Saturday, September 18, 2010

Tricktionary on your iPhone

The Tricktionary is a great resource for windsurfers, and in particular freestylers, as I had previously discussed. For geeks like me, a great thing about the Tricktionary DVD is that it is easy to copy movies for the tricks that you're working on onto the iPhone or iPod, and review at them at the beach. One of the ABK campers asked me for detailed instructions, so here they are:

  1. Find the disc and "title" number of the trick you want to work on. You can find the title number using the VLC media player, or you can look at my PDF file with the numbers for the first two discs.
  2. Insert the disc in your computer. Quit the DVD or media player if it starts automatically.
  3. Start the video converter program HandBrake (free downloads at http://handbrake.fr/).
  4. In HandBrake's "Open" dialog, select the DVD as the source, then press "OK". Handbrake will spend a minute or so to analyze the DVD.
  5. From the "Title" pulldown near the top, select the number for your trick from step 1.
  6. Choose the format of the video you want to create. The easiest way is to use the "iPhone & iPod Touch" preset (click the "Toggle Presets" button on the top right if you don't see the presets).
  7. Click on the "Browse" button to select the destination file (where the new video will be saved).
  8. If you'd like to have the German audio rather than the English, click on the "Audio" tab, and select "Deutsch" as the source. If you do this, but don't speak German, stop here and go kitesurfing.
  9. Click on the "Start" button to start the encoding, and wait until it's done. If you want to encode several tricks, you can instead use HandBrake's queue.
When you're done encoding the tricks that you want to work on, open iTunes, drag & drop the movies you just encoded onto the iTunes window, then synch your iPhone or iPod, and your done.

Please do not post any of the movies you encoded as above to YouTube or other web sites. That would be a violation of copyright laws, and you'd be screwing Rossi and the others who put a lot of work into the Tricktionary.