Doom9
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About Doom9
First of all: Why the funny name? A long time ago (at least in the PC biz) ID Software released one of the world's most successful computer games: Doom. At that time I was still playing adventure games on my PC and I had no idea about 3d games. Only about 2 month later a friend of mine gave me Wolfenstein 3D to try out and I instantly fell in love with that type of games. When I had shot my way through the legions of enemies I read about Doom in a computer mag, and I even got a then special release of my favorite game mag which contained a title CD and had Doom on it. A week later I had finished the shareware version and was ready for the full release. After having beaten any mode except for Nightmare I got a couple of add-on CDs and I spent literally hundreds of hours playing Doom in one way or the other.
Then when I discovered the Internet, and more importantly, the IRC and it came to choosing a nickname the choice was clear for me. As Doom turned out to be my destiny as a gamer - I still played Star Wars games but not much else - it was the appropriate choice. The only thing was that Doom seemed a popular name so I often had to switch to Doom as "my" nick was already taken.
In September 98 I got my first DVD player and the first bunch of DVD discs (I bought 7 on one day..). Even before that I was looking forward to DVD when it was mentioned for the first time on a computer magazine. It was at the time when I started to get interested in English books and movies and would no longer accept the dubbed version and I spent a lot of money on English films. DVD allowed me to get my favorite films in English at a cheaper price than the imported VHS tapes. Furthermore all the extras on DVDs we love and the much better quality - and let's not forget not having to rewind anymore - was enough for me to instantly fall in love with the format and to buy a player at the official European launch date. At that time regionfree was not so common and so my first player only played R2 discs. Gradually I got annoyed to not be able to watch all the discs I wanted and so I got a regionfree player. Even before that I was watching R1 DVDs on my PC but the small screen simply killed the fun.
Being a regular on Oleg's site even at that date - mainly to get the latest software DVD player - I got interested in DVD ripping but all my tries to create a VCD out of a DVD failed miserably. I wasn't even able to encode more than one single frame off a DVD. In September 99 I read on inmatrix.com that the CSS scrambling had been cracked and that a program called Speed Ripper from DOD allowed you to copy DVDs to your harddrive. After searching the web for quite a while I finally found what I was looking for and along with it I had a respectable collection of VOB tools on my harddrive. The very first movie that made its way to my harddrive was Cruel Intentions that I just got a few days ago. But that was only the first step. I was still unable to make something useful out of these VOBs.
Only in December of the same year I discovered mpeg2avi and I managed to encode Enemy of the State into the DivX format. But I still didn't know about streamlists and so I got asynch video and nasty green frames at the cut positions and once again I gave up, even though I had bought a larger harddisk to be able to rip since my previous 6GB disc was just too small.
But since that date I've been reading Oleg's forum almost daily in order to learn more and more and two months later I decided to give it a shot again. This time, equipped with FlaskMpeg 0.5 and Nicky Page's first guide I managed to convert The Mummy in one go with audio and the whole thing was synch. Then I tried The Matrix and I failed miserably again because of the multiangles. I also tried a lot of other movies in both FlaskMpeg and mpeg2avi - I had learned about streamlists in the meantime - and all NTSC movies would turn out asynch whereas all PAL movies done in FlaskMpeg would be choppy, or be asynch if I was doing the audio decoding with ac3dec. So once again I put my plans on hold and read Oleg's forum and I collected every bit of info on The Matrix and 2 weeks later I managed my first successful Matrix rip after having splitted the VOBs using vStrip.
In the meantime I felt ready to participate in the discussions on Oleg's forum since I had already learned quite a bit. As you can see.... I hesitated to post because I remembered the old Netiquette.. that is in a newsgroup you first wait and read for a while to learn the general tone and stuff. That's why I get so frustrated when people, instead of reading FAQs and follow discussions, simply post stuff that has been answered a 100 times over. In any case.. in order to be able to post I had to sign up at delphi.com and my favorite old-time nick Doom was taken. Delphi suggested a few others, among them Doom9. Assuming that it would be exotic enough I went for it.
After my success with The Matrix I encoded a bunch of other titles and I soon learned the basics about manual synching and stuff. Then I decided, that since the guides out there weren't really good and wouldn't deal with all the problems that I ran across during my first step, I would write a small guide on my own and publish it on the web. In order to have an easy address I opened a go.to account and used the same name for it: Doom9. That was the birth date of go.to/doom9 and my site, on the 15th of March this year. About a month later a friend of mine suggested that I should change my guides into the HTML format which I then did, and I started adding screenshots.
The rest you can reconstruct on your own by looking at the old news. The growth rate has been incredible and what was initially one 2 page word document is now a full fledged website with several mirrors and a rather professional design - at least I hope so.
Videohelp
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General
This site will help you to make your own VideoCDs, SVCDs or DVDs that can be played on your standalone DVD Player from video sources like DVD, Video, TV, DV, Cam or downloaded movie clips like DivX, MOV, RM, WMV and ASF. We also have extensive lists of Capture Cards, DVD Media, DVD Writers, DVD Recorders and desktop DVD Players with features, compatibility information and user comments.
Statistics
1 500 000 unique visitors visits our site every month and we have about 70 000 unique visitors/day from the entire world, about 46% from USA, 48% from Europe and 6% from the rest of the world.
Digital Digest
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Digital Digest is a web site dedicated to the future of video - a digital future. This site will feature articles, news, reviews and software archives related to the world of digital video.
Digital Digest is a combination of three individual sub-sites: DVD Digest, DivX Digest and DVD±R Digest, each covering a specific area of the digital video world. We also have a forum, suitably named Digital Video Forums, where you can discuss all things related to digital video.
The future is digital ...
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These are the three sites that I personally find the most useful when it comes to editing, converting, creating, or altering video. They are quite useful and have tons of guides, links, downloads, and so on to get your media into the form that you want it to be in. I encourage you to use them when you want to split files, convert files, merge files, create DVDs, edit DVDs, add menus to your content, make VCDs (and all the various formats).
These sites are invaluable to me and I hope you too can get some use out of them.
