Turning a DVD, LD or Personal Film-Commentary into a series of mp3 files

The DVD to MP3 guide assumes that you have a DVD-ROM device in your computer.   If you do not, then you can hook up your home DVD player to your computer in the same way you can hook up a Laser Disc player or a Microphone.

The goal of these instructions is for you to take commentary tracks and to convert that commentary into mp3 files that can then be burned to a CD with tracks that correspond to the Chapter selections on the DVD.   This way you can play the CD while watching your DVD and get to hear a commentary .

Having a DVD player in your computer is the easiest way to make chapter-ized high quality mp3s.  But, since Laser Discs are no longer available, I hope that people will utilize this guide to make high quality backups of their LaserDisc commentaries as well.

  
DVD to MP3 guide
LD or Microphone to MP3 Guide
   
1. Ripping Chapters with SmartRipper

1. Recording audio onto your computer.
2. Removing Audio with DVD2AVI 2. Converting to MP3 with winLAME
3. Converting to MP3 with winLAME 3. Chopping your big mp3 into little ones
4. OTHER: Setting ID3 tags, burning to CD, how to post files to Usenet, where to post files to Usenet etc 4. OTHER: Setting ID3 tags, burning to CD, how to post files to Usenet, where to post files to Usenet etc

NOTE: I've determined that there is a better way to input a LaserDisc commentary if you have access to a DV camera and a firewire card.

Recording the entire film on DV and then inputting it into your computer via firewire will certainly result in a higher quality audio track than just plugging into a non-professional sound card. Your S/N ratio should be much better and if you have any video editing software, you can split the video into chapters relatively easily.