Model Citizen

Melody on DVD?



I watched this film as a kid in the 70's and loved it. Recently after the kids had been watching Oliver I decided to look it up and buy it. But what! It's completely unavailable on any format I could find.
So my next stop after searching Amazon was the IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base, where if it's available to but there'll be a link to it.

Here's it's listing:

Melody

And you can see there's nothing available for what many consider a wonderful film featuring the two young stars of Oliver:

Jack Wild


And

Mark Lester


Here's a quote from the site:

It's inexplicable to me how this film bombed when it came out. It's one of the most charming, realistic stories of adolescent first love ever put on film. Mark Lester and Jack Wild, teamed here for the first time since "Oliver!," three years earlier, make a good team all over again as the two best school friends who temporarily have a bust when Lester develops a crush on Hyde, as charming, winsome a young miss as you will ever see. And it's all told with charm and believability. I saw this film on TV almost two decades ago and wonder why it isn't available on video. It should be, since it's sure to charm the kids and parents alike. Charm without smarm is even more of a rarity today than it was in 1971. But "Melody" pulls it off brilliantly and understatedly. A true hidden treasure.

Oliver was a great film, but in my opinion Melody tops it. They seem to have nailed down school life in the 70's to a tee. And if you dont feel a touch of nostalgia for those carefree days after seeing it you're hard boiled.



Anyway, back to the DVD. On IMDB, though there's no link to buy, in one of the comments below there's a message that the whole film has been uploaded to Google Video!

The link for that is here:
Google

Now, though you can watch it on line, what about saving it to the desktop?

Here's a link that will do just that. You tell it the website address and it will download it to your desktop as an AVI file.


JAVAMOYA

So, after about 900MB has downloaded you have an AVI file, but how do you make this into a DVD?
The next bit is Mac only, if you want help to do this to PC try http://www.videohelp.com/


For OSX you can download this free programme:

FFMPEGX

Then it's just a case of choosing the AVI file as an input and a DVD quality Mpeg 2 as an output. You'll end up with 2 folders called AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS, you just put both of these (and yes the audio one is empty) into Toast or some other DVD writing software using the DVD option.

Hey presto you have a Melody DVD!

Hope that helps some, it took me about a week to work all this out.