ripping to vob vs Xvid/mp4

[simoupnorth]

I am in the process of backing up my dvd's to a hard drive for my ps3 and want to know this:

If I back up to VOB this will give me the best quality and 5.1 audio if I backup to anything else it will be encoded and may not have 5.1 depending on codec.

Right I ma backing up saving private ryan but when i extract the movie VOB it ends up at 6.23 GB which needs to be less than 4gb for ps3 hard drive. My question really is what will the quality be like if I shrink using dvdclone or dvd shrink as opposed to encoding into xvid/mp4?

Also what are the pros and cons, I need 5.1 audio and good video quality

[redwudz]

If you just make an exact copy of the DVD, it will, of course, be the same quality. If you re-encode it to any format, you will lose some quality. You apparently don't need the DVD format, so there are lots of options. But if you want the DVD format, DVDShrink would be the fastest and easiest. Just set the filesize to 4GB. Or you could use DVD Rebuilder which would give you better quality, but take a lot more time.

OR

Divx or Xvid can use 5.1 audio. If you re-encoded to Divx and used a fairly high bitrate, it should look pretty good. You could try a representative clip to see what it would look like. A bitrate calculator would tell you the bitrate needed for a desired filesize. All you need is to tell it the running time of the video. A 2GB file should be more than enough. AutoGK can probably do all that easier.

[simoupnorth]

If I shrink the dvd from 6.23GB down to 4GB it must lose some quality and it is the quality of this resulting file I am intersted in. How would this compare to say a file encoded in Xvid at as mentioned 2GB

[Soopafresh]

Let your eyes be the judge. An Xvid/DivX file at half the size of the VOB is going to look quite good. Try a program like AutoGK to do the conversion, it should work quite nicely.

[alwayssummer]

If I shrink the dvd from 6.23GB down to 4GB it must lose some quality

You are right, if you want a smaller file size you will lose quality. A DVD uses MPEG2 encoding for the video and AC3 for the audio. Both these technologies are now fairly old. If you shrink the file size using the same formats it stands to reason that quality loss will be relative to the amount that you reduce the file size. Both Shrink and DVDRebuilder will retain your original format. Note that Shrink throws information out in order to meet your desired file size, while Rebuilder re-codes your file. This means that the smaller you make the file, the more likely you are to see better results with Rebuilder.

I use MP4 with AAC audio, which is are both newer and better codecs. Using better technology you should be able to dramatically reduce the file size without any really noticeable loss in quality.

I used to Shrink all of my DVD backups and was frequently disappointed by visible blockiness when the compression level was high (Shrinking a DVD9 down to DVD4 size). With x264 I am very happy with the results I get at 1.2G file size movies. This is much better quality in a fourth of the space. The disadvantage is that it's a lot more complicated. Hope this helps.