What do you use to encode your DVDs and what settings?

Spacy9

Spacy9

Scotch is my Lord and Savior
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Oct 13, 2000
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I'm getting ready to build my first HTPC that will be hooked up to a 65" 1080P display via HDMI. I have about 700 DVDs that I am going to work at putting on the HTPC. Since I have so many DVDs, and since I have a larger TV, HD space and quality are both important. I'm not worried about the Blu-Ray yet since I don't have that many. I'm planning on boxing up all of the DVDs after I have them on the HTPC - should be much easier.

Rather than ask what I should use for a good compromise between quality and size I thought it would be better to ask what everyone else is currently using (x264, XVid, Uncompressed VOB, etc...) and what program and settings they are using to do the encoding and possibly how big each movie, on average, is.

Right now I'm leaning towards x264 but I'm not sure on the settings yet.

Thanks!
 
I'm only watching on a 32" tv to my results could be vastly different from your's since your tv is much larger. I'm using AutoGK to convert to xvid at 70%. I tried doing dvix and h/x264 and the xvid came out looking the best to my eyes. I would suggest that you get a movie or two that looks really good and try it in xvid, divx, and x264 at different settings for each one. As for VOBs you would be looking at about 7 or so TBs and with converted files it be more along the lines of 2 or 3 TBs.
 
If that 65" display is a DLP get ready for overscan city!
 
If you have the budget for storage, go for full rips of the DVDs (Video TS folder). If not, here are my compression settings for Handbrake.

H.264
2000 kbps
Single Pass Encoding
Starting to use Anamorphic format
AAC Audio (although I may move to AAC + AC3)

Movies come in at around 2 gigabytes with great quality in my opinion. The quality has been gauged on my 1280x800 Macbook screen. I am not sure how the quality will hold up on a Samsung LNT-4671, but hopefully not to bad.
 
I've been playing around with the settings in handbrake, and I haven't come up with anything specific yet.

Firefox, why do you use a single pass only, and not the 2 pass setting?
 
2 pass simply takes to long. I do encoding on my Macbook and I already feel like I am beating the shit out of it having 1 movie encode for 5+ hours at full load, let alone a nights worth of 2 movies in queue.

Does 2 pass benefit H.264. I thought it really benefitted straight mp4s. Maybe it is opposite. Correct me if I am wrong.
 
use autogk , its the simplest and you can select 700 mb for movies you dont care for too much and 1400 for movies you want higher res.
 
ghostshell98 said:
use autogk , its the simplest and you can select 700 mb for movies you dont care for too much and 1400 for movies you want higher res.
Click to expand...

How big of a TV are you watching those on? Do you see much blocking?
 
Firefox90 said:
If you have the budget for storage, go for full rips of the DVDs (Video TS folder). If not, here are my compression settings for Handbrake.

H.264
2000 kbps
Single Pass Encoding
Starting to use Anamorphic format
AAC Audio (although I may move to AAC + AC3)

Movies come in at around 2 gigabytes with great quality in my opinion. The quality has been gauged on my 1280x800 Macbook screen. I am not sure how the quality will hold up on a Samsung LNT-4671, but hopefully not to bad.
Click to expand...

I wish I had the budget for the full rips - but that isn't going to happen. :(

What does the Anamorphic setting do for you?

Do you use the deinterlacer, or the deblocker, or any of those settings on the bottom right?
 
Anamorphic is very confusing to me, but it seems to me that Handbrake basically pulls the full potential of the footage off the DVD and encodes it at its natural size without borders and stuff. I am still not sure, but the videophiles recommend it. Try reading this and see if you understand.

I don't use any of the effects on movies usually because they do not need it. I assume most movies are in the progressive scan format. It seems like many TV shows are interlaced though. In that case, I enable it and it does a great job.

Depending on how picky you are, you can easily get away with 1000 kbps to 1500 kbps. I used to run 1500 kbps for movies I didn't care a whole lot about and the quality wasn't bad at all. I now do all of them in 2000 kbps though because I got 2x500 gb HDs and the assumption I will be playing them on a 46" LCD soon.

I watched a 700 mb version of 28 Weeks Later on my friends 720p Panasonic projector and with a lot of dark scenes, the quality is pretty bad. It was bearable, but I would never encode my stuff that way.

So...grab a scene from a DVD of yours, experiment with different bit rates. I would say try 1000-2000 kbps. H.264 is a great compression codec from what I can tell. It all depends on how picky you are.

700 movies at an average 2 gigabytes would put you at about 1400 gigabytes. I assume that would be 4 500 gigabyte drives with no back up (you lose x gigabytes with each drive because of the storage measurement standards).

700 * 2 gb = 1400 gb = 4 500 gb HDs = ~$430 (WD5000AAKS $105 at Newegg)
700 * 1.5 gb = 1050 gb = 3 500 gb HDs = ~$325 (same as above)

Those calculations are assuming you have no redundancy. I am currently running a RAID 1 type of array with just the 2 drives. That would be too expensive for 3+ drives.

Correct any of my calulations if I am wrong. It is late and I probably rambled on.
 
Firefox90 said:
If you have the budget for storage, go for full rips of the DVDs (Video TS folder). If not, here are my compression settings for Handbrake.

H.264
2000 kbps
Single Pass Encoding
Starting to use Anamorphic format
AAC Audio (although I may move to AAC + AC3)
Click to expand...

In the end, do these settings make a video file that is compatible with the Xbox 360?
I rip my DVDs to an external USB 2.0 HD that I leave plugged into the 360 for my own little videos on demand.
 
With a TV that large it makes the most sense to just rip only the DVD and keep it in it's native format (run it through DVD Shrink and just remove the menus, extras and shit). Average DVD with just the movie ripped is about 2-3 gigs and it's the exact same quality as the DVD it's self (since it hasn't been transcoded into anything else).
 
Firefox90 said:
Anamorphic is very confusing to me, but it seems to me that Handbrake basically pulls the full potential of the footage off the DVD and encodes it at its natural size without borders and stuff. I am still not sure, but the videophiles recommend it. Try reading this and see if you understand.

I don't use any of the effects on movies usually because they do not need it. I assume most movies are in the progressive scan format. It seems like many TV shows are interlaced though. In that case, I enable it and it does a great job.

Depending on how picky you are, you can easily get away with 1000 kbps to 1500 kbps. I used to run 1500 kbps for movies I didn't care a whole lot about and the quality wasn't bad at all. I now do all of them in 2000 kbps though because I got 2x500 gb HDs and the assumption I will be playing them on a 46" LCD soon.

I watched a 700 mb version of 28 Weeks Later on my friends 720p Panasonic projector and with a lot of dark scenes, the quality is pretty bad. It was bearable, but I would never encode my stuff that way.

So...grab a scene from a DVD of yours, experiment with different bit rates. I would say try 1000-2000 kbps. H.264 is a great compression codec from what I can tell. It all depends on how picky you are.

700 movies at an average 2 gigabytes would put you at about 1400 gigabytes. I assume that would be 4 500 gigabyte drives with no back up (you lose x gigabytes with each drive because of the storage measurement standards).

700 * 2 gb = 1400 gb = 4 500 gb HDs = ~$430 (WD5000AAKS $105 at Newegg)
700 * 1.5 gb = 1050 gb = 3 500 gb HDs = ~$325 (same as above)

Those calculations are assuming you have no redundancy. I am currently running a RAID 1 type of array with just the 2 drives. That would be too expensive for 3+ drives.

Correct any of my calulations if I am wrong. It is late and I probably rambled on.
Click to expand...

Good article, thanks.

Your calculations sound right. I've got 2 TB right now with no redundancy. Going to get more drives as I can for the redundancy.

What do you save your h264 encodings as? mp4?

Can you rewind / fast forward?
 
CrimandEvil said:
With a TV that large it makes the most sense to just rip only the DVD and keep it in it's native format (run it through DVD Shrink and just remove the menus, extras and shit). Average DVD with just the movie ripped is about 2-3 gigs and it's the exact same quality as the DVD it's self (since it hasn't been transcoded into anything else).
Click to expand...


Definitely going to remove all of the extras, I'm not sure I've ever watched a single one of those 'bonuses'

I didn't realize that the movie was only 2 to 3 GB with no compression...that's not to bad at all size wise.
 
I personally backup all of my DVDs using a mostly hands on method of ripping the vobs, processing through DGIndex, setting up an AVISynth Script, and using MeGUI to encode to an x264/AC3 .mkv with subtitles, chapters, and director's commentaries, but that's the more dedicated hands on approach. I know there are plenty of guides on Doom9 about it and all in one programs that will do roughly the same thing, I just like being hands on.

I normally aim for sizes that are divisible from DVDs, such as 1/3rd DVD or 1/4 DVD, and I always aim to keep the video bitrate at 1500kbit or higher.
 
I like the sound of you idea mpeg4v3, a nicely packaged, fully featured, DVD Rip sounds like my sort of thing.. might have to give that a go!
 
I use handbrake and watch on my 360.

xvid
640x272
1400 file size
2 pass
ac3 dolby 2

I have started to use autogk doing
1400meg filesize
xvid
ac3
640x272 or auto i dont have it open in front of me.
 
So if I go with x264 format and Handbrake, which container should I use - .mp4, mkv, avi, etc...? Can any of them fast forward / rewind in media center?
 
I hate to say it again, but I would really consider doing full rips.... You are going to go through all this work (backing up, reencoding, cataloguing) for less than full quality. Do it once and do it right. Ripping takes 10 minutes and your done, no 5 hours+ waiting on encoding etc.

You already have 2TB of storage, you're half way there. I have 340DVD's on 2TB of storage. If you cut menus, subtitles, and special features, I think you could get 400+DVD's on your 2TB setup now and by the time you get around to ripping the last half of your collection you could grab another 2TB (probably in the form of (2) 1TB drives for, lets hope, ~$300). Think about it.

EDIT: My full rips average 5.9GB, if the 3GB number from above held up you'd be able to do your whole collection on your 2TB setup.

But, if you still don't think thats possible. Handbrake and regarding the container question, make sure you go with something Media Center / XBOX360 compatible. http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-video-playback-faq.aspx
 
I'm with CrimandEvil...rip the DVD in native format and remove all the french/spanish/director's comentary/extras. Espically on a display of that size...you won't be sorry.
To acomplish thish, you could use DVDshrink. works very well to remove extras.

Seriously...when are you ever going to need to access the French audio track that is taking up 200MB on your hard drive? Unless you're dating a french chick...probably never ;)
 
I have just upgraded my storage capabilities recently, and I have changed from rip + encode to just Ripping the DVD. I also suggest FULL DVD backups. No quality lost!
 
Aside from the time it takes to encode your DVD's, the advantages of ~1.5-2gb per movie far outweigh the drawbacks to me. First, full rips without the extras average 4-7gb each as mentioned above, not 2-3gb or everyone would just do this. Second, a quality encode to 1.5-2gb depending on length of the movie results in excellent image and sound quality movies if done right. And last, shrinking movies to about 1/3 of the original while maintaining excellent quality (relative to full SD DVD quality) is worth it for many people, and if you don't mind leaving your computer on overnight you can queue a dozen movies at a time.

The movies I REALLY like I have the HD versions of; the rest, I'm content with 2gb files encoded with both divx and h.264. The idea of maintaining "lossless" quality by ripping normal DVD's to me is almost a paradox, but that's just my opinion. The second you pop in your DVD you already lost over half of your pixels :)

To further complicate things, if you compare a re-encoded 1080p movie that ends up about 6-8gb, it is vastly superior to a normal DVD full rip that may be close to 6-8gb, so this will likely be the future of HTPC's.

Most of my old movie collection I re-encoded to Xvid at 70% quality, mp3 audio at about 128kbps, using AutoGK a couple years ago and ended up with mostly 1-1.5gb files. The quality was decent enough that I didn't go back to re-encode them. More recently, I use AutoMKV, h.264 codec, Nero AAC audio codec at 160kbps and get files closer to 1.5-2gb. I choose "file size does not matter" and pick the quality settings and allow the software to do the work and the final file sizes are usually fine for me (this also makes the encode faster). The newer files to me are marginally better quality than my Xvid collection from 2 years ago but take a LOT more CPU work/time, but processor power now compared to 2 years ago is also much better so it scales pretty evenly. If I want to watch 300, Transformers, LOTR, or Gladiator, I would not want to watch my SD AVI or MKV or regular DVD; for the few hundred other movies, I can barely tell the difference between the original DVD versus a 2gb MKV.
 
Just for reference, I just finished my latest encode 5 minutes ago for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Here are some specs:

Movie length: 1h 55min
Main title rip with only english audio track and no extras: 5.9GB

Encoded file size: 1.8GB
-full resolution (no resize): 720x480
-2300 kpbs video bitrate, h.264 codec, constant quality encode
-Nero AAC 160kbps audio

It took a full 6 hours on a low end C2D laptop, but it looks and sounds great at less than 1/3rd the original size. A lot of the quality criticisms of compressed video files I think stemmed from comparisons of the 700MB Divx collections which were very popular not long ago since they fit on standard blank CD's, but the quality difference between a 2gb h.264 encoded movie and a 700mb Divx is pretty substantial.
 
lawrence131 said:
A lot of the quality criticisms of compressed video files I think stemmed from comparisons of the 700MB Divx collections which were very popular not long ago since they fit on standard blank CD's, but the quality difference between a 2gb h.264 encoded movie and a 700mb Divx is pretty substantial.
Click to expand...


Screenshots would help alleviate any doubters (myself included). :)
 
I use DVD::Rip and AcidRip in linux. They are incredibly streamlined, self-contained, and require almost no fussing around with.
 
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