An oldie, but it was brought to my attention yesterday that the “Dinner for Schmucks” DVD is a bit picky. Of course DVD Catalyst can convert it so you can play it on your laptop, tablet or phone, but in order for it to convert properly, a few settings changes need to be applied:

Start DVD Catalyst 4 without the DVD in the drive:

Enable Power User (bottom right), then go into Global Settings (top left) and look for the “Engines” Tab (top right). In there, switch the DVD engine for scanning and conversion to “Boosterpack 2″. If you decide to use the preview to use things like brightness/contrast adjustment, change the preview engine as well.

Click on Hide Settings, and insert your Dinner for Schmucks DVD in the drive:

After scanning, DVD Catalyst 4 will bring up the 99 tracks dialog.

Leave this open, and start something like Windows Media Player to play the movie. Work yourself through the menu so you get to the actual movie, and use the position slider to go to somewhere in the middle of the movie. Look in the top left for the track number displayed. It alternates between scene and title. You want the Title number.

In my case, it was Title 48. Close Windows Media Player, and go back to the track selection dialog of DVD Catalyst 4. Uncheck the selected track, and then enable the checkmark for the tracknumber you found with Windows Media Player:

and click OK to have DVD Catalyst scan the track.

Now change settings as you see fit, select your device profile etc. then tap “Go” to start the conversion, and wait for it to complete:

Thats it. Now you can transfer the Dinner for Schmucks video to your device.

Using the standard Tegra2 Tablet profile in DVD Catalyst 4 v4.1.0.2 (I used the Xoom one, but its the same for the Thrive, Transformer, A500 etc) the conversion took 16 minutes (quad-core laptop) for a near 2 hour movie ), which is 7 times faster than it takes to actually watch the movie, and the created file ended up as 1.3GB in size.