The Quality Problem

[alimustafakhan]

Hi,

Because general public catches with the Tech guys a little later. I am a late bloomer. What happened was that I bought a £700 laptop which had its motherboard dead two times in 1.5 years and HP refused to repair it. So I decided to move from laptops to desktop, and make the desktop myself. Then I thought of buying a HDTV and connecting to my computer, then came music system's integration. Now, my computer is a huge media system, so much so that I have got rid of my DVD player as picutre and sound from my PC is better than the best DVD systems in market. Ofcourse I was able to do this much because of the help from net and guys likeyou.

With my Media System ready it was time to convert my entire DVD library and store it in hard drive for ease of playing one thing after another and getting rid of getting up to change DVDs. I had some downloaded movies from the net. These downloaded films were AVI or DivX files and their quality felt far superior to anything that came out using Xillisoft DVD ripper. Infact I got a DVD specifically to see if my eyes were playing a trick or is that really what is happening. I specifically chsoe a film for which the HD and Blu ray versions were not out in the market. Hence the best quality you could get was from a DVD. When I ripped the DVD I got using Xillisoft. I tried various things but nothing came out to be as high quality as to the film I had downloaded. the downloaded film was smaller file size and clearer, while Xillisoft's files were larger and poorer quality, and I tried various formats, but without any gain.

Please help in getting this sorted as the current quality is not acceptable because the TV and computer give very fine picture and flaws in qulaity in these films come out pretty domiant on screen.

Thanks and Best Regards,

A

[guns1inger]

You are right that Xillisoft and it's ilk are cheap and of average quality. They are designed for people who know very little, and don't wish to learn any extra. These people are either happy with crap, or simply believe that that is how it must be.

That said, if you are concerned about quality, think carefully about actually re-encoding at all. When you encode from a lossy format (mpeg-2) to a lossy format (Xvid/Divx/H264) there will be a quality drop. The lower the quality drop, the lower the saving in space because a larger bitrate is required.

I find that both Divx/Xvid have inherent issues that are not so apparent on a PC monitor, but are more visible on a television. For that reason I stopped encoding with Divx/Xvid some time ago in favour of H.264. While it is not immune from all ills, it does avoid the major issues of Xvid/Divx while providinf superior image quality at the same bitrates, or similar quality at lower bitrates.

There are plenty of tools to do this, and plenty of guides. To get you started, have a look at things like MeGUI, Handbrake, FairUseWizard and Xvid4PSP.

[lordsmurf]

Rip the DVDs as ISO files and just store and play those. Forget about wasting time converting.

[alimustafakhan]

Thanks a lot for your help, I think I will rip them in ISO and play as I do not have a problem with memory (got 2.5 TB) of it and can add much more if required. Coming to another problem, in future DVDs will become obscure, I would like to rip Blu Ray movies, I have access to Blu Ray films.

The problem I faced when ripping Blu Ray was that it takes a lot of space and time. For example using AnyHDDVD I ripped the Blu Ray and then tried to get it done through Ripbot (I did download all the required tools). But even after letting the computer on for a whole day as it kept gathering information and nothing came out, after 24 hours my computer had consumed much more electricity than the cost of a new blu ray disc. Hence I am not going that route. Can I also convert something like Blu Ray easily and play it easily????

Has there been a discussion on this topic.

Best Regards,

Ali

[ronnylov]

I guess you pay much for electricity in UK, or you have very cheap Blu-ray discs, or maybe your computer needs too much power...

Anyway, you can use faster ecoding settings in your x264 command line. --preset fast compared to --preset very slow makes a huge difference in encoding speed but not much quality difference. I have never used ripbot so I do not know where to change the speed preset.

You may also just rip your blurays to iso files too (or mkv files using original video and audio streams) but then a bluray can be up to 50 GB of data...

[alimustafakhan]

Hi

I ripped the DVDs as ISO with DVD Shrink however I believe the quality problem still stands. The ISO files ripped by DVD Shrink are not as high quality as the DVD itself, even with Deep Analysis.

Another problem is that it gets confused and if the film is broken in three files it starts any one of them.

Is there a way out??????

[Nelson37]

If you ripped as an ISO and see a difference, there is a problem with your procedure as the ISO is EXACTLY the same files as a DVD original disk.

BUT, Deep Analysis is not used when ripping as an ISO, and right off the top of my head I don't think DVDSHrink has such a function.

Try DVDDecrypter, or the FAB or HD versions, to just rip to ISO. Shrink is for, well, shrinking, and this is where quality can be lost. Simple ripping is an exact digital copy, no loss in this procedure.

Hard drive space is like closet space, you will eventually fill it. H264 is a good compromise of lower size and high quality.

[alimustafakhan]

Hi,

After much trial and error I believe DVD Decrypter and Auto GK best video quality with comparatively small file size, however the audio is a problem.

After filling our all option in AutoGK, I ran a preview and everything looked great picture was top quality almost 1:1 with good sound, then I hit the start button and it automatically started Virtual Dub and started working with it. However when the final file came out the sound was missing.

Any ideas?????

Please help.... Ali