I was recently faced with the task of converting an old home movie into a series of YouTube-esque clips for use on the site Geni.com. Back when I was considering a small video game review blog I had played around with video conversion and editing but ultimately let it slip by due to lack of time. The challenge of converting these old home movies was just enough to push me back to learning the process.

After having the VHS transferred to DVD (something I realized I can probably do at home with my DVD recorder and some creative cable work) I set out on the task of finding the right clip and putting together the first video.

I'm not going to go too in-depth and instead just provide a quick walk through of the process.

The DVD transfer wasn't protected the way most commercial DVDs are so I was able to just browse through the DVD contents in Windows and select the .VOB files that make up the movie. In all there were four so I copied them to my hard drive and then set about researching the conversion process.

Because Windows Movie Maker doesn't accept the VOB files (even when renamed to MPEGs) I had to get them converted to .AVI first. This is where a quick lifehacker search and several downloads came in.

Ultimately I found Any Video Converter to be the best option for making the conversions. It's got a drag and drop interface and allows you to simply set it and forget it. After selecting the four VOB files taken from the DVD I set Any Video Converter to convert to AVI and took a little break. In my case it took about 30m per video to get the conversion done which didn't seem to bad.

For those wondering about cost Any Video Converter is offered in both a free and paid version. I'm using the free version which works just fine.

Once the video's were converted I opened up Windows Movie Maker and just went from there. Movie Maker is a pretty simple tool to use and is included in all versions of Windows. Just import your video and everything else is pretty self explanatory.