Converting video formats...

Hello again...another computer question for the resident doctors here.

I want to store my DVDs on my hard drive. They're regular movie DVDs, The Simpsons, etc. I want decent quality, like 175-200 MB for 30 minutes. What do you recommend for ripping from a DVD? Is Divx the best small format?

Thanks!

 

XviD or h.264 are both much better than divx. For ripping DVD decryptor is excellent, And I've heard good things aout DVD shrink. If you don't already know about it, www.doom9.net is an excellent resource

 

I use DVD decrypter to rip, then GUI4FFMPEG to convert the resultant VOB files into .avi or something else watchable. It allows you to save in several different formats, a pretty good program that you can get here:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=gui4ffmpeg

 

DVD Shrink all the way for ripping even copy proof DVDs to other DVDs. Of course you want to rip to DIVX or something like that, right? So get DVDx ! I'm telling you it's all you need and it's FREE !!!! You can rip vob files direct to any format you want as long as you have the codec. It's FAST as well. Plus you can even down sample the audio as well as screen ratio if you really need to.

Yakumo

 

I'll second DVDx, I used to use it to rip DVDs to MPEGs that were VCD compliant which I then built a VCD image with for burning.

 

OK, I'll give it a shot. I ran a DVD through the DIVX converter and it came in at 1 gig. I'll have to work on shrinking that. I'm looking to save my movies on my hard drive, then run a line to my TV and be able to watch and select movies from there. I want the best quality picture with the lowest MB,

 

use xVid ! Far better compression than DiVX. You can get great picture quality at 640x352 resolution with 156khtz audio with a frame rate of 25fps for only 240meg (25 minutes). Of course you can down sample the audio to a MP3 codec at 128kbps to save about 30MB. The best way is to experiment and see what suits you best. My Retro Core show is in xVid with a 1 hour 20 minute show only coming to 300 odd meg with a picture resolution of 350 x 240 (VHS resolution) and 56khtz audio in MP3.

Yakumo

 

Cool, thanks again. I downloaded DVDx and did my first conversion and it worked pretty well. I chose xVid as the file type.

I want to be able to hook up my TV to my PC and play the movies from my hard drive. Is there any good conversion settings? I'm still learning. I usually use 720 x 480, 29 FPS, and I don't change the audio from the default settings. I have a 32 inch widescreen TV and I'll be running S-video from my PC to TV.

My first DVD went well, but it split it up into files of 500 MB (the limit I set) and one extra file at 111 MB. Is the software telling me that it can't fit the entire DVD into 500 MB or did I screw up the settings somewhere?

Thanks again!

 

There is no way you can convert a feature film down to 500mb and have it watchable. mpeg 4 ( divx, xvid etc ) can do roughly the same quality as mpeg 2 ( dvd ) at half the bandwidth.

I used to use DVDx and you could get almost watchable at 700mb ( i.e. one cd ). Really you need to go for at least double that to keep any resemblance of quality. Otherwise it's the equivalent of copying a VHS off a friend of a friend of a friend, it's watchable but you ain't going to be selling tickets. You can spend forever tweaking the DVDx parameters, you probably want to drop the resolution. Because you don't need to compress what isn't there anymore. Multiple passes can help too.

I've been meaning to take a look at wavelet compression, because you don't get the artifacting inherent to idct. No idea if there are any free codecs out there yet.

smf

 

He's watching the stuff through S-Video, not Hi Definition so he could easily fit a movie on to 700mb. Eric use these settings

Video Bit rate (Use the XviD MPEG 4 codec default setting of 4)
Video Resolution = 640 x 352 with 25fps (Wide Screen for Digital TV or movies. Normal TV is only something like 320 x 240)
Audio = 44khtz at 160kbps. or less if you aren't too fussy.

These settings should let you get about 1 hour 30 minutes on to 1 CD (700MB). Take a look at these screen grabs from the British TV show, Bo in the USA which was recorded with the above settings. I watched this the other day. It looked perfect ! Just as if it was right of Digital TV (which it was )




Yakumo

 

Normal TV is 720x525 ( or 720x625 for PAL ). Although that is an over simplification, analogue TV has an infinite horizontal resolution. It's only limited by your TV ( lcd pixels/dot mask on your crt ) and what the picture has been put through ( the ccd in the camera etc ). The horizontal resolution of different tv's are different, you always lose something because of the retrace time. But a nominal resolution of 480 interlaced for NTSC and 512 for PAL is about right. 1 hour 30 minutes isn't feature film length & tv programs tend to have less movement. Camera pans and special effects really take their toll on the bitrate.

I notice the difference in quality between a DVD9 and a downsampled DVD4.7 so I guess I'm more of a perfectionist, though I sure don't miss the time spent on DVDx & the resulting artifacts. I do generally watch films on my laptop's LCD, which due to lower colour resolution will show the artifacting much more ( I think it's effectively 6 bits per pixel instead of 8 ).

smf

 

Oh yeah, Why did I think TV resolution was 320x240 ? Spending too much time with YouTube I think.

Yakumo

 

I got a question for you guys, I tried using DVDx to convert a Dvd I ripped (that I legitimately own) and for some reason it will only convert up to the first chapter break, the first 6 minutes of the movie. Thing is when I select the vob file it says 1 hr, 30 minutes, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Is there a way to remove the chapter breaks first or something?

 

Hmm, that is odd. I only use DVDx to convert my retro core show to MP4 but I do remember converting an XMEN3 DVD rip to 700MB for someone without that chapter problem. Have you tried doing a different DVD to see what happens?

Yakumo

 

Just what the Dr ordered :nod:

My baby Brother has just bought himself a new toy.....




http://www.amazon.co.uk/Archos-AV700TV-Mobile-Digital-Recorder/dp/B000FNNYS2

He left it with me last night to add some movies etc

I have DVD-Decrypter and DVD Shrink but for some reason after I re-installed everything last year, I can burn back to DVD`s but not to a hard drive.......so this thread has helped me greatly :thumbsup:

 

glad to see this thread is helping more than one

By the way is that a digital pocket TV?

Yakumo

 

DVDx had been working, but now I seem to get a error every time telling me that the frame rate is causing problems and I should try to choose the "force 24 fps" option. I've chosen that, and it has the same error again. It seems to happen with the movie is about 75% converted.... Any tips?

 

NOt to sure what's going wrong here. What are you converting from? A normal DVD to AVI ?

Yakumo

 

Eh, I'm not a huge fan of DVDx.

Damn thing *NEVER* syncs the audio properly.

Divx might not compress quite as well as Xvid (still seems pretty darn close to me) but at least Dr. Divx can manage to keep the audio synced with the video.

-hl718

 

That always depends on resources available and how long the video file is and how small you want to compress it too. I've used Dr. Divx many times. When I had it compress DVDs with 4hours of video in and compressed it to 700megs, the audio was out of sync by 5 seconds! I made sure that it was the only program running. My PC was on hiatus for 16hours, had to do it overnight.

However, when I re-compressed another 4hour video into 1gig, it took less time and the audio was in-sync.