Results of the Vidding Source Import Tools Census

[echan]

These are the results of the Vidding Tools census! There's a lot of info here. Overall there was a huge variety of responses, very diverse.

Some items are listed under more than one section -- that's not an error, many tools are flexible and different vidders use them in different ways.

All links were gathered by me, not the respondents themselves. Some tools I am unfamiliar with lack links, unfortunately. If you want to leave a link in the comments I'd be happy to add it in.

Ripping DVDs

• MacTheRipper
• "Mac the Ripper is perfect for anything that doesn't have modern, super good DRM [like Marvel MCU DVDs]. I like that it has few options and just requires the click of a button." -Anonymous
• "MacTheRipper works great 90% of the time. Sometimes it can't crack encryption or "bad sectors"." -Laura Shapiro
• "MacTheRipper is fantastic - it extracts the .vob files regardless of region or other blocks." -Anonymous
• DVD Decrypter
• "DVD Decrypter is particularly good, I haven't yet met a copy protection that it can't crack, and it's handy to be able to specify how you want the output files split - by size, by chapter, etc." -obsessive24
• "99% success rate, although I recently had a DVD that the programme was just not having. Don't do anything fancy with it, though." -Anonymous
• "DVD Decrypter tends to work fine, a real workhorse." -Anonymous
• Mac DVD Ripper Pro
• SmartRipper
• "SmartRipper needs some sort of decrypter to be totally effective, and lately AnyDVD hasn't always worked." -Anonymous
• "It's clunky, but totally serviceable. I've never had any problems that I couldn't eventually solve." -Anonymous
• Handbrake
• "I've tried Handbrake but found it slow and inflexible." -Laura Shapiro
• DVD Shrink
• "Can be finicky reading scratched discs." -obsessive24
• DVD FAB Platinum

Ripping Blu-Rays

• MakeMKV
• "It didn't ask much of me, mentally. Intellectually. Spiritually, even. I tried a few others (I forget what they were...) and could not figure out what I was actually meant to click." -shati
• "I avoid it WHENEVER POSSIBLE because it's just the worst. (I understand that it's fiddly on Windows or Mac too, but I vid on Linux where it's just the pits. I had to recompile FFmpeg just to get MakeMKV to install...)" -Anonymous
• AunSoft BluRay Ripper

Downloading YouTube videos

• DownloadHelper Firefox browser plugin
• "I used to find DownloadHelper awesome but then it randomly stopped working for some videos." -Anonymous
• "DownloadHelper works the majority of the time, except for commercially locked videos on YouTube, and some forms of flash. If I really need the video in those cases, I'll do a workaround using Google-fu to help me find a program. Mostly I just use DownloadHelper." -Anonymous
• keepvid.com website
• "Satisfied, though I need to keep my java updated, otherwise it's doesn not play ball." -Anonymous
• clipconverter.cc website
• "clipconverter.cc works for everything so far but isn't quite as convenient as you have to go to another website/wait conversion times." -Anonymous
• SaveFrom.net Safari browser extension
• Complete YouTube Saver
• "I mostly rely on Complete YouTube Saver because it tends to be the only addon that can download Full HD videos without glitches ever since YT made some changes to their system. It's also very customizable." -violace
• Internet Download Manager
• Other: "Whatever shows up in "download YouTube" search results. I do a new search each time I want to download streaming video, because whenever I get a script or a site or a plugin I like, YouTube changes their system to break it." -thirdblindmouse

Capturing Streaming Video or Game Footage

• iShowU HD
• "It's literally a screengrab program, so anything I do outside of the program I'm capturing is also going to get captured." -Jetpack Monkey
• AverMedia HD
• "AverMedia HD is pretty good if you want to capture your own console footage. It records into HD .mp4 format that I imagine most editing programmes can handle. I do re-encode it though, because it's just SO high quality it's enormous and I usually have a lot of garbage gameplay footage in between the shots I want to capture. I like it because it records onto an external hard drive rather than a computer. That's useful to me for space reasons, but also because it frees the harddware/software requirements inherent in most other capture cards, which is an issue for me because I use Linux as my Operating System." -Anonymous
• ffmpeg
• Video game's built-in recorder
• YouTube, download playthroughs other people have captured

Torrent trackers or other download sites

• Transmission torrent client software
• "The best!" -Anonymous
• "Works great on every operating system I've installed it on." -echan
• Torrent sites
• cinemageddon.net torrents site
• "Avoid the comment system, but otherwise great for cult film." -Jetpack Monkey
• TVTorrents.com torrents site
• "Site is currently down, sadly. When it is up there's a good selection of american shows, but not much science / discovery channel type stuff." -echan
• KickassTorrents site
• FilesTube search engine for video downloads
• ThePirateBay torrents site
• "TPB is primarily useful for current popular English-language stuff, but it's always worth a try. It's open and unrestricted, which is nice for me; I can't handle torrent sites that require invites or maintenance." -thirdblindmouse
• "Pirate Bay is very widely know, and as such a frequent target for blocks by ISPs or network admins." -echan
• tvunderground.org.ru
• "tvunderground is the best organized one and has inbuild quality control that weeds out fakes efficiently. downside, you need a log in and they only have limited formats available (mp4 & mkv)" -Anonymous
• torrentz.me search engine that indexes torrents sites
• Speed.cd
• "Uploaders are mostly Italian or other nearby countries, so english shows may have subs/dubs. Great source of Olympics videos and some other sports." -echan
• LimeTorrents torrents site
• "you need to be a bit more careful and look at the feedbacks to make sure that it's not a fake. However, I only very occassionally have come across bad files." -Anonymous
• torrentfunk
• "you need to be a bit more careful and look at the feedbacks to make sure that it's not a fake. However, I only very occassionally have come across bad files." -Anonymous
• AsiaTorrents
• eztv
• tehparadox
• mygully (in German)
• "mygully is pretty much the German equivalent to tehparadox. Sometimes when I come across dead links on one of them, I'll find good ones on the other." -violace
• serienjunkies (in German)
• "For TV shows only, and has even obscure stuff I would never find anywhere else, in various formats and quality on some popular one click hosters. It doesn't require any sort of registration. Downside for me is that they split all their files into 100 to 200 MB archive parts which can be tedious, but some people find that's an advantage." -violace
• Usenet
• Note: Usenet access is not provided anymore by most ISPs (ie, those providing website & email access). You'll need to get access via a separate provider. Here's a good overview of usenet basics. -echan
• Astraweb usenet service provider
• "A pretty good provider I guess? It was one of the best when I got it but that was a couple of years ago and I know there's better options out there now. But like, when I get right down to it, I can't be dealing with the hassle of shutting down one account, setting up another, etc., just to save $2/month. Especially when Astraweb has one of the better privacy policies - supporting encryption and not keeping download logs." -Anonymous
• UseNext usenet service provider
• "I've had UseNet for many years. Some shows are hard to find on it, but it's a really good source of material. Costs about 85 euros a year. You have to be careful - some downloads contain viruses so be sure to read the comments for a file first." -Anonymous
• binsearch.info usenet search engine
• "Binsearch is NOT userfriendly, but is the most robust and comprehensive nzb searcher I've found." -Anonymous
• LJ and Dreamwidth download communities, both general media ones and ones for specific series or groups of series
• specific anime raw/fansub groups
• Direct downloads in general: "searching for [them] is a crapshoot in terms of quality and availability, but sometimes it can turn up rare things that would take forever to torrent or simply don't exist in torrent form. If you're searching the web for direct downloads, I recommend looking for files marked ""dual audio"" (and learning the words for ""dual audio"" and the title of the media you seek in other languages). Such files are less likely to have hardcoded subtitles, and files not in English don't tend to get taken down so fast." -thirdblindmouse

Transcoding Video to Different Formats / Codecs

• iSquint
• MPEG Streamclip
• "MPEG Streamclip works well for me and the type of footage I need to convert. I also like the crop feature." -kat-byrd
• "Mpeg Streamclip can be a little more complicated [than Handbrake] due to the larger range of options, but still not too hard." -Anonymous
• "the best program evar" -Anonymous
• Tune4Mac Platinum
• "Tune4Mac has a hard time with batch processing or specific files on occasion, but their support team is super-responsive and they've always helped me fix the problem within a day or two." (used for iTunes downloads) -Laura Shapiro
• Handbrake
• "Handbrake is really easy to use." -Anonymous
• "Handbrake takes a lot of the guesswork out." -Jetpack Monkey
• "I've used Handbrake to make smaller files. Handbrake was pretty simple once someone explained which settings to mess with and which settings not to." -thirdblindmouse
• ffmpeg
• "FFmpeg is incredibly reliable if you can be bothered to learn a command line programme. Which I wouldn't necessarily recommend or anything, it's just since I *have* learned it, it's a really quick, efficient way to transcode files. You can't clip with it though." -Anonymous
• "ffmpeg is popular enough that a google search turns up a ton of examples and forum posts about which options to use to get the result you want. It can convert between a ton of formats, let you select specific video/audio streams, even limit the conversions to specific timeframes or start/stop points." -echan
• mplayer & mencoder
• "mplayer is a powerful video player, though the interface can be funky. mencoder is a great transcoding program that's part of the whole mplayer project and is fairly awesome." -echan
• mencoder very powerful and comes with a very, er, complete man page, but good luck figuring out how to do whatever specific thing it is you want to do." -thirdblindmouse
• Prism
• "Prism is paid software that I use to convert pre-production, mainly from Xvid AVI to MPEG-2. I pretty much edit exclusively in MPEG-2/VOBs. It's slightly annoying that I have to pay for this program but I haven't met a decent free converter to MPEG-2 that works with me , and I like the degree of control Prism gives in terms of output size/FPS, so I think of it as just a necessary cost like paying for my hosting website." -obsessive24
• AviDemux
• "AviDemux [has] always worked great for me." -Anonymous
• AutoGK
• "AutoGK is great for converting to Xvid AVI (my main distribution format), very flexible and easy to use. It uses VirtualDub but that part is automated and taken out of your hands." -obsessive24
• VirtualDub
• "Manually dealing with VirtualDub is non-intuitive and I only use it for specific tasks like handling avisynth scripts "post-production"." -obsessive24
• Real Converter
• "I use Real for converting to ipad-friendly mp4. It's not great because you don't have a lot of control over file size etc. But I'm too lazy to look for anything better (and still free)." -obsessive24
• LlamaEnc
• "[I use] LlamaEnc for converting to con-format m2v/wav. It feels like the industry standard since it's used for VVC and all other con vidshows follow the same submission format. The only gripe is that I usually vid in 25fps due to being in not-North-America, and it has to be converted into 29.97 or 23.976 NTSC, which makes the output video a little jerky. I'm pretty sure I can get around this myself if I took the time to manually mess around with HCenc (which LlamaEnc uses) but I'm too lazy / not anal enough." -obsessive24
• Total Video Converter HD
• "does what it says on the tin. Easy to use, but also option for tweeking settings if need be. reliable, does play/convert all formats my computer can handle." -Anonymous
• Windows Movie Maker
• "Windows Movie Maker does a good job at making .wmv files." -Anonymous
• FreeMake Video Converter
• "FreeMake Video Converter makes [transform a .vob file to an .avi without captions] easy." -Anonymous
• StaxRip
• "StaxRip is an encoder GUI similar to Handbrake or AutoGK, but I *much* prefer StaxRip's interface. I found it easy to get used to and it's basically my favourite and the most hassle-free of all the tools and programs that I have to deal with in my vidding process." -violace
• AviSynth (&etc)
• "I use A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video (v3) to figure out the AVSynth commands and settings for DGIndex, AvsPmod, VirtualDub, Zarx264gui,(http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech31/index.html). Software is reasonably easy to use with the guide." -Anonymous
• "I use dgmpgdec + avisynth scripts to get vobs to a point where I can open them in VirtualDub, from which I export UTvideo'd avi clips. If my source is mkv or mp4, I use ffmpeg + avisynth, and same. After I export my avi video project from Premiere, I used a gui by Zarx that is creatively called ZarxGUI to make an mp4 without having to think about anything. Actually it may be called Zarx264GUI." -shati
• Sony Vegas
• "Sony Vegas is mostly good, but doesn't include MKV out of the box -- still figuring out how to add that codec, as guides tell me its possible, but I can't figure it out." -Anonymous
• Format Factory
• "pretty easy to use once you know what the settings mean." -Anonymous

Other / Misc Tools

• Audacity
• "confusing but powerful" -Anonymous
• "Audacity isn't completely intuitive, but I was able to do what I wanted to do."-Anonymous
• "I love it. I had to put in time to learn how to use time-shift for NLE and envelope for crossfades, but now I do all my audio editing in it." -echan
• ShotDetect
• "[Use it] for generating a list of shot boundaries so you can autoclip. shotdetect has many quirks and has many files it won't play well with. Details here: http://thirdblindmouse.dreamwidth.org/146989.html" -thirdblindmouse
• Motion (from Apple)
• "I have tried working with Motion on three occasions and it has defeated me utterly. ):" -Laura Shapiro
• Audio editing in your video editing program
• "I edit audio within Final Cut Pro and it's fine for that. I hate Final Cut Pro's export setup, but otherwise, no real complaints." -Laura Shapiro
• "I do audio editing within Blender, but it's buggy as hell and there is no reason to do that if you're not already using Blender." -thirdblindmouse
• "Sony Vegas works well as an audio editor." -Anonymous
• "Corel VideoStudio Pro X5 can edit audio. I think Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 was awful. It would crash every ten minutes like clockwork. That was very frustrating. Pro X5 is much better, considering it's a Windows program." -kat-byrd
• SubtitleEdit
• "I've tried many subtitling tools and it's the easiest I've found. With a bit of practice I can now subtitle a 3 minute vid within 5 minutes." -violace
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• Photoshop
• "annoyingly ubiquitous but really useful" -Anonymous
• Paint.net image and photo editing software for Windows
• "Paint.NET is freewear and very good. It does nearly everything I want it to." -Anonymous
• RoughDraft
"RoughDraft is a freewear word processor and needs less memory than Word so is good to run at the same time a memory hog like Sony Vegas is working; I use it to note down any AVSynth filters, or editing choices I make, so I can replicate them with other sources if I need to -- this saves so much time and is an essential tool." -Anonymous
• VLC Media Player
• "VLC Media Player is surprisingly useful, not just for displaying media and taking screencaps, but for trying out filters, clipping, and other things I've only started to play with." -Anonymous
• AfterEffects
• AvsPmod for avisynth script editing
• "AvsPmod, which is I guess an enhanced editor for avs scripts, somehow confuses me more than Notepad. It's trying to help! but it helps...by never closing tabs...and asking me if I want to save all 20 tabs it reopens every time I open, even if 19/20 of those scripts haven't changed. Each time, icy fear grips my heart as I click "no." But seriously, there has been no change. THERE IS NOTHING TO SAVE." -shati
• FotoFlexer online image editor
• SumoPaint online image editor
• showFoto (image editing component of digiKam)
• Preset Manager for Sony Vegas
• "Preset Manager for Sony Vegas is something I've only started to use [to expand effects library], but seems a useful way to create vidding shortcuts." -Anonymous
• Windows Media Player
• "I only use [this] while editing, as I save drafts of the vid using the WMV codec -- it's nice and compact and quick, but only plays well on the WM Player which is otherwise not as good as VLC." -Anonymous

~~ The End ~~

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