My New Friend

So as many of you know, one of my new businesses that I am launching right now is a dojo. I will be teaching Martial Arts with a friend of mine at a satellite school of the school I train at. Along with my partner, and my instructor, we hope to start as a training group renting out space in a rec center, and eventually expand into our own building with a full run dojo, like the one we current train at.

To accomplish the launching of this business, my partner and I needed a place where we can being to teach our classes. We have been looking all over, and the most logical place was the rec center in the city we live in. So, as logic would dictate, we approached the staff at the rec center, and asked what it would take for us to be able to teach there.

To make a long story short, the staff lady there has been giving us the runaround, because it seems that there is already someone there teaching Martial Arts. Now I know it is popular opinion that Martial Arts are Martial Arts, but that is simply not the case. There are different styles of martial arts out there, just as there are different styles of dance out there. Now this rec center has no problem having one person who teaches ballet there, and another who teaches tap/jazz, because as she says, she can see the difference. She doesn't however understand what makes the form of martial arts that we teach any different than what is already being taught.

So, I had been tasked with creating a DVD to give to her, which depicts the difference between Shotokan (what is already being taught) and Ninjutsu (what we teach). So I began on the process and I realized again why I hate software sometimes. You would think it should be easy to rip a DVD which I own which shows the practice of Ninjustu and use some of those scenes, and download a few Shotokan videos from Youtube, and then place these video scenes side by side, and burn them to DVD. This should have been simple. Unfortunately, it was not. Youtube stores their videos in one format, and my DVD ripper rips DVD's in another format. What I needed was a software program that converts one format of video into another.

As we become more and more technologically advanced, this seems to be happening more and more. I have a file in this format, but I need it in that format. I have a windows file, I need a OSX file. I have a linux file, I need a windows file. This is getting crazy. So I began my search for a program that could help me.

Long live the open source community. What I found was a program called Media Convert. This neat website can take a file in almost an format, and convert it to almost any other format. in fact, you don't even always need a source file, you can point it to the source URL if the file is embedded on a website, ala Youtube, and it can work from there. This free site is awesome, and as a result is the newest friend of the abstract.

If you are ever in need of file conversion, this is the site to go to http://media-convert.com/convert/. Best of all, it is free !!!