DVD main title to single file, with AC3/DTS

[knight76]

So being a newb at converting video to another format I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction so I can then head off and learn how to do it.

What I want to do: I have about 250 DVD's of movies, docos, TV series etc and want to convert these to a single file format to play on the WD TV player. I am not interested in menu's or extra content from the disc such as making of docos etc. I just want the main movie and the ac3, DTS soundtrack.

So my priority is to keep the main movie, keep the ac3 or DTS 5.1 sound, and ditch the rest. Subtitles not necessary really unless they are forced subtitles, like when watching english language movie, but foreign language is spoken and subtitle comes up.

I generally use DVD shrink to rip the movie and audio track only with compression to the hard drive, then burn to a DVD when doing a physical copy. But not sure on digital.

Preferably I would be looking at keeping the video quality and am thinking of a file size around 2gb or lower for the movie.

Can anyone point me in the right direction with some suggestions on what can do this?

I have done a fair amount of searching here, and found this guide https://forum.videohelp.com/images/guides/p1829628/fairuse%20wizard%20&%20mkv%20encodin...%20&%20ac3.pdf which seems to do the trick. But to be honest after reading here for a few hours it all gels into mush.

Thanks for any assistance.

[txporter]

The easiest thing will probably be to install Handbrake and convert your videos to mkv using the Constant Quality Rate profile. For conversion quality, I would probably start between 60-65% (equivalent to 18-21 CRF, many people consider a CRF of 18 to be nearly lossless). You can select what you want to do with subtitles (they will be burned into the image if you select them, I believe).

There are a ton of options for x264 encoding, but the defaults in the Constant Quality Rate profile are probably ok unless you are very demanding with video quality.

Jason

[knight76]

Thanks for the info. I used the tutorial I posted above to encode a movie using the VC1 codec and put that in a mkv container with AC3 audio and my WD TV player could not play it.

Does handbrake use H or X.264 with ac3?

[txporter]

Handbrake uses x264.

Jason

[knight76]

Thanks mate.

Doing some further reading I read that FairUse Wizrd also does x.264 with ac3 audio so this should work.

Q. If a player lists h.264 and mkv in its specs, can it play x.264 encoded stuff?

[txporter]

Q. If a player lists h.264 and mkv in its specs, can it play x.264 encoded stuff?

Yes. H.264 is the standard. X.264 is being used to encode to those standards.

Jason