Hey guys,
I'm ripping a ton of my DVD's to my HD and want to store them on it for ease of access for a HTPC.

I want to compress them down to 1.4Gb each (3 to a DVD or could easily split them to fit 2 CD).

I normally use xVid with AutoGK and a .avi container (want a fairly straight forwards solution that doesn't require alot of intervention and work from me per film) but I'm finding the films are looking quite blocky and not that impressive.

Have also started trying out using AutoMKV but am TOTALLY new to it and to x264. Played with the different settings in it alot and found the higher quality ones take HOURS literally (like 5 or so!) (file size set to 1400Mb) and the time taken by it seems to vary ALOT depending on which profile I use.


I'm basically just after suggestions on what format would give me the best quality files at around 1.4Gb that can be easily read on my PC and also played back with XBMC.

Also then after what software to use for that format and also what settings to use

After full enlightenment basically

Please instruct!!

Ordinarily I'd hesitate to answer a video question on an audio forum, but given that I've spent countless hours trying to answer basically the same questions and have yet to find a video forum of the caliber of HA, I'm willing to make an exception.

I recently discovered and have fallen in love with HandBrake.

http://handbrake.fr/

It supports H.264 and can encode to several different containers including mkv, mp4 and avi. It's also multi-threaded so it's *fast*.

Check out the Video section of the Wiki for optimal settings

http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/HandBrakeGuide

Happy ripping!

You should be able to fit 2 hours of DVD video in 1.4 gigabyte of mpeg4 (xvid, divx) with pretty good quality. For optimal quality at a given file size, you should go for a two pass encode.

This is not the answer, so don't read:

x264 scales really well, which means it can be really fast and still look good, your target bitrate is somewhere between 1200-1700 kbps (video + audio), so you will probably have to scale down SD video a bit for a blockless experience (or in x264 case blurless).

xvid has its strenght as well, compatibility with standalones and with correctly downscaled video it should deliver good results.

mpeg2 (or DVD structure) thought is still a compatibility king and DVD media is cheap enough, so i can't see the reason why would you need to put 3 movies on the same DVD?

The main point isn't to be able to get 3 to a DVD (thats just an added bonus), its about getting the films down to a reasonable size to save on my computer so they're always accessible for my HTPC.

7Gb is just too big a file size to make this worth while and so I figure this is a pretty good compromise size.

And I know its 'hydrogenaudio' but this is the 'General A/V (Audio/Video) forum so I didn't think it would be a problem.
Hope its not!

about the software, this is basically what i use for x264:
a. avisynth + some basic avisynth scripting knowhow (check avisynth.org)
b. x264.exe command line & nero command line encoder for the audio part
c. mp4box for muxing V + A part.
d. total commander as 'gui' + custom *.bat for encoding, which is based on profiles for x264 and templates for avisynth (from time to time i would install megui to steal some of the sharktooth presets for x264).

p.s. most of the time i would use some of the QT compatible presets, which gives an extra addtion of showing things on some other platform or via web (although we have flash supporting mp4 now).
p.s.2. custom *.bat you will find on my blog with some luck.


no problem at all

I don't agree with this. I have encoded movies @ 950kb/s with the original resolution (minus cropping black bars out) into a 700mb file using x264. The output video has very little blocking and smearing (not really noticeable even with my discriminating eye). It really depends on the options you use with the type of video.

footballking3420: ok, i stand corrected then, my post was way overgeneralized...

As the final filesize isn't critical, I'd like to suggest that you try encoding with the XviD codec in VBR (variablr bitrate) instead of CBR (constant bitrate).

I've been doing this for years to convert DVD to MPEG-4 for HD storage for exactly the same purpose as yourself, and all movies have come out to a filesize of between 600MB and 1.7GB with an average size of just under 1GB. This is achieved by using a constant-quality (CQ-mode) setting of 90%. It's also a single-pass process so is fairly rapid.

The huge advantage of CQ-mode is that you don't have a tied bitrate of, say, 900Kbps which is totally inadequate for capturing scenes with lots of fast-moving content and will inevitably lead to blockiness. Using XviD in CQ-mode allows the bitrate to rapidly adjust in response to scene complexity and rate of change. With a value of 90%, I regularly see bitrates in the range of 600Kbps to 2.5Mbps.

As long as you keep the audio content encoded in the typical MP3 at 128Kbps CBR format, the files still play back perfectly on MPEG-4 compliant standalone DVD players too, so there are no worries about compatibility.

If you have trouble getting AGK to do this (which I don't think you will) then Google for an application called Vidomi. I've been using it from day-one and haven't encountered any problems yet.

Why have I gone to the bother of doing this? Well, I view all of my archived content on a 60" projection screen and any other method of MPEG-4 encoding is either hideous to watch or incredibly wasteful in terms of filesize. Using the above method in conjunction with some custom ffdshow image post-processing restores the image to a level of quality so close to the original most of the time that I don't really worry about it even on a screen of this size.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Hiya,
If you're getting good results on your 60" using those settings then thats enough for me.

I've installed Vidomi and so am looking through it now (dont like the GUI at all).

Just wondering what settings you're using for everything inside of it?

If you could let me know so I can try get the best results possible.

Thanks

Hi.

I know what you mean about the user interface. It's not my favourite either, but it gets the job done.

Here's a full list of settings. Bear in mind that you'll have to load up an extracted VOB file before you can get to any of the settings options. Just click the "+" icon and navigate to an extracted VOB or MPEG-2 file, and then make the following settings by using the "options" icon.


Video Options: Hyper Crop - tick, Deinterlace - tick, Hyper Scale - tick, Threshold - 20, Scale By Percent, Left Crop - 0, Right Crop - 0, No Frame Rate Adjustment, 100% of Width, Force Output Dimensions to be a Multiple of 16 - tick. In the Video Codec Settings - Normal One Pass Codec (One Pass). In the Encode Color Space setting - YV12 (Faster).

Now click on the "Select Video Codec Defaults" and select - XviD MPEG-4 Codec. Click on "Configure" and select "1 Pass - Quality". Set a Quality value of 90%.

Click on "Advanced options..." and select Motion Search precision - 6-Ultra High, Quantizer Type - MPEG, FourCC used - XVID, Enable lumi-masking - tick. Click "OK". Click "OK" again on the "XviD configuration" window and click "OK" again on the "Select Video Codec" window and click "OK for a last time on the "Vidomi Video Options" window.

Click "Options" on the main encoder window again and select "General Options" and apply the following settings. Display Statistics When Encoding - tick, Multithread Encode on Dual CPUs - tick, Use _INFO.txt if present - tick. Leave all other checkboxes clear. Click the "OK" button to close this menu.


It only needs setting up the once as all of these values will be saved when you exit.

You should end up with fullscale output that looks very respectable on a conventional sized screen without any post-processing. If you do need a hand with the post-processing side of things then give me a shout. The effects of it may be an advantage to you if you have fussy eyes and/or a high quality display.

Good luck.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

This sites has lot of great guides for helping with this stuff

http://www.rita.lt/


Also I second what Datalone says, Handbrake is fantastic for DVD files as well. But DivX/XviD is obviosuly more widely supported

The guides are great as long as you bear in mind that most of them suggest settings that restrict XviD or DivX to CBR encoding at rates that simply aren't high enough in reality to capture DVD content with any degree of accuracy for fast-motion scenes.

It's the same basic argument as that used for encoding MP3 in VBR. For MP3 to capture CD-quality source material to the best of its abilities, it must be run at the full samplerate of 320Kbps if CBR encoding is being used. This results in very large files which defeats the object, to a large extent, of using a lossy compression system in the first place. VBR allows the encoder to think for itself and, generally, it has a much better idea of the required bitrate than we do.

Using a constant bitrate of, say, 2.5Mbps for XviD when encoding 16:9 DVD content at a 1:1 pixel ratio (720x400 pixels, rounded down to the nearest multiple of 16) almost entirely eliminates blocking on fast-motion scenes but only leads to a typical compression ratio of around 2:1. Using CQ-mode at 90% allows the bitrate to swell to ~2.5Mbps when required but keeps the average filesize down such that a typical movie (taken as an average over 150 encodings in my particular case) occupies just under 1GB.

Although the final filesize is very hard to predict with CQ-mode, the quality level is almost 100% predictable, as opposed to the CBR method where filesize is 100% predictable and the quality level is almost unpredictable.

Sorry if I seem to be repeating some of the content of my previous posts, but I can't stress enough what an enormous difference this makes to encoding quality with XviD.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

very good .
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