I have a little shelf of DVD's, a lot of them being music DVD's, and I've got a widescreen moniter and TV. Anyhow, I wanna rip all those beasts to my PC and be able to watch them on the TV with the 360 Media Center so I never have to take the 5 steps over to the shelf and get the disc out. The big reason though, is with VirtualDubMod I've found that I can modify the videos to fill my whole TV without screwing the video up too bad (this is mostly for the music DVD's, since for some reason they have bars but there still 4:3). So far I've been using DVD Decryptor, AC3 audio, and Xvid, but Xvid doesn't work on 360 unless I use the 360Transcode thing, which I can live with but I wonder if there's a better compatible video codec, or is Xvid the best thing? Anyhow yeah, just wondering how you guys do it. So far I use virtualdubmod to modify the video to fill the screen and use AC3 audio, but yeah, is Xvid the best there is, and am I gunna have to live with transcode360? Or is there something better I could be using?
What about using DVDx as a ripper perhaps ? But perhaps it is just nonsense what I am saying. But anyway that was my two cents here.
last time I was experimenting with ripping DVD the ripping itself was real time - i.e. hour and half movie DVD took hour and half to rip... and then some other clean up and etc. before can run it thru RealPlayer... to cut the long story short I wasn't patient enough to do any more ripping and happy with popping movie and occasional music DVD into one of DVD player to watch... ^__^ Of coz YMMV...
Thanks wolverinedk. I'll take a look. My main concern is that I want to be able to edit the movies to fill my widescreen Tv's if they need to be, which I tested with Xvid, and it worked pretty good, only of course some goofy interlacing looking artifacts but nothing terrible. I'd rather have that then bars on the sides. Is Xvid/AC3 the best codec to be using? What about like Mpeg or something 360 compatible?
So basically you're stretching the image? Ew. Each to their own, I guess, but are you sure your widescreen TV doesn't have some aspect adjustment modes, ie zoom or whatever? I've yet to see a widescreen TV that couldn't take a 4:3 image and stretch it to fill the screen.
It has the adjustment modes but they suck and cut out a lot of the image. I guess it's stretching but it doesn't look like, say, a GBA>GBC stretch. I fit it to 720×404. It fills the screen without looking real bad or stretched but yeah, still kinda wierd. I like it better then the two giant bars on the sides though. The resizing mostly applies to the music/band DVD's. A lot of them are letterboxed.....so when I play them I get a nice bar on each side, turning it into a postage stamp. When I resize it, it fills the screen and cuts off the bars....and I guess cutting off the bars lets whatever encoder, such as Xvid, work on the main video more since theres no bars I guess? I'm thinking thats how it works. Widescreen movies I don't have to mess with, they come out fine. I guess wide and HD is a double edged sword...old/SD/4:3 stuff is ick on it. But that's fine I guess since the good wide HD stuff is so nice.
I tried doing this a few different ways but finally gave up since I couldn't get a decent enough picture. I like it to be clear and any kind of fuzzy display ruins the movie for me. I was using DVDx as well, but had problems with it crashing.
Just rip the raw ISO. Play back with XBMC. Done. If you want to use a 360, rip the raw MPEG. Run Transcode on the MCE PC. Done. No quality loss. -hl718
x2 Just in cases you can always check the doom9.org for anything you want related to encoding [or general ripping (dvdshrink etc)] They have some nice tutorials for everything related, from enocding to adjusting the subs But keep in mind that encoding is taking time, much more than to get up and get the dvd :katamari:
I never even thought about just copying the VOB's... Are you serious? 360 only plays WMV? I thought it can play MPEG and stuff too?
