Haven't touched video encoding in a long time, need a quick refresher.

[wh33t]

I want to backup DVDs and store them digitally. I used to use DVD Decrypter + AutoGK to make xvid rips.

Is there a modern day process that is as easy to use?

Should I be using h.265?

Also, I'd like to embed the subtitle track and make it toggle-able when viewing. Not sure how to go about this.

Any tips! Thanks!

[Cornucopia]

Couple of thoughts...

Can your machine encode to h265 quickly enough? (I doubt it)
Can your playback devices smoothly playback h265 material? (I doubt it)

Use h264 for a little while longer...

Ripping: AnyDVD*/DVDHDdecrypter (* or it's successor)
Encoding: Handbrake/MeGUI/Hybrid
Some swear by MakeMKV.

I'll leave the rest to others for now (don't spend much time at all ripping w/ subs, myself)

Scott

[wh33t]

Couple of thoughts...

Can your machine encode to h265 quickly enough? (I doubt it)
Can your playback devices smoothly playback h265 material? (I doubt it)

Use h264 for a little while longer...

Ripping: AnyDVD*/DVDHDdecrypter (* or it's successor)
Encoding: Handbrake/MeGUI/Hybrid
Some swear by MakeMKV.

I'll leave the rest to others for now (don't spend much time at all ripping w/ subs, myself)

Scott

I'm using handbrake at the moment. A program I discovered which I think fits the bill. It takes about 16 minutes to process a 90 minute movie from my tests so far. I'm impressed with the file size. 500~mb for a 90 minute film. I'll try to playback the file on my phone and see how it does.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I have a question, do you know much about upscaling? It's painful to watch these 480p DVD's on my 2560 x 1080 monitor in fullscreen.

[johns0]

The only thing you can do is get blu-ray version of the dvds,no upscaling will help if the dvds are not that good in quality to begin with.

[wh33t]

The only thing you can do is get blu-ray version of the dvds,no upscaling will help if the dvds are not that good in quality to begin with.

Bah, that's wack. What about improving the framerate? I see that handbrake can force 60fps. Will that make the movies seem more life like? I suppose I should just try it.

[johns0]

Nope,garbage in,garbage out,you can't get good quality from crappy sources by trying higher framerates or bitrates.

[Cornucopia]

Most hollywood films are 24fps (actually 23.976, actually 24000/1001) with flags to make it fit 30fps (actually 29.97, actually 30000/1001) with pulldown. This won't change with BD (though it has true 24fps and doesn't necessarily need pulldown), and you shouldn't expect it to (until such time as hollywood films make the bulk of their films at >24fps).
If you have DVDs that were shot on video at 60i, then force converting them to 60p will retain the smooth motion and makes sense to do. Good example would be sports or dance recordings.

You can uprez to HD sizes, but the TV would be doing that anyway, and unless you know what you're doing, the TV would probably do just as good a job in realtime, if not better, than you would spending lots of time (plus, you'd be losing quality with a re-encode).

I would suggest that you use a more appropriate monitor - an SD monitor if you can get hold of one, or at least a 16:9 or 16:10 HD monitor instead of that ~21:9 thing you mentioned. Talk about a lot of wasted space!

I would also suggest that the encodings you do for your phone should be created using quite different settings from encodings you do for your TV/Monitor (both bitrate, rez, and Level/Profile).

Scott

[wh33t]

Bah humbug.

Thanks for the info guys.