Ripping a television show from DVD and converting to torrent size...

[tzikeh]

I'd like to give back to the bittorrent community by taking some lesser-known tv shows which I have on dvd and converting them to DivX or XviD .avi files and uploading the torrents. The problem is, whenever I try to convert the .vob file, I either get an enormously large file at the end or a proper-sized file with crappy visuals.

Most hour-long shows (well, 42 minutes without commercials) on bittorrent tend to be almost exactly 350MB, and always look pretty great. I'm stumped. I have Mac the Ripper, DVDxDV, MPEGStreamclip, Handbrake, and several other pieces of software I've tried.

Also - I'm not certain what the difference between 1-pass and 2-pass is.

If anyone could help me, I'd greatly appreciate it.

tzikeh
tzikeh@thechicagoloop.net
"Imagine if every movie was 100 hours long, and they just kept projecting them until everyone in the theatre had walked out in disgust at around the 30-hour mark. That's how American serial TV gets made."

[tomlee59]

If you want people to have a chance to help, you've got to include more information besides "I want to do X, but it doesn't work."

What are your source file characteristics? Duration? Target format characteristics? Etc. etc. Then maybe someone can help.

As to the 1- 2-pass question, two passes gives the encoder additional information with which to make better decisions, permitting higher quality for a given file size, at the expense of roughly doubling the encoding time. I use 1-pass most of the time, and choose 2-pass only if I am trying to downsize the files quite a bit.

One tool that you did not mention is D-Vision. It's my favorite DivX/XviD tool; it just plain works. It tends to autoselect parameters very sensibly, so it's particularly ideal for folks who don't want to have to fiddle with a lot of calculations to get a satisfactory result. Folks like me.

[tzikeh]

What are your source file characteristics? Duration? Target format characteristics? Etc. etc. Then maybe someone can help.

I thought I did that - 42 minutes of source file ripped from a pro DVD, target 42 minutes in .avi format (either DivX or XviD) at 350MB at good, clean, viewable quality.

If there are pieces of vital information I'm missing, can you tell me what they are? Because I'm quite new at this *particular* kind of conversion.

One tool that you did not mention is D-Vision. It's my favorite DivX/XviD tool; it just plain works. It tends to autoselect parameters very sensibly, so it's particularly ideal for folks who don't want to have to fiddle with a lot of calculations to get a satisfactory result. Folks like me.

I'll check it out immediately. Thank you for now -

tzikeh
tzikeh@thechicagoloop.net
The link to "Does God Hate Astronauts?" is broken - now I'll never know the answer.

[tomlee59]

Here's a partial list of things that you omitted that are potentially helpful:

source and destination framerates
audio codec, sampling rate and bitrate (again, both target and source)
source and destination resolutions
Basically, the more detailed, quantitative information you provide, the more others have to work with, and the more likely someone can figure out what is going on. More detail is better, even if you think it is irrelevant.

[mdoublem]

From my experience, those forums often have videos sized at 320x240 or half standard TV res. That cuts quite a bit of size. When I've encoded video ripped from DVD, I've used the h.264 codec, try downsizing the video. You should also be able to play with other parameters such as frame rate (32, 24, 16 etc) and quality. Just experiment by encoding a small sample of video using different parameters.

[Case]

Most hour-long shows (well, 42 minutes without commercials) tend to be almost exactly 350MB, and always look pretty great. I'm stumped.

Modern shows tend to be shot with superb equipment, resulting in less noise and a clearer picture, which can be better compressed. Many modern shows are 23.976 fps, while the old ones are often 29.97 fps, thus needing 25% more frames on old shows, and consequently a larger file size. Going from interlaced source to progressive mpeg-4 (XviD) is another hurdle to tackle, if applicable.

Also - I'm not certain what the difference between 1-pass and 2-pass is.

2-pass is encoding twice, and using the results of the first pass to optimize the second pass, by using a lower bitrate in easy-to-encode scenes and a bit higher in the others. It is also a tool to aim better for a specific file size. Always use it when you value quality over encoding time and want a fixed file size.

Widescreen shows are often encoded at 640x352; a 4:3 show of 528x400 would roughly be the same frame size in total number of macroblocks.

[thoughton]

Here's a partial list of things that you omitted that are potentially helpful:

source and destination framerates
audio codec, sampling rate and bitrate (again, both target and source)
source and destination resolutions
Basically, the more detailed, quantitative information you provide, the more others have to work with, and the more likely someone can figure out what is going on. More detail is better, even if you think it is irrelevant.

I think you're getting a bit fussy here buddy. If you had any experience of TV torrents you'd know they are almost always xvid and mp3, at NTSC film framerate. I don't even know why you are asking about sample rate or source resolution. In fact I'd say your only valid question was desintation resolution :P

[tzikeh]

I think you're getting a bit fussy here buddy. If you had any experience of TV torrents you'd know they are almost always xvid and mp3, at NTSC film framerate.

Right - they're .avi files in either a DivX or XviD with mp3 audio at NTSC framerate. I just figured people knew what I was talking about w/r/t television show torrents, which was my error.

So - back to my original question - all I really need to know is how to take that 1-hour show, either from a VOB or a dv import from VHS-to-FCP, and make the ~350 file that I can seed.

Thanks again....

[thoughton]

Out of the software you've listed Handbrake is probably the one you want (other options would be ffmpegX, D-Vision and probably several other apps I can't think of right now). It's been a while since I converted to xvid.

There's a list of Mac tutorials here but the one you want is probably Galactica's DVD to Divx tutorial - just choose xvid instead of regular mpeg4, crop as necessary, keep the audio at 128kbps, set a target size of 350MB, select two-pass, and see how it turns out!

Hope this helps!