Better Compression Method?

[jrw1]

I'm looking to copy some of my DVD's to my computer. These are primarily TV series. I need to reduce them in size by about 1/3 to 1/2 (ie., compress a 1.5GB file to 700MB to 1GB) in order to save space on my hard drive. If I need to burn them so as to play them back on my TV via my DVD player, which of the following two compression methods will result in the best viewing quality (or are these two about the same):
a) use a program like DVD Shrink to reduce their size - which leaves them as a .vob file (correct?); or
b) use a program like avi.NET to convert them to an avi-xvid file?
---thanks---

[redwudz]

c) Convert them to a MKV file with a program like Handbrake or similar. I compress DVDs to about 1.5GB with good quality. At around 700MB you may see some macroblocking in the dark areas. But try both and see. With my PC it takes about 20 minutes to convert a DVD on one of my optical drives to a MKV. But they won't usualy work on a DVD type set top player. PC or something like a WD Live will work, though.

Shrink won't perform well and MPEG-2 won't either at the low bitrates it will take to get to 700MB or even 1.5GB. Shrink will leave them as a DVD compliant file.

Xvid or Divx may work, but with a fair amount of quality loss. If you need to play them back on a Divx set top player, maybe one way to go.

Episodic DVDs with a lot of separate videos can be a problem. Most AVI type video files don't have menus, but some players will list all the files during playback.

But others here may have different opinions.

And welcome to our forums.

[jagabo]

I'm looking to copy some of my DVD's to my computer. These are primarily TV series. I need to reduce them in size by about 1/3 to 1/2 (ie., compress a 1.5GB file to 700MB to 1GB) in order to save space on my hard drive.

If that's all the compression you're looking for you can get very good quality and almost anything will do better than DVD Shrink.

Check to see if your DVD players supports aspect ratio flags for Divx/Xvid AVI. If it does, then use any of the Xvid front ends that supports Target Quantizer (constant quality) mode, keep the original frame size, and set the quantizer to 2 (the lower the quantizer the higher the quality). That will give you a file roughly half the size of the MPEG 2 source with very good quality (you'd be hard pressed to see a difference with most material).

x264 will do even better but your DVD player is unlikely to support h.264 video. You'll need a blu-ray player or a standalone media player.

[jrw1]

Thanks for your reply. I cannot use MKV as it is not a file type recognized by my DVD player. For the TV series DVDs I was planning on seperating each episode into its own individual file. I have downloaded & watched a few avi-xvid files of TV shows (350MB for 42min. episode - probably compressed from an HD broadcast). The quality was good. What I am uncertain about is DVD Shrink and the quality of its compressed files. It seems to be an easier process to use (ie., just designate file size or % compression) than the avi-xvid procedure.

[johns0]

Don't use dvd shrink if you want good quality compression,at 60% you will get lots of artifacts such as dark screen moire and mosquito effect around objects and fast moving scenes.Xvid gives much better results at that ratio.