Which file format does everyone prefer?

[kamelman]

Newbie here!

I have about 1200 dvd's that I want to backup onto some external hdd's. I have 2 2TB Western Digital MyBook hard drives and also picked up the WD TV Live+ Network Media player to watch them on.

I was wondering on which file format most people prefer (mkv, divx, mp4, etc) and which programs they use to covert the movies.

Any other tips would be much appreciated too.

Thanks

[aedipuss]

try videcoder to convert to mkv.

[edDV]

Many reasons for each format.

1200 DVD's ?

Why would anyone spend that much time doing that ?

Have you done one yet?

[kamelman]

Thanks. I'll definitely try it.

I know realize that my post doesn't really make too much sense. Just learned that .mkv is a container and not a format.

[kamelman]

I want to back them up to make room also too many shelves full of movies, takes forever to find a specific movie when you want one. Kids keep scratching them etc....

[jagabo]

x264 + original AC3 audio in an MKV container.

1) Rip with DVD Fab
2) Index and demux Ac3 audio with DgIndex
3) AviSynth script as necessary
4) x264 CLI, original frame size, CRF 18, veryfast preset, a few other mods
5) mmg to mux Ac3 audio

[darkknight145]

You don't say if you want to back up the whole DVD (menus etc.) or just the actual movie.
Assuming just the movie and assuming 1 hour for each one, this will take at least 50 days continuous without any downtime.
Maybe narrow down which ones you want to backup

[kamelman]

Jagabo: i'll try those, thanks.

Darkknight145: I don't care about the menus or extras on the discs. Just want the movie itself. Figured it would be at least 6-8 months to complete. Some of the titles i don't care about will be skipped too. I'll probably download quite a bit too.

[dragonkeeper]

kamelman, don't get discourage I started the same process almost 2 years ago and built a quad core media center PC to expedite things. I had over a thousand DVDs and a little over 100 HD-DVD and blu-ray titles at the time. I wanted to put away my DVDs and make room for my HD titles. But have since started ripping and converting those as well.

Its been two years of on again off again but i'm down to less than 300 DVD titles to rip and about 50 Blu-ray. After that then it will be time for my old album and cassette tapes.

[redwudz]

What I did is use a spare PC and installed four DVD drives I raided from other PCs I have. Then I batch encoded them directly from the DVD drives to MKV and kept the original AC3. I had AnyDVD running in the background. It took a few days, but I could run 12-20 a day though the PC, depending on how much spare time I had. I had about 600 DVDs to convert.

I used Handbrake for the encoding with a single pass at 19.5 quality setting. I set the Decomb filter on and the audio to AC3 passthrough. That gave me a average file size of 1.5 - 2.5 GB and they look good to me.

If you had six DVD drives and a case that could handle them, even better. You could use a different program than Handbrake, but it worked well for me. The main thing is to set up batch encodes, then you can let the PC run and just toss in more DVDs when each batch is finished.

[jagabo]

Jagabo: i'll try those, thanks.

That's probably more work than you want to go through with 1200 DVDs. Look into something more automated like Xvid4Psp.

[cal_tony]

For DVDs my preferred format is DVD Iso without any recoding. I use DVDshrink mostly. You may end up with files similar to the original but the iso can include a simplified menu if that's what you want. The best thing is that the changing over to an iso only takes 2-3 minutes each.

For BRs I like MKVs in the original bitrate. Again, if you don't change the bitrate, it only takes about 15 min.

Hard disks are cheap......my time isn't.

Tony