Best codec for ripping/archiving DVD's?

[scotty]

So, on the weekend I finally got the network at my new home running. I'm using an Athlon64 3200 machine with 2 RAID'd 1TB drives as a NAS of sorts (running XP Pro). I used to have an XP MediaCenter, so I'd rip DVD's to the hard drive in straight VOB format (DVD Shrink) and they'd play without any hassles in Media Center. Now I have a PS3, and it seems as though most of my ripped DVD's are useless, as the PS3 doesn't play plain-jane VOB's. You 'can' get the vobs to work, but it's pretty much just as easy to start over, after all is said and done (you have to re-encode the disc, not splitting VOB's, and then rename all the vob's to mpg).

So now I'm faced with whether or not it's worth it to start ripping DVD's to single mpeg or avi files. I've always been an advocate of keeping DVD's in their 'original' state (menu's, etc), but it seems more trouble than it's worth. That, and I really dont watch the extra's all that much anyway...

So my question is, if you were to rip/convert [hundreds] of DVD's into some sort of single, uber-format, what would you choose? It seems as though Mpeg4-H.264 is pretty much the most widely accepted standard (PS3, Ipods, etc) with the best quality... Any thoughts? Opinions? Anyone know how large a roughly 2 hr movie would be in MP4? An iphone/ipod/windows mobile phone is likely in my future, so it would have to be as cross-compatible as possible. Storage space isn't a huge concern, but video/audio quality is.

This is one of those things I dont want to have to do again, so if I have to convert/re-rip any of my movies, I'd prefer to do it once and for all. Any thoughts?

[It appears as though Handbrake does the best job of this, unless anyone has any better suggestions for programs].

 

[thiggins]

You might find better answers over in AVSForum.

 

[scotty]

You might find better answers over in AVSForum.

Yep, I headed on over there to get some answers, amongst a few other places. Everyone has their opinion though, AVS is definately geared towards a particular crowd.

It does indeed appear that H.264 is the way to go. It seems as though it's pretty much the standard right now (it was implimented in HD-DVD and Blu Ray), not to mention pretty much everyone is on the h264 bandwagon in a pretty big way. It also appears as though many/most digital Television broadcasters impliment h264 themselves. A full 2 hour movie is about 1.3-1.5GB. That's a far cry from ripped DVD's that are being compressed all to hell and still taking 3-4 GB per movie (seeing as DVD's are using a roughly 15 year old compression technology).

The only trade-off is encoding time it seems, it takes about 3-4x longer to encode in h264. With that said, Handbrake supports queuing, so you can feed it a pile of movies and let it have at er. This is a huge plus for me, as I have hundreds of gigs that just need to be converted.

H264 it is.

 

[Brandon]

Yep, I headed on over there to get some answers, amongst a few other places. Everyone has their opinion though, AVS is definately geared towards a particular crowd.

It does indeed appear that H.264 is the way to go. It seems as though it's pretty much the standard right now (it was implimented in HD-DVD and Blu Ray), not to mention pretty much everyone is on the h264 bandwagon in a pretty big way. It also appears as though many/most digital Television broadcasters impliment h264 themselves. A full 2 hour movie is about 1.3-1.5GB. That's a far cry from ripped DVD's that are being compressed all to hell and still taking 3-4 GB per movie (seeing as DVD's are using a roughly 15 year old compression technology).

The only trade-off is encoding time it seems, it takes about 3-4x longer to encode in h264. With that said, Handbrake supports queuing, so you can feed it a pile of movies and let it have at er. This is a huge plus for me, as I have hundreds of gigs that just need to be converted.

H264 it is.

I personally use Xvid (Which is fully Divx playable, meaning DVD players with Xvid can play burned-to-cd/dvd versions fo family members and such). I also found MPEG-4 to distort reallly easy, which would give a very VERY grainy picture more often than not it seemed.

For ripping, I use DVD-Decrypter, I then use AutoGK for compression/removing menus and making everything nice and neat. I currently just compress them to 75% quality (Which isn't noticeable to me, even using a 1080i PC screen.

The only down side to this codec, you can get some really random sizes depending on the movie (Anywhere from 700mb-2gb.

 

[jpbuzbee]

[It appears as though Handbrake does the best job of this, unless anyone has any better suggestions for programs].

I've been down the same DVD ripping path, and I don't know that there are any perfect answers. Over the last few years I've reviewed a dozen or so different media players and none could play everything in my library. The most common format supported among the players was xvid/divx so that might be a solution. For myself, for the time being, I've settled down with a hacked AppleTV and have used Handbrake to rip 400 or so DVDs to H.264 format. Handbrake can even preserve Dolby Digital that will play back on the AppleTV. Depending on the movie/audio, rips check in around 2-3 Gig or so, so they are good sized. All is not rosy in H.264-land though. I've tried a few of the rips on a PS3 with no-joy. They wouldn't play. But if you fiddle around enough with the Handbrake settings, you might find a rip that would play in both.

If you decide to go down the straight VOB path, you might be interested in a inexpensive little device that I'm in the process of reviewing. It can play back VOBs from an attached FAT/NTFS USB drive just like a DVD player with menus, scene lookup, etc. Stay tuned.

Jim Buzbee

 

[scotty]

I fiddled with handbrake and my PS3 a lot last night. Man, they don't like each other. Only when I encoded a clip with the specific PS3 settings did it play, otherwise the PS3 wouldn't read the file. Wierd. Frustrating. At first, I thought it was an issue with the media server, but both Tversity and Nero MediaHome had the same results. And WMP11 is useless as it doesn't inherently recognize MP4's, and as such wont add them to its library for sharing purposes. It's wierd though because the preset was virtually identical to the other one I tried (normal). I'm going to try some more things tonight though.

Ideally I'd like to keep things in Vob, besides the fact that they're huge and it just seems like a waste. I'm toying with the idea of going back to a media center PC for this purpose, because the PS3 just isn't there yet. With MCE, just as long as windows media player can play it (which is easy to do with virtually any file), MCE will play it. Nice enough interface, no frills no crap. Considering some of the flack that it gets, I've had nothing but good experiences with MediaCenter (XP/2005, haven't tried Vista's MC in any serious way yet).