First, greetings to everyone on this board. I recently purchased my first Axim (A 51V) and googled for some software...and here I landed.

What a great site! Packed with tons of great information and experienced Axim users. Really glad I stumbled here!

Anyways, to the content of my post. I figured I would attempt to make my first post somewhat of a contribution instead of the usual questions. I had read some of the tuts stickied above about ripping...but since I had experience burning normal DVDs, etc I I decided to give the following a try...and it worked. So here goes:

I only use two programs to rip the DVD to my Axim. AnyDVD and FairUse 2. Both are free....and both could be ran by a monkey and a mouse.

Download (Or purchase the new release) AnyDVD. Some of the older versions are free to download...and work fine. For example I'm using 5.4.1.1...which is dated but still works great.

Download FairUse2.

Put the DVD in your drive....the small Fox icon on your desktop will flash. You may click on the Fox if wanting to view details...but it's not necessary. The minute you put your DVD in it removes copyright protection.

Start FairUse 2. Follow instructions and simply select your DVD drive as the files you want to rip.

That's it. So in summary this is how easy the DVD rip is.

Put DVD in drive.
Run FairUse 2.
Walk away.

Don't know if this helps anyone...but it's a bit easier then decoding to your harddrive...ripping the image...THEN changing that image to AVI. Hope it helps and thanks for this great site!

Ryan

So how long does it take to rip a movie using Fairuse? Do you have a link to the freeware version?

        

sounds good now add some links to download the software and you have yourself a top-notch how to there.. way to go

X50v
4 GIG CF Microdrive (everything)
1 GIG SD card (movies & more)
512MB SD card (GPS maps)
512MB SD card (programs)
Bluetooth GPS

tons of programs
to many to mention or I just forgot

quote. "why do things the easy way when complicated works too"

Yeah links are good eh ?

Fair Use Wizard:

http://www.fairusewizard.com/lang_en/

AnyDVD

http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

Fair Use takes roughly 2 hours on my comp. It's not a system hog though...you can simply minimize and do whatever else you need to do.

Ryan

Thanks and welcome aboard.

---Steve-O

Check out Stevenator65 Weblog. It's back and worse than ever!

        

What kind of file sizes do you get from a DVD?

Well, Fair Use generates around a 5 gig file containing all the rip information and one AVI file. Keep in mind, once it's done encoding the DVD into that AVI file, you can delete all the excess files and simply keep the one AVI file.

As for the final output file, the AVI itself...that's completely up to you for size. You can set it to output to whatever size you wish...it's simply a matter of how much quality you want in the video.

I've been using 100MB/for every 30 minutes as I've seen suggested on this site...and the end product looks terrific! I've watched War of the Worlds and Matrix Revolutions..which contain a fair amount of FX...and could see no issues in the least. You could go lower on size...but I haven't tried it thus far to comment on how much quality you would retain.

Ryan

I have a 4GB CF card (just got here) so file size isn't a big deal. ~300MB a movie would probably be best. What resolution do you encode to?