Re: 'Best' format for ripped DVDs?

["Sam Partington" <sam.partington@xxxxxxxxx>]

I spent quite a while playing with this.  I decided I wanted to
repackage
the VIDEO_TS folders partly because I find the whole VIDEO_TS thing a bit
untidy but mostly because I decided I wanted to keep my collection on a 1Tb
drive, with some room for expansion, with raw that wasn't an option, and
funding is low for a larger array :-)

My main priorities were no loss in quality of video or audio, keep multiple
audio/subtitle languages  (SWMBO is italian, and my son will hopefully be
bilingual).  I was actually keen on losing the dvd menu, as I find them all
rather annoying, and I've ditched all extras as well - I never watch them,
and I always have the original disk should I get an irresistible urge.

In the end I chose matroska (mkv) as the container, h264 as the video
compression, the audio is left in its original format mostly for simplicity
but also because any compression is negligble compared to video size.  Mkv
supports multiple languages nicely.

The process is this :  I use MacTheRipper to extract the VIDEO_TS folder
into a queue folder.  This takes about 30 minutes.  Then I have grabs a
VIDEO_TS from the queue, extracts the audio(mplayer), subtitles(mencoder),
transcodes(HandBrake) and repackages the result into an mkv file. This
takes
about 8 hours per disk on my mini.  And then it grabs the next VIDEO_TS
folder.  The script runs in the background and I can watch movies at the
same time

I'm not complete yet - about half way through my collection (300 disks is
going to take me 3 months!).  but every now and then the system mails me
that it is low on VIDEO_TS folders and I sit there and feed the disks into
MacTheRipper whilst watching telly, and fill the queue folder up.  This
means it doesn't require much intervention from me, so I don't really care
how long it takes.

The MTR stage is a bit fiddly, as I have to keep selecting "Main
Feature
extraction" and click go, ideally I would automate this more, I
believe it
would be possible with some applescript, but I've not had the time yet. Or
if anyone has any better ideas I would like to know.  Also some disks fail
completely in MTR, I believe MTR3 may solve this, but I've failed to find
the magic newsgroup where you donate money and

The resulting MKV is 2~4Gb depending on the movie so about 50% of the size,
I can see absolutely no degradation in quality on my 32" LCD, but I
did have
to do quite a lot of experimenting with the handbrake settings before I
achieved that (none of the fiddling increased the file size particularly,
it
just vastly increased the transcode time - and presumably CPU required to
playback).

As for playback, VLC plays nicely including grabbing he various subtitle
and
language files.  FrontRow plays just fine with Perian and Sapphire
installed, but doesn't easily allow subititle switching.  I will most
likely
use OSXBMC when it is more stable, or maybe I will try to contribute to the
Sapphire project, as that is really the interface I like best at the
moment.

Sam

On 08/04/2008, rb_ziggy <rb.lists@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   A while back I started experimenting with ripping DVDs and serving
> these from a NAS. I've got this all up and running nicely.
>
> However, I'm now wondering if I went down the right route with
> formats. To keep it simple I originally ripped the DVDs as straight
> copies (i.e. Video_TS with .VOB files). I wanted to make sure I kept
> the same quality as on the DVD so didn't really want to introduce
> compression and loss of quality (we watch on a 50" plasma not an
ipod).
>
> But I'm wondering if there is a 'better solution'. Do some of the
> other formats offer no (appreciable) loss of quality but chapters
> markers, no dvd copyright blurb, better (lossless) compression. I'm
> not too bothered about keeping the DVD menu either. (But must keep
5.1)
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


------------------------------------