I want to do several kinds of jobs with video, but know nothing about it, since I've done nothing with video so far...
1. To extract DVD to HDD. To compress (?) it. What format? Lossless?
2. To record video from a VHS video recorder (SONY SLV-X711) to a HDD. What format? Lossless? To compress (?) it.
I want the highest quality possible.
And I also want to catalogue my video collection like it's done with audio collection with the help of the Mpeg Audio Collection by me.
What software player to choose?
For 2, I need a video card with video in/out, what video card would you recommend?

These are all fairly general questions that are beyond the scope of a single forum post. If you really want to get full on into video encoding on a PC, then you will need to do some extensive reading. I will try and answer your questions.

Firstly, lossless video takes up an incredible amount of storage space. DVD's themselves are not lossless, but encoded in a format called MPEG2 (forgive me if this seems condescending, I don't know how much you know already). To convert a DVD to a lossless video format would take up far more space than the original DVD.

The most common formats in use are implementations of a video encoding standard known as MPEG4. MPEG4 doesn't only consists of video standards but also audio and container standards. However, we are only concerned with the video for now. The most common implementations of MPEG4 are DivX and XviD, although others exist (eg. 3ivX). There is a free version of DivX with limited features, a no monetary cost version with more features, which uses adds that pop-up while browsing the internet to pay for itself, and a full pro version which costs US$19.95. The adds version and the pro version have the same feature set. XviD is a codec the devlopers are using as a learning tool. It is free to download the source code, but is probably illegal to compile and use in most countries. Binaries are available at sites around the web. It is probably illegal to download these in most countries to. However, XviD is generally (and I stress generally considered to be the most advanced codec of its kind. Ultimately the choice between DivX or XviD is up to you.

For information on how to convert DVD's or Tapes to DivX/XviD, you will have to read several of doom9's guides available at

http://www.doom9.org/guides.htm.

As far as a capture, I would recommend a Pinnacle card, prefarably one with Analog and Digital capture modes so that in the future you can capture video off of a digital video camcorder and edit it.

Please also note that converting DVD's or Tapes to video on a computer is illegal in many countries.

Sorry for dragging up this (sort of) old thread. I'm like the first poster, I want to backup my DVDs. I was wondering what the best way would be to go about it? I'm creating a lossless archive for my music CDs and I thought my DVDs deserved the same treatment. Is lossless video not worth it? I have no intention of editing the video. Would it be best just to backup via a lousy method (like Xvid, which I have done before)?

First of all, the video stored in DVD is already in lossy format, namely MPEG-2. You would gain nothing by recompressing it into a lossless format. The best procedure for archival purposes is to extract the data on the DVD and store it somewhere.

For instance, you can extract the whole DVD to your hard drive using DVD Decrypter. You can later on do anything you want with this data, including burning it into a DVD(-/+)R.

There are other applications and methods for storing a DVD image, you might want to check the guides at Doom9.



Lossy, not lousy

I thought what I wrote above was fairly self explanatory. Here it is again.

This will give you some idea of how big lossless video is:

NTSC Video 720x480 (D1 Resolution) 30fps in Uncompressed 24bit RGB
1 minuite of video in Megabytes ~ 60sec x 30fps x 720x480pixels x 24bit / 8bit /2^20bytes ~ 1780MB!!!

But video compression factor about 2:1 in lossless RGB and 4:1 in YUV2 and may be a little bit more in YV12 color space. so 1 minutes of lossless NTSC video at D1 resolution are about 350MB per minute. (~50Mbps)

Lossy compression give very high compression ratio.
According to the test at 100fps.com
http://www.100fps.com/file_sizes_of_lossless_compression.htm
24bit RGB to DivX (YV12) at 100% is about 100:1 (I have no idea what divx at 100% quality mean, maybe Q=2)

Gennerally DivX and XviD look very good at 0.20 bit / pixel (translate to bitrate about 2Mbps for D1 NTSC video, about 14MB/s), typical usage (1CD rip) is about 800-900kbps

So think lossless video is overkill for current storage technology and not neccessary at all.

The question is: what is better, to leave a HDD DVD copy in MPEG2, or to convert it to MPEG4?
Could smb. please give quality/size measurements?

Leave it as mpeg-2 if you have enough free space. Trasncode to mpeg-4 if disk space is an issue. Transcoding will always result in lower quality.

What about the choice of sowtare for MPEG-2 extraction?
Thanks.

DVDDecrypter is the only choice, This will extract it to vob files, or an image. I would probably extract to an image, and mount it with daemon tools. This will take up between 4-8.5GB per disc.

one thing you should know - recompressing video isn't as bad as recompressing lossy audio. video compression is much simpler, and there's none of that masking threshold stuff to make transcoding so evil.

the main difference you'll get with a high-quality transcode is some colour banding on subtle gradients. that is if the source DVD doesn't already have this problem.

also blocks will be accentuated if your source is blocky in bits.

check out www.doom9.org for all you could possibly want to know about this stuff (though it seems to be down at the moment, hence my unusually prolific posting here )