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Convert DVD to smaller file?

t_ski

t_ski

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 13, 2006
Messages
7,510
At work, I have been asked to evaluate putting an educational DVD on one of our file servers. I have spoken with the vendor and have their permission to rip an unecrypted DVD that they will send me. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with doing something like this, as my only experience comes from using DVD Shrink to place my personal DVD's on my home server. The original DVD is about 2.23GB in size, and we would love to maximize the compression but still keep the quality.

Since this may be a "one-time" thing, buying software to do this is not the ideal choice. Are there any free and safe apps out there that will allow me to compress a DVD into an MPG or AVI file? By "safe" I mean something not loaded down with malware/spyware.
 
turb0 said:
handbrake......


done.
:)
Click to expand...

That works (there's a Windows version)

You can also try Gordian Knot / AutoGK. Its also open source, fast, and lets you tweak the codecs you're using.

Check out doom9.org for totorials, etc.
 
I've used Handbrake before (in Vista 64), and it worked fine to downsample a bunch of my DVD's to play on my portable media player.
 
I tried the Super Video Converter and did not like it. I tried AutoGK and thought that it needed to do a ton of work just to create the file (but I'll admit, I don't understand the program evry well). So far Handbrake seems to be the easiest, but the bad part is that it only creates Quicktime files, correct? The problem with that is Quicktime is not included in our default images, so we would either need to convert this with another program to another file format that Media Player can handle, or we would need install Quicktime on several hundred computers.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions so far.
 
I don't remember having that problem with handbrake - thought I published to an avi.

I did have to use another proprietary app after handbrake to get AVI's in the specific specs that my media-player could handle, so maybe I was feeding mov's into that. Not sure.

I'll have to take a look when I get home to make sure what apps I was using and what settings were available.
 
I have the newest one from the website (0.9.4) and the file output settings are mp4 and mkv files.

Other than that, the compression seems good (full DVD down to 800MB) and the quality was good, too. Very, very easy to use.
 
Yeah, handbrake only outputs to MP4 and MKV, which is pretty limited. That's why I suggested AutoGK - it can do DivX/XViD + many other codecs out of the box.

You can try FUWizard (Fair Use Wizard) as well. It is pretty automated, though it takes a long time to rip a DVD. I think the unregistered version limits you to 700mb per file but that may not be a problem for you

You can also try Windows Media Encoder, though I think its input format support is fairly limited. The output format would be WMV or ASF, which any windows machine can play out of the box.
 
I just took the Quicktime file and dropped it back into Super Video Converter. After a couple attempts playing around with it, I was able to get a similarly sized AVI file with similar quality. Now I've dropped the file on to one of the servers and I will playing it from a couple different computers to make sure it's working OK.
 
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