h.264 or no?

[triggerstep]

I was wondering since i am building a media server(thanks for the info and help from the users and such in here) would it be worth it for me to do a straight iso rip or do a h.264 convereion to save alittle space.All my media will be and are currently veiwed on a 50"1080p dlp tv(my computer moniter).Will the h.264 encoders display a good picture on my set.I do not know enough about video frame sizes to know.From the few iso's i have experimented with(this could just be me being to picky)it still seems I am losing alittle picture quality.Does this happen?What would the h. look like.How would MeGUI fair in this area.Any pointers would be great.Thanks for the help

[disturbed1]

If you have the space, a direct rip would be the best. 750gb drives are ~$140 or 2 500gb drives for ~$200 should give you more than enough room. If you need more than 100 full movie backups at one time, rip the main movie only, add another drive, external drive, NAS........

No matter if it's x264 or xvid, you will lose quality once you convert the DVD to another source. With high enough bitrate, this can be brought down to almost nothing. But then you have to weigh in the time factor. Is it really worth it? I use to rip all my DVDs to ~2gig full size xvids, then 1.5gig x264. It turned out to be just so much easier to do the full backup instead.

If you were ripping 1080P down to 720P x264, that might be worth the space savings. ~15-20gig vs. ~4gig while still having a high picture quality is great. But going from 480p to x264/xvid may not be worth the time involved.

[GMaq]

Hello,
Well there is no argument that a direct rip is the ONLY way to not lose quality. However with my own HTPC and 42" Plasma I rip my DVD's to H.264 using DVD Decrypter AnyDVD and WinFF. Using 640x480 for Fullscreen 624x352 for Widescreen and 640x272 for Anamorphic Widescreen. Using a bitrate of about 1000kbps the movies look close enough to the original quality as not to detract from enjoying them (this of course is a matter of personal preference). I have about 120 movies on a 160gb drive and there is still about 40 gigs to spare. There is no question that storage space is cheaper than ever, If you do decide to rip to another format, forget about XviD,DivX etc. IMHO their heyday is over and none of them are even in the same ballpark as H.264. Since you are using a computer and standalone compliance or filesize is not an issue H.264 is truly your best option.