2. Serious. If some previous products of this company actually were distributed with non-declared adware – GAOTD please clarify #61, it is easy to check distributives.
Just ethic problem for those who got that as a gift. Delete and avoid all products from such developer.
Imagine the people payed and bought adware/spyware. That is a story.

Today’s offering is just a more recent version of the FLV option for a previous GAOTD called “Extra DVD Ripper Express”. That is, Ripper Express can rip and convert to ‘any’ format, including FLV. FLV Ripper can only rip and convert to the FLV format.

I compared Ripper Express with FLV selected as output with FLV Ripper and the two appear identical in every respect. There are no extra options, no new buttons, nothing. Not only the default values for the options are the same, but they both have the same bug, the string for the Output File option ‘leaks’ if it is longer than the box where it goes.

I really believe they are the same, but I could be, and probably am, wrong. The thing is, I am not sure if Ripper Express and FLV Ripper are going play nice with each other.

My gut tells me that they are not. Besides, as StealthKnight said, having both programs installed on the same computer is a waste of resources. Then again as was said is a previous comment we are not being offered the latest version of the software anyway.

IMHO, don’t install FLV Ripper if you already have Ripper Express installed. Otherwise, leave it alone.

But then, that’s just me,

AxCut

However I would like to address a couple of other points:

1. Not everyone has been aware of this site since the computer was invented. Instead of complaining about ‘another ripper’ or ‘another screen saver’ consider that lots of people weren’t around when those products wre offered before. Anything you get here that is useful is a bonus, so cut GAOTD some slack if they re-offer simlar products. Just finding these giveaways has to be tough enough.

2. Of course these comments are moderated. If they weren’t every second post would be an ad for knock-off watches or male enhancement products. Have some patience – your post will show up eventually :)

QUESTION: Are all .flv files so grainy? Is this an expected, natural result when ripping to .flv files?

Extra DVD to FLV Ripper is also not a ripper really, but software that records the video playing on your PC’s monitor… In that respect, since the picture’s based on exactly what you see, the video that *will be* encoded can be called roughly the same quality as the original. Encoding of course is another matter, and the FLV file the program writes will not contain all the data, won’t include the complete picture you see on-screen – that’s just the nature of lossy video encoding.

Extra DVD to FLV Ripper can make some use of your graphics card’s GPU if it has mpg2 playback, hardware acceleration. On a current PC, video from a recorded DVD stored on a hard drive, play back (for recording) looks like about 2x speed. It doesn’t use any of the installed Power DVD 7 files, so performance shouldn’t be dependant on what other software you’ve installed. Extra DVD to FLV Ripper like several other converters for some reason comes with an old version of Xvid – if you don’t have the latest version already, you’ll probably want to update Xvid.

For actually ripping a DVD [accessing & using the original files stored on the disc], check out videohelp.com for guides, software, & forums.

When it works it’s slow (I’m guessing 1/8 speed of real time), and when it doesn’t it crashes.

Appears to be very consistent, a commendation is in order.

(Win XP SP2 with all hotfixes).

e.g. FormatFactory
http://www.formatoz.com/

The makers of that program don’t tell you silly little lies about being able to convert from one format to another without any loss of quality.
There product does work on any windows OS and it is available in 29 different languages.

All in all ‘FormatFactory’ looks a whole deal more promising then Extra Soft Inc. with there fake awards and over the top description of themselves.
http://www.dvdcopyrip.com/aboutus.html

I appreciate the idea behind Giveaway but unfortunately they can only be as good as the companies that partake. As long as enough people keep being grateful for mediocre or even bad software, remember the converter that couldn’t even calculate binary without having a result past the decimal point, chances are that it won’t attract the better quality of software.

Re: the almost unrelated discussion about YouTube… I you are not offered “watch in high quality” then append &fmt=6 to the end of the URL. If it’s available, you’ll get it. Also try &fmt=18 and get both High Quality AND Stereo when available.

Samples:
standard quality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6N2vEA6pI
high quality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6N2vEA6pI&fmt=6
high quality and stereo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6N2vEA6pI&fmt=18

PKLaf