DVD rip to H264

[bialio]

I'm thinking about converting my "Movie only" DVD rips into something a little more space friendly. Any tips on good tools to convert the Ripped DVD Video_TS folder into a single h264 file?

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by bialio

I'm thinking about converting my "Movie only" DVD rips into something a little more space friendly. Any tips on good tools to convert the Ripped DVD Video_TS folder into a single h264 file?

Handbrake gui or EP's tool that uses handbrake:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40079

[joematt]

I like AutoGK (Auto Gourdian Knot):

http://www.autogk.me.uk/

Oops only supports DivX/XviD. Sorry about that!

[S_M_E]

I think mkvmerge supports video-ts folders too and it's pretty quick...

[tmiranda]

I've been experimenting with RipBot264 to do this. I've only done one or two test cases but so far it's promising.

RipBot264 is the closest thing to one click H.264 encoding I've seen (that gives good results.)

[cenwesi]

Funny you should ask. I spent almost 1week about 2weeks ago testing and testing all sorts of converters out there. I settled on HandBrake... I use the command line to convert all my movies to *.mkv

PS: what are the settings you guys are using on Handbrake, i just want to be sure i am using the best setting.

[SWKerr]

I use DVDFab to convert my non HD rips and it does a good job. You have a lot of control over how and what you want to convert and once you settle on your preferred settings you can make them the default and after that it is just a few clicks to run it.

[Susurrus]

Does using Handbrake support chaptering and FF/RW? If so, I want to try it out this weekend.

Sus

[evilpenguin]

I recommend trying my mediaShrink tool.

It's more or less just a front end to Handbrake, but in addition it...

• Enables drag and drop encoding
• UNC paths
• Embedded closed captioning (Handbrake currently only supports burning subtitles into the video)
• Automatic pick out and encode TV episodes to their own file from a TV show DVD
• Automatically detects and attaches commentary tracks if they're available

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I use DVDFab to convert my non HD rips and it does a good job. You have a lot of control over how and what you want to convert and once you settle on your preferred settings you can make them the default and after that it is just a few clicks to run it.

How do you select aspect ratios other than the ones that appear in the list? I have a test clip that is 16x9 NTSC DVD format but when converted (by VideoFab, but I'm assuming the conversion engine is the same as DVDFab) the aspect ratio is off.

I'm trying to use the same settings as RipBot264 (720x362 at approx. 1mbps, 48kHz AAC, 29.97 fps) to get an apples to apples comparison.

Edit: I answered my own question. DVDFab and VideoFab are slightly different. I converted the .MPG to DVD format (DVDFab does not seem to accept .mpg files directly) and then converted that. The results seem very good.

[tmiranda]

In case anybody is interested:

I've done some experimenting with DVDFab and RipBot264 to see how they do converting main movies to H.264. My subjective view is that RipBot264 produces better results at a given file size.

For my experiment I used a full length movie and converted it using both tools so that the end file size was about the same (950 MB). I first converted the movie using a CQ of 26 in RipBot264. This resulted in a target file size of about 950 MB. I then converted the same movie using a "fixed file size" or 950 MB in DVDFab.

I tried matching the aspect ratio, cropping, audio bitrate, etc. as close as possible in both tools.

DVDFab was a little faster but RipBot264 produced slightly "better" results (subjective on my part).

Can anybody compare RipBot264 results to Handbrake and EP's tool? I'm not interested in chapters and subtitles.

[nyle]

Originally Posted by bialio

I'm thinking about converting my "Movie only" DVD rips into something a little more space friendly. Any tips on good tools to convert the Ripped DVD Video_TS folder into a single h264 file?

I use Nero Recode to encode my movies retaining AC3 to h264 Nero AVC files. Playback great in SageTV and take up a lot less space. I've been doing that for years since I switched from using DIVX on them all.

We really enjoy having our collection at our fingertips.

[Taddeusz]

I've been doing this with Handbrake for the longest time with about 52% quality. Resulting videos were about 500-1000Kb depending on content. Previously I had an SDTV and didn't notice that much of a difference. Now I have an HDTV and more recently I got a 1TB hard drive and don't have the storage constraints I had before. Now what I'm doing is for movies that get rewatched like Star Wars and such is ripping the video and audio directly from the DVD and putting it in an MKV container. It's almost like ripping the DVD structure but I can actually watch the movies on Placeshifter, unlike with ripping the DVD's directly. Quality is outstanding on my HDTV. I don't know how I put up with the crappy quality before, and it was pretty crappy, no matter how high of a bitrate was used. Transcoding video should be used sparingly.

That being said, I'm still going to transcode my BD rips. 20GB for a 1hr and 45min movie is just insane. Even after transcoding 1080p still looks good at a 1/4 the bitrate.

[gibsonpa]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

...for movies that get rewatched like Star Wars and such is ripping the video and audio directly from the DVD and putting it in an MKV container...

This sounds like what I want to do...new dvd's to mkv...how exactly are you doing this. handbrake only? currently i am using dvd-shrink, then based on this email thread using mediashrink(which is really nice). Is your process straight from disk to mkv (ie not a 2 step process). Any help would be great!

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by gibsonpa

This sounds like what I want to do...new dvd's to mkv...how exactly are you doing this. handbrake only? currently i am using dvd-shrink, then based on this email thread using mediashrink(which is really nice). Is your process straight from disk to mkv (ie not a 2 step process). Any help would be great!

No, to do this I don't do any kind of processing on the video from the DVD. And unfortunately it's not a one step process. I use DVD Decrypter to combine the multiple VOB's into a single file and extract the chapters. For whatever reason I get audio sync problems if I drag the VOB into mkvmerge so I had to add a step to use tsmuxr to demux the video and audio. Then finally I mux the elementary streams into an MKV using mkvmerge.

I only keep one audio and one subtitle stream (if it has one that needs to be there such as Star Wars) from each movie. The resulting files are generally in the 3-7GB range depending on the movie.

[Taddeusz]

I'm going to give this a shot when I get home but this program looks like it has promise:

http://www.makemkv.com/

[gibsonpa]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I'm going to give this a shot when I get home but this program looks like it has promise:

http://www.makemkv.com/

Did you get a chance to try this out? Just curious....

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by gibsonpa

Did you get a chance to try this out? Just curious....

Yes I did. It works quite well. Although one of the resulting MKV's was corrupted or something. Not sure why.

Once the code stablizes it looks to be a great program. On DVD's I where I was having serious audio sync problems it gets the sync exactly correct. Not to mention it's a one step process.

[gibsonpa]

Great. Thanks for the update.

[VikingCrown]

Here is a kind of related question, I have plenty of storage and a weak PC so encoding is way too long for me. So if i wanted to take my LOTR extended edition which is 2 disks and just take the main movie from both disks and combine into a single .mkv or a .mpeg file what would be the best way to accomplish this without compressing?