General consensus on "best" video format for V7?

[Brent94Z]

Hey Guys!

I have a large offline DVD collection with a fairly small amount (~150) copied to the hard drive. How I have been doing this is using CloneDVD2 and AnyDVDHD to copy the movie and extras (but not foreign langauges) to the hard drive and compressing as necessary to fit on a standard DVD. This quality is fine for me and I do like having the DVD menu and options.

I see a lot of talk about mkv and also see alot of others doing avi, etc.

I'm curious as to what you experts consider the "best" way to do it and format to use to put your DVDs on your hard drive? I do not need near Blu-ray quality but I don't want to watch a bunch of pixelation junk either. Basically, the best bang for the buck for quality vs space used. Like I said, I'm currently only compressing my DVDs down to ~4.7gig for the DVD and saving them in standard DVD format. My DVDs work like a DVD with the menus and such which I like but isn't 100% necessary if I can get similar quality at a fraction of the file size required. I did too read something about mkv and chapters and how Sage supports this (or will?). Would this make a mkv work similar to a DVD menu?

I'm also going to be using the MyMovies plugin so know I need to have my recordings in their own folders.

Anyway, before I spend too much more time putting my DVDs on my hard drives, I would like to make sure I'm doing it "correctly" I *thought* I was by simply using CloneDVD2 but it sure seems there are a lot of you experts out there NOT doing this and using mkv, avi, and whatever else

Thanks for any recommendations. I know this is mostly opinion related and has been talked about before but not sure if Sage V7 changes any of the thinking about this and if there might be a "new best way" of doing it. Or, maybe I'm lucky and my current way using CloneDVD2 IS considered the best way. LOL! Thanks!

EDIT: I'll also add that I do have Placeshifter and a couple clients but 99.9% of all my Sage use is done from my Sage server HTPC. Thanks!

[Fuzzy]

Basically, the deciding factor is whether you want Menus or not. If so, then you are stuck with the DVD format, which unfortunately is limited to MPEG-2, which will take up space. If you DON'T want the menus, then ripping just the main movie saves space. Even if you keep it MPEG-2, it'd still be smaller, and in that case, I would stick said MPEG-2 into an MKV with something like MakeMKV (straight from the disc). Let's you choose the tracks you want, and is pretty much a one-step process. If space is of concern, you can further compress that single main movie file to H.264 with something like Handbrake. Either way, i certainly don't think I would continue with the re-compressed MPEG-2 to shrink it down, that REALLY kills the quality.

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Basically, the deciding factor is whether you want Menus or not. If so, then you are stuck with the DVD format, which unfortunately is limited to MPEG-2, which will take up space. If you DON'T want the menus, then ripping just the main movie saves space. Even if you keep it MPEG-2, it'd still be smaller, and in that case, I would stick said MPEG-2 into an MKV with something like MakeMKV (straight from the disc). Let's you choose the tracks you want, and is pretty much a one-step process. If space is of concern, you can further compress that single main movie file to H.264 with something like Handbrake. Either way, i certainly don't think I would continue with the re-compressed MPEG-2 to shrink it down, that REALLY kills the quality.

Thanks, Fuzzy! When you say you wouldn't continue with the re-compressed MPEG-2, then what do you think (assuming I only want the main movie) is the best option to put the main movie on disk with space being a concern? Sounds like you are saying use Handbrake to H.264 but then it sounds like you said you wouldn't do that due to huge quality loss (unless I'm reading it wrong). Thanks!

[stanger89]

The absolute 100% best option if you want the smallest size with the best possible quality, let me rephrase that, least quality loss, is transcoding to H.264 using some combination of avisynth scripts and x264. Though probably for big Hollywood movies that's probably overkill as advanced deinterlacing methods aren't usually necessary.

Put simply, all else equal, H.264 is 2-3x more space efficient compared to MPEG-2, so depending on your quality requirements you can save a lot of space.

Personally I wouldn't bother transcoding from MPEG-2 (definitely don't use transcoded MPEG-2) unless you want to get into somewhat advanced AVIsynth processing.

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by stanger89

The absolute 100% best option if you want the smallest size with the best possible quality, let me rephrase that, least quality loss, is transcoding to H.264 using some combination of avisynth scripts and x264. Though probably for big Hollywood movies that's probably overkill as advanced deinterlacing methods aren't usually necessary.

Put simply, all else equal, H.264 is 2-3x more space efficient compared to MPEG-2, so depending on your quality requirements you can save a lot of space.

Personally I wouldn't bother transcoding from MPEG-2 (definitely don't use transcoded MPEG-2) unless you want to get into somewhat advanced AVIsynth processing.

Thanks, stanger! Definitely don't want to do anything that is complicated and time very time consuming like I suspect this AVIsynth stuff is. I'm a little dense on this so just want to make sure I get this straight... DVDs are MPEG-2. You say you wouldn't bother transcoding from MPEG-2. Does that mean you wouldn't bother trying to compress/downsize DVDs and recommend I just copy the DVD 1 for 1 to the hard drive or at worst, keep doing what I'm doing with CloneDVD2 (compressing down to ~4.7gig)? Thanks!

[gplasky]

Disk space is cheap enough so I don't compress my DVDs at all when putting them on the hard drive. I leave them native and for most of them don't include the menus or extra features. Sometimes I'll take the ones with TV Episodes or Series and rip with the menu so people have an easy time choosing the episodes to watch but still no extras. Rarely I grab it all including the extras. Only when it is something I'm interested in or a review calls out an extra as being something to see.

Gerry

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Disk space is cheap enough so I don't compress my DVDs at all when putting them on the hard drive. I leave them native and for most of them don't include the menus or extra features. Sometimes I'll take the ones with TV Episodes or Series and rip with the menu so people have an easy time choosing the episodes to watch but still no extras. Rarely I grab it all including the extras. Only when it is something I'm interested in or a review calls out an extra as being something to see.

Gerry

Thanks for the input, Gerry! One of the reasons I compress them down to DVD5 (I think it's called) is it makes it easy to burn a copy of the DVD for a family member or friend.

Looks like, from the opinions thus far, doing what I'm doing might actually be best for my needs... liking the menus and extras as well as most all my SageTV usage is using my HTPC where watching DVD format isn't an issue.

[paulbeers]

I wouldn't recommend compressing to DVD5 and storing it that way. The reason why, is that you can always convert to DVD5 later IF you need to burn a DVD, but if you convert now to DVD5 (which means you are compressing the video and losing quality), you can never "unconvert"....

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I wouldn't recommend compressing to DVD5 and storing it that way. The reason why, is that you can always convert to DVD5 later IF you need to burn a DVD, but if you convert now to DVD5 (which means you are compressing the video and losing quality), you can never "unconvert"....

Well if you have the physical media, you can always re-rip it to get the original quality.

I'm using Handbrake to convert everything to MKV, and the quality is acceptable for most movies, like drama or comedy. For visual effects movies, I would leave them as original format. I'm still saving lots of space and at the same time keeping the quality up on movies that need it. As cheap as hard drives are now, I'm always running out of space.

[stanger89]

The big problem with "DVD5" rips, is there's a quite large quality hit to space savings ratio. What I mean is you take a relatively large quality hit for the minimal amount of space you save.

Compared to say transcoding to H.264, where you can save quite a lot of space for a similar quality hit.

I still think though that transcoding is a waste of time unless you're going to put a lot of time into AVISynth to clean up deinterlacing or other issues.

[Suntan]

I'd have to agree with Stanger. Personally, I don't bother to re-encode except when I want to jam video onto my cell phone. And then it is just for last resort entertainment. I don't even bother with re-encoding when putting them on the laptop for a trip.

I do rip just the main movies to save space.

-Suntan

[medwynd]

Originally Posted by Brent94Z

I have a large offline DVD collection with a fairly small amount (~150) copied to the hard drive. How I have been doing this is using CloneDVD2 and AnyDVDHD to copy the movie and extras (but not foreign langauges) to the hard drive and compressing as necessary to fit on a standard DVD. This quality is fine for me and I do like having the DVD menu and options.

I do the same thing as you. I have about 200 titles but a lot of multi-disc sets totaling about 600 some odd discs and also like having all the menus and extras.

I just ripped them using clone dvd and removed the foreign language tracks and captions and was done with it. I ended up with about 3.5TB of rips and with disc space so cheap that's only like 225$ worth of hard drives.

Originally Posted by Brent94Z

I'm also going to be using the MyMovies plugin so know I need to have my recordings in their own folders.

I am using this currently. My process was pull a stack of discs from my collection, make folders for them, rip the discs locally to the folders, then when I would get like 150gig or so worth I would dump them over to the server. Then I play them back on my HD-200, easy peasy.

[Fonceur]

Another reason not to rip as a DVD with menus and all, would be if you think you might eventually want to stream them to a phone or tablet...

[Taddeusz]

I prefer to rip with Handbrake using a 2500kbps average on the video. It yields about a reduction by about half. But that's not the only reason to do this.

The quality of telecining and overall video varies greatly from DVD to DVD. The HD100/200 don't seem to handle this variation very gracefully or sometimes at all. I have some videos where the video is encoded bottom-field-first. I've previously contacted support and they say that their decoder is keyed for only top-field-first encoded video and that this is a fix to correct incompatibilities with certain badly tagged streams. So they made an easy fix rather than making a more dynamically capable decoder. Granted, most video I've seen is top-field-first, but their fix was rather short sighted. Their decoder also doesn't deal well with bad telecine flagging. It is stricly a flag based decoder so if the flags are missing or placed on the wrong fields you will get bad video output.

The result of these issues is that using Handbrake, which has much better detelecining, to transcode the video, IMHO, generally produces a much cleaner video with fewer decoding problems than using the original MPEG2 video.