DVD->MPEG2: please help to improve my procedure...

[s2001]

Dear All,

It seems I found simple way to convert DVD->MPEG2...Could you review this procedure please? Probably I do something wrong...

1) Copy (decode) all VOBs to HDD by DVDDecrypter
2) Open VOBs by VirtualDubMod and create uncompressed AVI with video +WAV with audio
3) Encode AVI+WAV to MPEG2 by MainConcept Encoder

Probably I can create in VirtualDubMod AVI with video+sound together? I can't setup it...
And can I avoid uncompressed AVI createtion? It seems MainConcept Encoder do not support some "frameservers"...

Thank you!
Best wishes,
Sergey

[FulciLives]

Dear All,

It seems I found simple way to convert DVD->MPEG2...Could you review this procedure please? Probably I do something wrong...

1) Copy (decode) all VOBs to HDD by DVDDecrypter
2) Open VOBs by VirtualDubMod and create uncompressed AVI with video +WAV with audio
3) Encode AVI+WAV to MPEG2 by MainConcept Encoder

Probably I can create in VirtualDubMod AVI with video+sound together? I can't setup it...
And can I avoid uncompressed AVI createtion? It seems MainConcept Encoder do not support some "frameservers"...

Thank you!
Best wishes,
Sergey

Well I don't use the MainConcept Encoder so I don't know much about it BUT I do know TMPGEnc and to a lesser extent CCE and both of those do not require you to convert the VOB files to AVI first.

You simply run the VOB files through DVD2AVI which gives you a D2V project file along with a sound file (usually AC-3). TMPGEnc can read the D2V directly and then encode. With CCE I think you have to create an AVISynth AVS script to read the D2V project file but the script doesn't have to be fancy. This way you are converting from the VOB files without that AVI step.

If anything I said sounds alien to you perhaps I can help with more detail but if you only want to use MainConcept then I'm afraid I can offer no more help as I've never used it nor know much about it.

IF on the other hand you can use either TMPGEnc or CCE then perhaps I can help.

Maybe a MainConcept encoder person will read this and offer some advise though ...

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ZippyP.]

I use Smartripper>DVD2AVI>TMPGEnc. No intermediate Avi, like Fulcilives said. Here's the guide that I used: https://www.videohelp.com/sefy/

Not sure if my method supports Mainconcept or not, but MC is in the guide. Maybe Frameserve from Vdub to MC instead? Sefy has all kinds of methods in the guide, I'm sure you'll find something. Obviously, for time and quality it's best to avoid encoding twice.

Good luck!

[poopyhead]

I use Smartripper>DVD2AVI>TMPGEnc. No intermediate Avi, like Fulcilives said. Here's the guide that I used: https://www.videohelp.com/sefy/

not necessarily.... if you wanna add subs (hardcoded, meaning the subs are part of the video), then you will need to generate a psuedo .avi file, so you can load vdub, run vobsub, and frameserve into tmpgenc through vdub.

---------

another method would be to rip the vob files as is, meaning no multi-angles removed or anything (i.e. smartripper's file mode or dvddecryptor with multi-angle processing UNCHECKED). be sure to also rip the .ifo file. you can load the .ifo file, along with the vobs, into FLASKMPEG and use that to frameserve into tmpgenc.

i find FLASKMPEG works pretty when there is seamless branching DVDs (i.e. both the theatrical and director's cut version in the same set of vobs). FLASKMPEG has its own ifo parser, so you can select which version you want to encode with tmpgenc

[Ejoc]

not necessarily.... if you wanna add subs (hardcoded, meaning the subs are part of the video), then you will need to generate a psuedo .avi file, so you can load vdub, run vobsub, and frameserve into tmpgenc through vdub.

(I use to do it that way)

No you dont actually, its somewhat complicated if you've never done it before, but you can use AVISynth and bypass the psuedo .avi and having to using vdub.

DVDDecrypter -> DVD2AVI -> AVISynth Script -> TMPGEnc

You still do the VobSub Configure, but you dont need to use Vdub to frameserver. Sure you might not care, but using AVISynth cut my encoding by atleast 1/2 for movies w/ subtitles

[matneaves]

i use

1 dvddecrypter, did use smartripper but couldnt get key on some dvd's
2 dvd to avi (not creating avi just saving project that tmpgenc knows)
3 tmpgenc >mpeg1/2

[SaSi]

Converting DVD VOB files into MPEG2 ?
Or re-encode the DVD VOB files into a lower bitrate MPEG2?

Your process needs a single piece of improvement. You don't need to go to the AVI step before you encode back in MPEG-2. If you don't need to reduce the bitrate, simple demuxing is enough. If you do need to reduce the bitrate, Mainconcept will happily accept mpeg-2 streams for input directly.

Here is what I do (in general).

1 Rip the DVD onto the HD with DVDDecrypter. (I was using SmartRipper in the past but it once failed me badly and don't use it for actual DVD ripping any more).

2. To extract the individual streams off the VOB files, I use SmartRipper. I demux the VOB files into separate files setting a file size of 9000kb to ensure that the whole video will be saved into a single file.
This step results into separate MPEG-2 video files and separate audio files that are usually AC3 (and seldom LPCM). Never seen a commercial DVD with an MPEG-2 audio track.

3. If I want to re-encode the video into a lower bitrate, I use Mainconcept feeding it the actual .m2v file. (I have tried to frameserve in the past, like FulciLives suggests with DVD2AVI, but I found it to be too much of a hassle. It is a useful technique if you are short in disk space, but I rather have some more Gbs than complexity).

So, the above steps (RIP, Demux and - optionally re-encode) are the basic steps that are suitable most of the time.

There have been some cases where the above failed badly.

1. Some episode disks (Stargate season 3 & 4 - PAL version) seem to be badly authored. Time stamps and audio sync go to hell if you try to demux and work with the streams.
The solution I've found is to use DVD2One, not to re-encode the whole disk but to "trick" DVD2One in that I want it to make me a single episode disk. Since the episode is almost 1.8Gb, DVD2One just selects and extracts the selected episode into a VIDEO_TS directory that contains a single episode. Ripping this with the basic process is ok.

2. Some disks seem to have another problem with timestamps. (Stargate had that as well). The video and audio time stamps are inconcistent. For example, video start code is anything like 3:59:22.12 and audio start code anything similar - but not equal.
Try to use the above - along with subpictures into Scenarist and it won't work.
If you feed a video stream like the above to Mainconcept, it will appear to lock-up for quite a few minutes while it is scanning the whole video stream. Eventually - if you are patient and have a fast system - it will recover and start encoding. However it will usually crash in the middle of encoding.

The solution to the above problem is to use Restream. Version 0.8.7 allows you to Reset time stamps to any value you want - you should want 0:00:00.00 though - and produces a corrected .m2v you can either author or re-encode with MainConcept.

Finally, there has been a single movie (City by the beach) that failed all the above - still don't know why). For that, I used SmartRipper to create a single VOB for the whole movie, used VirtualDUB mod to open the VOB and created a nice AVI file with Hufyuv codec. I encoded that file with Mainconcept. But this case is rather rare.

I hope my lengthy comments have been of help to some...[/i]

[AdamBrunt]

You simply run the VOB files through DVD2AVI which gives you a D2V project file along with a sound file (usually AC-3). TMPGEnc can read the D2V directly and then encode. With CCE I think you have to create an AVISynth AVS script to read the D2V project file but the script doesn't have to be fancy. This way you are converting from the VOB files without that AVI step.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, then, cos when I try to specify the D2V file as the video source ... TMPGEnc claims it doesn't recognise the file format ? Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong ??

UPDATE .... Ok I am now dragging the dv2 file onto the TMPGENC icon and it now knows where the video and audio files are. BUT when it has finished the encoding the video is playing twice as fast as the sound ?? Is there something obvious I am missing here ??

Regards,

Adam Brunt