Complete newbie help in converting DVDs to avi/mpeg/mkv

[damianjmcgrath]

Hi,

I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to this, so bear with me.

I have a lot of DVDs (around 300) that I want to put onto a hard drive for backup purposes and also to watch them on my laptop or TV without having to find the disks! I haven't ever downloaded any torrents but from research, it appears that film torrents are around 700Mb and are AVI files so this seems to be the accepted standard.

I've downloaded many tools over the last month, including DVD Decryptor and AutoGK 2.55. These two seem to be working reasonably well for me so far - I put the DVD in, convert it using DVD Decryptor to 2 files (a IFO and a VOB file). The IFO file is less than 100Kb and the VOB file varies wildly between 3 and 8Gbs. I then use AutoGK, load up the IFO file, set a Custom Size of 700Mb, and it converts it to one AVI file of roughly 700Mb. It takes around 3 hours to do a film, which is ages, but all seems reasonably good.

However, I've noticed that some films look terrible, really patchy and pixelated. For these films, I've tried increasing the Custom Size to 1400Mb, but then it takes around 7-8 hours per film, which is just too long.

Since coming onto these forums, I've noticed people mentioning mkv a lot, but AutoGK seems to just convert to avi. I've also seen programs like Handbrake and VidCoder mentioned.

I have some questions:

1. Is what I'm currently using good for my task, or does anyone recommend anything better/faster/easier?
2. Is AVI the best format, or will I see better quality from mkv?
3. I leave all the AutoGK settings as default except the Custom Size. Are there any settings I should be tweaking to get better/faster results?

Thanks in advance.

[damianjmcgrath]

Also, one further question, I've seen some people recommend using DVD Shrink before using AutoGK as this will speed up AutoGK. Is this true? I've never used DVD Shrink.

I guess I want to convert my DVDs using a method that's good quality but without having to wait AGES for AutoGK to do whatever it's doing.

[Baldrick]

DVDDecrypter doesn't support all dvds so I would use free DVDFab decrypter. And I like batch convert to mkv h264 video using VidCoder. You should be able to get better quality using mkv h264 than avi divx/xvid for similar size.

[damianjmcgrath]

Can you give me a hand with the settings in VidCoder?

1. Container - MP4 or MKV?
2. Video Filters (deinterlace, decomb, detelecine, denoise, deblock) all set to Off?
3. Video Quality - set to Constant Quality 20? Is this fine, or should I go with the Target Size of 700Mb?
4. Video Codec - H264 or MPEG2 (ffmpeg) or MPEG4 (ffmpeg)?

[damianjmcgrath]

The Constant Quality of 20 gave me a 1.4Gb file when I converted a DVD. The quality is actually fantastic. I used a container of MKV, kept all the filters to off and chose the H264 codec.

If I want to reduce the file size down to around 700Mb to 1Gb, I assume I reduce the Constant Quality down to 10/11/12 ish?

[dragonkeeper]

The Constant Quality of 20 gave me a 1.4Gb file when I converted a DVD. The quality is actually fantastic. I used a container of MKV, kept all the filters to off and chose the H264 codec.

If I want to reduce the file size down to around 700Mb to 1Gb, I assume I reduce the Constant Quality down to 10/11/12 ish?

If you want certain file size you need to select 2-pass instead of Constant Quality, the app will then give you the option to set the file size. On a side not when using CQ, the lower the setting the larger the file size i.e. a setting of 24 will produce a smaller file than a setting of 18. Also when using CQ on DVD material the lowest setting i would actually use is about 24 or 23, any lower than that and you will just be wasting bits the diff between a DVD encoded at 15 and one encoded at 24 is negligible. But their is a drastic diff in file sizes.

[damianjmcgrath]

Thanks. I dropped the CQ down from 20 to 23, and the filesize dropped from 1.4Gb to 650Mb and the quality is still really good. I'm going to use 22 for all my films now - because 650Mb is a little too small for me to be confident that the quality will be great on every film, some films are more detailed than others, so 22 seems like a good compromise.

VidCoder seems a lot faster than AutoGK at the moment - taking around 1 hr per film instead of 2-3 hours.

[Gavino]

I dropped the CQ down from 20 to 23, and the filesize dropped from 1.4Gb to 650Mb and the quality is still really good. I'm going to use 22 for all my films now - because 650Mb is a little too small for me to be confident that the quality will be great on every film, some films are more detailed than others, so 22 seems like a good compromise.

You're missing the point here.
A given CQ gives you a constant quality - its the file size that varies, so if a film needs more than 650MB to achieve that level of quality, it will get a larger size.

[Hoser Rob]

Haven't used Vidcoder myself but I do use DVDFab HD Decrypter and Handbrake, the latter of which Vidcoder is based on (I ain't going to argue with Baldrick - if there's anyone here who knows wat he's talking about it's him). If I needed batch processing I'd install it quickly.

Since it's based on Handbrake, I'd suggest going to their site and looking at the docs. They're excellent ... better than a lot of software you'd pay for, let alone freeware ... and they actually give you a pretty good explanation of how and why you use different encoding options.

You'll often find that reading the documentation (assuming it exits and wasn't written by and for Linux geeks) is actually faster than asking stuff on forums like this and waiting for a response. As useful as I find user forums, that's the truth.

BTW I prefer MKV to MP4 output. MKV gives the best quality video, relative to size, of any format I've used.