Some free audio video programs for windows

If you need to put some audio up on a website from a cdrom or video from a DVD it will take a few steps.   You will need to convert to a digital file like mp3 for audio and mp4 for video.  You may also note want the entire file and may want to trim part of it or clip out a few minutes of the video for example.  Here are some notes on a couple free programs to handle audio and video from disc to digital on a windows platform.

Get tracks from an audio cd and convert to mp3

Audiograbber

"Audiograbber is a beautiful piece of software that grabs digital audio from cd's. Audiograbber can automatically normalize the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and encode them to a variety of formats including MP3. Audiograbber can download and upload disc info from freedb, an Internet compact disc database. You can even record your vinyl LP's or cassette tapes with Audiograbber and make wav's or MP3's of them. There are a lot more functions in Audiograbber, but to put it simply: Audiograbber has the most features one can wish from such a program!"

There are a of pay for solutions, one that we know that works and may be free for some use,

Switch

"Switch Audio File Converter Software, Convert and encode sound files on PC and Mac
Switch is one of the most stable and comprehensive multi format audio file converters available and is very easy to use."

Copy DVD to mp4

Handbrake

"HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

"This program can convert the DVD to a mp4 on your computer.

Cut out part of the video, simple cutting filtering tools.  There are quite a few solutions, but here is a free one.  Note, Yamb may be difficult to install because it depends on Mp4Box which may be difficult to get working, you may want to use a previous older stable version of Mp4Box if you have difficulties, and another issue is the author's site provides code only on the download link but has a binary version if you google around....

Yamb

 "Yet Another MP4Box User Interface for Windows Users"
Yamb is the acronym of Yet Another Mp4Box UI. In other words, this is a new graphical interface for mp4box using, a tool based on command lines which is a part of GPAC Framework. This GUI is mainly dedicated to Windows OS. 

Yamb  will need Mp4Box installed. MP4Box is a MP4 multiplexer. It can import MPEG-4 video, DivX, XviD, 3ivx, h264 etc, audio streams and subtitles into the .mp4 container. The end result is a compliant MP4 stream. It can also extract streams from a .mp4. MP4Box is a command line tool, but can be used with graphical user interfaces such as YAMB or my MP4box GUI.

Mp4Box

MP4Box can be used:

• for encoding/decoding presentation languages like MPEG-4 XMT or W3C SVG into/from binary formats like MPEG-4 BIFS or LASeR,
• for manipulating ISO files like MP4, 3GP: adding, removing, multiplexing audio, video and presentation data (including subtitles) from different sources and in different formats,
• for performing encryption of streams
• for attaching metadata to individual streams or to the whole ISO file to produce MPEG-21 compliant or hybrid MPEG-4/MPEG-21 files
• and packaging and tagging the result for streaming, download and playback on different devices (e.g. phones, PDA) or for different software (e.g. iTunes).

It is widely used: by academics, by the video community and is noticeably used in Google Video services for preparation of multimedia files for playback on iPod and PlayStation.

A free windows converter that you may want to try:

WINFF

WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg's, flv's, and mov's, all into avi's all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions.

Note it may be feasible to use this program to also reduce the resolution so you can get smaller size files  (less quality also).   According to some documentation when choosing the settings for conversion, on the drop-down list under "Convert To..." to select the device you want the video to be on. Under "Device Preset" choose the resolution and aspect ratio you want.