Questions on ripping to AVI's for playback on a computer

[Airjrdn]

I've modded my XBox and will be replacing the stock harddrive with a 200G drive. I'd like to rip all of my home bought DVD's, and put them there, so when I go on trips, I don't have to take the DVD's with me. I'm already running EvolutionX and XBox Media Player, so a good portion of this is working already.

Can I get good quality with a DVD ripped and compressed to around 1G? If so, is there a simple way to do it?

Over the last couple days, I've been trying DVDShrink, DVD2AVI, and a couple others I don't even remember the names of. In each case, the quality was no where near acceptable.

Bear in mind, I don't want any extras, subtitles, etc., I just want the movie. I'll be ripping them from the original DVD's, and I'd like to keep this fairly simple, as I'm going to be doing it to around 100 DVD's.

Thanks for the help.

[teegee420]

Converting to DIVX or XVID wouldn't be a bad idea. Only problem is that the conversion can take up to 6 hours per DVD. The good thing is that with a 1 gig file size you should be relatively satisfied with the quality if the film is under 2 hours. There are a million different ways to do the conversion though. You might want to check out the guides section and decide which would be best for you if you decide to move ahead with DIVX/XVID.

[Airjrdn]

Thanks for the reply.

I've been testing out DVDx 2.2. It seems pretty capable. I've got Shrek (downloaded, watched it, liked it, ordered it) and it's exactly what I want. However, when I try to duplicate those same settings for Finding Nemo (my original DVD, just trying to rip it) it comes out looking terrible.

The Shrek avi I have says XVid in the name, and has these properties:
WxH - 640x352
Audio:
Duration - 1:26:22
Bit Rate 117kbs
Audio format - MPEG Layer-3
Video:
Frame rate - 25fps
Data rate - 138kbps
Video sample size 12bit
Video compression DivX codec
Filesize - 701M

So, is it DivX or XVid? Or, does XVid simply refer to the resolution?

Using DVDx 2.2, I can tweak some things to get those numbers, but the quality isn't anywhere near what Shrek looks like. My Finding Nemo DVD is 1:40:27, so duration wise, I should be able to get the same quality with a little more filesize.

Using DVDx 2.2, I can select Super Video CD, and the quality is nice, but the file is over 2G. Somewhere between 700M and 1G is my target filesize.

[Poppa_Meth]

Gordan Knot is one of the best all in one type proggies for Divx, Xvid conversion. I like Xvid quality better myself. Doom9 just did their annual codec shoot-out and Xvid came out on top. Xvid generally takes me about 4 hours to do in comparision to Divx taking about 6. keep in mind with Divx thats its best to use the 5.05 codec, not the 5.11. Doom9 found that there is virtual no improvement in 5.11, all it does is increase encoding time unnecessarily.

[Airjrdn]

Thanks for the info. I'm reading doom9's guide now.