Anyone know best format for playing DVD's from HD?

[Foochey]

I would like to rip my DVD's to a hard drive and play them from there and was wondering if it would be better to try and use an AVI, Mpeg2, Mpeg4, or some other format to play them.

I have encoded a couple of movies in AVI, but I'm unable to play the file if it gets larger than 2GB. Below that and I lose too much quality on a big screen. I thought that perhaps MP2 or MP4 may be a little easier on the cpu/graphics card, but I tried encoding the VOB's to MP2 using Flask and after about 10 hours I said forget it.

Anyone have any thoughts as to what format would be best for HD playback? I don't want to reburn them to VCD or SVCD, just play from the HD.

Thanks in advance!
Foochey

[BJ_M]

leave them at mpeg2 (the dvd VOBS are mpeg2 already) would be the Best format ... unless you are trying to save space - then it sounds as if you need to install win2k/XP and format your drive to NTFS ..

there are many types of AVI -- i assume you mean divx ?

xvid would be a good quality in a small space ... or divx .

or better yet - just play the dvd in your dvd player on your pc .. the best way .. takes even less room ..

[Foochey]

Thanks BJ, I did use Divx 5.05 and 5.03 to encode to AVI, but even though I'm using XP Pro and NTFS partitions, any file over 2GB still would not play using the DIVX player, WMP, QT, nor ATI's File Player. If I lowered the bitrate and kept the file below 2GB, then it plays in all of them. Motion is just not quite smooth enough though.

You are right about just using my DVD's to play the movies, except they tend to "walk away", get scratched, or not get put back into their cases. So, I figured I'd take a big HD and just rip them all down to the HD. If I left the MP2's on the HD, how do you play the entire movie without having to play each VOB separately? Does that make sense?

Didn't know if anyone else out there is doing this, just want to know the best way to play my DVDs from my HD.

Thanks again,
F

[BJ_M]

windvd will play a vob folder

[Baldrick]

Or powerdvd, just rip the entire dvd and then open the video_ts.ifo file with powerdvd and you can play the dvd as a standard dvd.
www.dvdrhelp.com/play#dvd