DVD conversation to MKV container.. what codec?

[MwBakker]

Hello everybody,

I am converting my dad's DVD's to a digital form.

The DVD is MPEG-2 @ 9048kpbs, but I do not know the codec and want it converted to a digital form on my PC.

Original: DVD MPEG-2 9048kbps, codec uknown (H262?)

Possible output 1) .MKV H264 at 9048kbps
Possible output 2) .MKV H262 at 9048kpbs

so at both cases I still use the same bitrate, since file size reduction is not my target: I want the conversation to be as close as possible to the DVD original quality. In other words, which codec H262 or H264 will give me the most original quality?

[jagabo]

DVD is already digital. You can quickly remux with no loss of quality with MakeMKV or any of a number of other tools.

[MwBakker]

I can't because I am also editing the DVD to cut out blue fragments or crop the visual image during conversion (Movavi combines both processes)

[Krispy Kritter]

So then these are not commercial discs?

In any case, which codec you use will largely depend on how the files will be played (ie: which codecs are supported).

And you won't need the same bitrate for a newer codec as was used with mpeg2.

[jagabo]

h.264 will give you better quality than h.262 at the same bitrate. Though 9000 kps is a waste of bitrate for an h.264 encoded DVD source.

[MwBakker]

I'll clarify what I mean.

The DVD is .VOB with MPEG-2 codec

- .H264 codec is known to present the same visual quality of .H262 at lesser bitrate.

So what if I convert to H264 at same 9048kbps? Will this reduce the quality loss any conversion/editing will have?

Or would conversion at 9048kbps at H262 reduce quality loss at most since this is the original codec coming from the DVD?

[MwBakker]

9000 kps is a waste of bitrate for an h.264 encoded DVD source.

so 9048kbps at H264 will not compensate for cenversion quality loss?

[jagabo]

9048 is way more than is necessary for a DVD source. You could easily get away with 1/2 that and not see any difference. Maybe even 1/4.

[MwBakker]

I trust you, but how is one sure, is there an exact formula or is it assumption?

[Cornucopia]

It is a demonstrable rule of thumb.

Scott

[MwBakker]

But the level may vary, it could be 1/2 of the size or 1/4 but this I need to figure out myself by simply comparing results?

[jagabo]

But the level may vary, it could be 1/2 of the size or 1/4 but this I need to figure out myself by simply comparing results?

Different videos require different bitrates. A modern computer generated cartoon may look fine at 1000 kbps. Noisy, high action movies may require 4000 kbps. And different h.264 encoders will deliver different qualities. There's also a difference between 1 pass and 2 (or more) pass encoding. If you insist on bitrate based encoding you'll have to try different bitrates for the video if you want the smallest file size that will deliver the quality you expect.

If your encoder is x264 use CRF mode. It will always delivers exactly the right bitrate for the quality you specify. Try CRF=18 and the slow preset. That will deliver pretty high quality. You'll have to look at enlarged still frames to see much difference. If 18 is good enough for you use a lower value. If you can't see any difference and you want a smaller file, use a higher value. Once you've determined what CRF gives you the quality you want you can use that for all your encodings.

[lingyi]

The codec for your video is MPEG-2 which is the most universally compatible format. .VOB is a specialized container for DVDs.

You said you edited the video. Did you convert it to another codec or did you edit the .mpg directly, which it seems you did. What is the file format of the output of your software? If it's .mpg, then just wrap it in an .mkv container as jagabo stated as file size isn't an issue. You've already lost some quality during the editing process and will lose even more by reencoding to any other format.

For reference, the proper way to retain as much quality as possible when editing an MPEG-2 video, would be to convert it an uncompressed form, perform your edits on that, then output to whatever your preferred codec is, then wrap (remux) it into an .mkv container.

[MwBakker]

The codec for your video is MPEG-2 which is the most universally compatible format. .VOB is a specialized container for DVDs.
For reference, the proper way to retain as much quality as possible when editing an MPEG-2 video, would be to convert it an uncompressed form, perform your edits on that, then output to whatever your preferred codec is, then wrap (remux) it into an .mkv container.

I think Movavi does this all at once by converting with edits.

Talking about bitrate, if I use Handbrake to convert the DVD at high quality the output becomes twice as much as the original. In other words Handbrake does determine hight bitrate immediatly to high quality?

[Cornucopia]

Another, possibly better way to retain quality when editing, is to edit on Gop boundaries with an editor that supports smart rendering.

Scott

[MwBakker]

Possibly, but it goes too far for the experience in video that I have

[lingyi]

As I stated above, unless you've converted the original file to a uncompressed format before editing, you'll lose quality no matter what format or how high your output settings are. As jagabo stated, start with 1/2 the bitrate with h.264 and check if you see any difference from the original. Up the bitrate if you do see a difference, but keep in mind that you've already some quality of the original by working on it in MPEG-2. There's no advantage to using MPEG-2 in this case because you can't put back what you lost.

[jagabo]

As I stated above, unless you've converted the original file to a uncompressed format before editing, you'll lose quality no matter what format or how high your output settings are.

If his editor can deal with MPEG 2 video as a source (which appears to be the case) there's no need to convert to a lossless codec before editing. That would be a waste of time and disk space.

[hello_hello]

Talking about bitrate, if I use Handbrake to convert the DVD at high quality the output becomes twice as much as the original. In other words Handbrake does determine hight bitrate immediatly to high quality?

How are you setting the quality in Handbrake and what is it?

There's many factors. NTSC DVDs are 720x480 but display as 16:9 or 4:3. For a 16:9 NTSC DVD that means the width is stretched out to roughly 854x480 on playback. For PAL it's 720x576 stretched out to 1024x576 for playback. If you encode anamorphically (720x480 or 720x576) there's less video to encode than if you stretch it out first. You can still crop and encode at the cropped resolution, or crop and resize the width to the appropriate resolution, but the latter will increase the bitrate for a given quality. If a PAL DVD is close to 16:9 after cropping I generally crop to exactly 16:9 and resize to 960x540.

There's also the quality of the source. In theory, x264 can compress much better than mpeg2, but that's compressing the same source. If you compress with mpeg2 first and then recompress that with x264, the latter has to effectively compress the original video plus any artefacts introduced when encoding as mpeg2, which can be quite substantial and reduce re-compressibility. The same applies to re-encoding an mpeg2 encode as mpeg2.

If a DVD is interlaced you have to decide whether or not to de-interlace and make it progressive, or encode as interlaced, but the quality of the deinterlacer can make a difference.

Can you upload a few small samples of what you're working with, as that way others can tell you how they'd go about re-encoding it, but it's all personal preference so if you get 5 responses you'll probably also be given 5 different methods of doing it.

If you just want to re-encode (no fancy filtering) and want as close to the original quality as possible, for x264 you'd probably use something like CRF16. Lower CRF values are higher quality and naturally higher bitrates. If you filter/resize the video you can probably get away with a lower encoding quality. I use CRF18 for almost all standard definition sources but I tend to try to clean the source up a bit first if necessary.

Noise filtering can make a huge difference to compressibility, but that's always a compromise between removing noise and blurring fine detail. Some noise filters are better than others in respect to how much noise they can remove without noticeable blurring. There's lots of variables, and most of the regulars here have probably refined their preferred method over time, through experience.

In theory you always lose quality when re-encoding but sometimes you can negate that with filtering or even end up with an encode that looks better in general. The majority of posters here probably use Avisynth for that, and/or some sort of Avisynth based GUI, but it's a learning experience.

[netmask56]

I had a look at the4 specs of movavi and it appears to directly output MKV. It would appear you can do the lot within the program.

Input
Formats Codecs
3GPP (.3gp), 3GPP2 (.3g2) H.263, H.264, MPEG-4
Advanced Streaming Format (.asf) MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV V7
Audio Video Interleave (.avi) H.264, MPEG-4, H.263, MJPEG, DivX, Xvid, DV, Cinepack, Fraps, TechSmith, Uncompressed
DivX Video (.divx) DivX
Flash (.flv) H.264
Flash (.swf) FLV1
HD Video (.m2ts, .mkv, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .wmv) MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, WMV V8
HD Video (.m2t, .mts, .ts, .wmv) MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, AVCHD, WMV 9, WMV 9 Advanced profile
Matroska (.mkv) H.264, MPEG-4, MJPEG, Theora, DV, Uncompressed
MPEG Transport Stream (.m2ts) H.264
MPEG Transport Stream (.ts, .mts, .m2t) MPEG-2, H.264
MPEG (.mpg) MPEG-1, MPEG-2
MPEG (.mpeg, .mpe, .m1v, .mod, .tod) MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264
MPEG-4 (.mp4) MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, MJPEG, ProRes
MPEG-4 (.m4v) MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, MJPEG, ProRes
MXF – Material eXchange Format (.mxf) MPEG-2, DV
OGV – Ogg Video (.ogv) Theora, MPEG-4
QuickTime (.mov) H.264, MPEG-4, AIC, MJPEG, ProRes, Sorenson 1/3, PNG
QuickTime (.qt) H.264, MPEG-4, AIC, MJPEG, ProRes, Sorenson 1/3
RM – RealMedia (.rm, .rmvb) Real Video 2/3/4, Cooker
WebM (.webm) VP8, VP7, VP9
WMV – Windows Media Video (.wmv) WMV V8, WMV V7, WMV 9, WMV 9 Screen, WMV 9 Advanced profile, MPEG-4, WMV 9.1 Image V2
WTV – Windows Recorded TV Show (.wtv) H.264, MPEG-2

Output
Formats Codecs
Audio Video Interleave (.avi) H.264, MPEG-4, MJPEG
Flash (.flv) H.264, FLV1, H.263, Flash Screen Video
Flash (.swf) FLV1
HD Video (.m2ts, .mkv, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .wmv) MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, WMV V8
Matroska (.mkv) H.264, MJPEG
MPEG-4 (.mp4) MPEG-4, H.264
MPEG Transport Stream (.m2ts) H.264
MPEG (.mpg) MPEG-1, MPEG-2
OGV – Ogg Video (.ogv) Theora
QuickTime (.mov) H.264
WebM (.webm) VP8
WMV – Windows Media Video (.wmv) WMV2

[babygdav]

1. FYI for those that don't need to resize/crop, mpg2cut2, virtualdub mod, etc. can cut out segments from a vob and output to MPG without needing to reencode.

2. Some commercial video editors allow fast export of video segments that haven't been edited straight from the original, and only adding in segments that have been edited as new encodes.

3. For what you're doing, cutting and resizing, pretty much any free/commercial video editor can do this well.
Avid Media Composer First, Davinci Resolve Free are two examples of free commercial video editors that can do this well.

4. For export, you can pick the typically/commonly used .MP4 H.264 file name/type. This allows for maximum compatibility with modern devices.
DVDs can go up to about 9000kbps for the video stream. H.264 does about the same with about 1/2 the bitrate, but doesn't hurt to give it more than about 5000kbps so that it retains as much of the original video quality as possible (eg. up to about 10,000kbps is reasonable).

For the audio, you can pick either MP3 or AAC, but MP3 is usually more compatible across a wider range of media devices. 320kbps for the maximum quality .

DO NOT expect all conversions from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 H.264 to result in clean, nice conversions!
There are a handful of discs I've tried, but the noise plus interlacing plus artifacts in the original video is simply too much to encode into H.264 well (meaning I'd have to create a file that is several times larger than the MPEG-2 file in order to match the original quality). Here, I simply keep it in the original MPEG-2 video format and edit that.

...

There is no 1 set default that'll work for all home videos, so you'll need to test encoder settings on a short clip until you're happy, then use that for your projects.

[MwBakker]

Alright thank you for all your replies, a lot more info as I expected.

I do know I will lose quality during conversion, this is what I stated in my first question. I aim for the least quality loss and the info provided so far is very good on letting me know. As I epected and Babygdav says: h.264 can do the same work at half the bitrate but it's still _save_ to go a little higher than that. I rather be save in this matter, there is enough storage to go for.

If I am performing the editing, cutting and cropping, I am sticking with Movavi since I found my way in this and I already have a payment from earlier times made for this program. I guess .MKV at H.264 was the right way all along

[MwBakker]

Talking about bitrate, if I use Handbrake to convert the DVD at high quality the output becomes twice as much as the original. In other words Handbrake does determine hight bitrate immediatly to high quality?

How are you setting the quality in Handbrake and what is it?

I have set it to 'high' just to test the output and compare it to the Movavi output.

Can you upload a few small samples of what you're working with, as that way others can tell you how they'd go about re-encoding it, but it's all personal preference so if you get 5 responses you'll probably also be given 5 different methods of doing it.

If I upload a fragment it would mean this fragment is cut and compressed.. I dk if that is what you want me to do but I will attach this fragment. This fragment is from 1997, and yes that small kid with black hair is me

I am doing a graduation project so things like this digitalizing for my dad comes in between. I thought it would just be a sequential process, but I came to conclusion I am more autistic about the right output than I thought. When I finally figure the right way I still have 50 DVD's to digitalize. But IF I do find the right way I could do this in between within a week. I just don't know which way is best anymore.

So far my best option appeared:

cut/cropped during conversion (Movavi does this all at one go, but doesn't tell exactly how) with output .MKV H264@5975kbps (original DVD was 9048kbps)

[hello_hello]

MwBakker,
You're correct. A re-encoded sample isn't much good as anything could have happened to it.
You can upload a sample of the original video by opening one of the vob files from the DVD with TSMuxer,. It's output will be a TS or M2TS file containing the original video and/or audio. TSMuxer is pretty easy and because there's no re-encoding it only takes a second.

Pic 1 is TSMuxer after opening a Vob file. You can deselect all tracks except the video to keep the file size down.
Pic 2 is setting the start end end cut points to output a couple of minutes of video. Pick a couple of minutes where you'd say the video looks typical and click the Start Muxing button.

[MwBakker]

MwBakker,
You're correct. A re-encoded sample isn't much good as anything could have happened to it.

Sorry for my late reply, I have had a very busy period that left me no time after work to move on with this project. Here is the example (a direct rip) from MuxeR

[ProWo]

The quality is poor. It makes no sense to aim for more than SVCD quality when re-encoding. You can do such a re-encoding the easy way with my smart FFMpeg gui. Parts were cropped and the video was deinterlaced. The target was PAL SVCD (480x576) with an AR of 4:3 (see picture), 56,9MB (without Audio).
Try yourself.



https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/395425-New-small-GUI-for-FFmpeg

[babygdav]

Besides the ffmpeg gui, handbrake will easily get you to a decent h.264.

Put disc in drive, start Handbrake, open disc, convert using default settings.

...

The paid Moavi video suite says it supports dvd directly and the mpeg-2 format used by dvd videos. https://www.movavi.com/suite/formats.html

[jagabo]

Possible output 1) .MKV H264 at 9048kbps
Possible output 2) .MKV H262 at 9048kpbs

Given the amount of noise in example2.ts, if you're not going to use some strong noise reduction go with #1.

[MwBakker]

Besides the ffmpeg gui, handbrake will easily get you to a decent h.264.

Put disc in drive, start Handbrake, open disc, convert using default settings.

...

The paid Moavi video suite says it supports dvd directly and the mpeg-2 format used by dvd videos. https://www.movavi.com/suite/formats.html

Good, I have the paid version.

The difference between the handbrake approach is that I want to cut and crop while converting the video. Movavi gives me the idea that this is done at one go (by which I mean: before setting the conversion process from DVD I can add the cutting/cropping part along with the process) so I prefer sticking with this. However the best output is what I aim for.

[MwBakker]

Possible output 1) .MKV H264 at 9048kbps
Possible output 2) .MKV H262 at 9048kpbs

Given the amount of noise in example2.ts, if you're not going to use some strong noise reduction go with #1.

Noise is visible at low light situation, the camera's technology lacks here and smoothing this would be unnatural I assume