Fastest MiniDVD Conversion For Macs Or PC's

[Vintageman]

OK fellas this my first tutorial so if anything is misspelled or wrong please be kind.


I've been trying to find a fast and proper way of making MiniDVD on my Macintosh for my DVD player and what I came up with was inspired by Shock Troops version. OK the tools you will need is DVD2One, DVD Backup and DVD Shrink. First you have to have the movie already ripped with DVD Backup in your computer. Next we're going to use DVD2One to shrink the movie down to fit on 2 CD's. Open DVD2One and select you movie then set it to these settings,

Set Output to ( User defined ) and make it 1390MB

Set Copy to ( Film)

Set Ratio to ( Variable )

Also make sure to just select the main movie and audio ( you can choose more but the quality is not as good ). And hit start on DVD2One. Once it's finished doing it's thing it will leave you with a VIDEO_TS folder. At this point you can check the quality of the movie with DVD Player. One strange thing about this movie is that you can't get the info window to work in DVD player but it will keep all the chapters. The quality should make your jaw drop at how good it is at 1390Mb. Now to split the movie. I find that using DVD Shrink in virtual PC is the fastest. You can just use Shock Troops steps for that located here: http://www.polarhome.com:793/~afonic/minidvd.htm.
Once you've split the movie into two just burn it to two Cd's as a Data ( DVD-ROM (UDF) with Toast 6.0.3. Well that's it. In total it will take about an hour to two hours at the most. Please let me know your results.

PC users can just substitute a PC ripper for DVD Backup.

[wulf109]

In my expierence even a movie under 4Gb's turns out very blocky on 2-700MB CDR's. I've had much better luck converting TV episodes to 700MB's. 30-45 min. episodes turn out very good.

[Vintageman]

I think you really should try the method first! I thought the same thing but Shock Troop is right it is much better than SVCD. So give it a try and compare and I think you will be surprised.

[Vintageman]

One other thing if your DVD Player doesn't play MiniDVD's you can Demux the files and convert the AC3 to MP2 44khz 224bit and author as XSVCD. Work fine on my JVC which doesn't recognize MiniDVD where as my Norcent recognized the MiniDVD.

[qshartle]

If you can, go to Fry's, or another big electronics place, and get the mini DVD-R's made for camcorders. Burn with those. Then you can have the whole DVD movie, just on a small disc. And the discs are 1.8 gig. I tried your method, and burned to these discs, and they r awesome to show to people, or take to parties. I even got LOTR Two Towers onto 1 lil DVD-r





Q

[Vintageman]

Yeah your right they will fit on a Mini DVDR. But I would optimize them for that format by finding out whats the most I can get on there ( how many MB ). Might be you can fit a full 1800MB version instead of 1400MB.

[galactica]

speaking on the topic of less than 4 gigs for dvd2one, i did Meet Joe Black (2 disk dvd) with each disk set to 2.2 gigs, then joined them (this was before the join feature was out)

surprisingly good! for being 2.2 gigs per disk!

I can see how this would look suprisingly good!

thanks for the tutorial!

would you be opposed to me adding this to my site? when i go though the renovations planned?

[Vintageman]

I have submitted it to new guides but hey yeah use it anyway you want!

[Vintageman]

An update the info window on DVD Player works fine with these files ( seems I had a bug ). And you could if you want save subtitles also.

[qshartle]

I just did a test with my Vampire Hunter D DVD, and altho it was 3.56 gigs for the whole disc....i fit the WHOLE F'N DISC onto 1 mini dvd. All menus, subtitles, and features. On my Xbox, it looks awesome!

Q

[tgpo]

I would do this, but the only thing I have that would play it would be my computer, which I don't really like to watch movies on.

[Vintageman]

tpgo try the method. Like I said before you can always Demux the file and convert the AC3 to MP2 ( SVCD Standard ). the quality will be better than XSVCD and you can author it as a XSVCD. One other thing is that it will still be a faster conversion than any other conversion method. And you will see that even though it will be authored as a XSVCD if you get info on the m2v ( I like extractor " not osex " for demuxing ) it will say 9.80 mbps ( which is a lot better than 2500 ).

[tgpo]

tpgo

??? who ???


Actually my player will only accept standard VCDs. No SVCDs, No CVDs, not even (X)VCDs.

[Vintageman]

Sorry tgpo!

[Vintageman]

I really think that this method is going to replace any VCD or SVCD method once people catch on to the quality. And it's so much faster and better quality who wouldn't want to convert them to this method. I think AVI will still be around for single CD conversion but I'm not gonna waste 6 to 12 hours to convert a DVD to any form of S(VCD) when I can get better quality in about 2 hours. I think Shock Troop has created a new standard. Beats even KVCD.

[Vintageman]

OOPS! Maybe I shouldn't have said that. There are a lot of programmers making money with DVD 2 SVCD conversion. Sorry fellas.

[Vintageman]

tgpo I forgot to mention by all standards this is a DVD. If you burn it with a couple of other movies to a DVD it should play fine on your DVD player. Thats what I did with a couple of my movies and it worked great. You can get fancy and add a menu with buttons to each movie but I just put each movie and and it worked fine.

[qshartle]

Isnt there a mac only way so that i can split it? I dont really like VPC. Can be a Major Bitch sometimes.


Q

[Vintageman]

No! That's my issue also. If DVD2One can split the Video_Ts folders in about 3 minutes like DVDShrink does, then we can keep it all Mac. Come on DVD2One put this option in.

[Vintageman]

Does anyone know of a Mac program that can split Video_Ts folders in about 3 minutes per half?

[Vintageman]

Question does anyone here know if DVD2One are going to allow for spliting a Video_Ts into pieces? I know you can do it with DVD Shrink but it would be nice if we can keep it all Mac. By the way DVD Shrink splits it actually very fast ( about 3 to 4 minutes per half for 2 halfs ).

[stmdk]

I've found one new bug with the subtitles. In some of the movies the main movie subtitle still shows up even when you uncheck it. I don't know why it does this. Still working on it.

[AntnyMD]

If you double-click and/or leave one of the subtitles highlighted (as opposed to simply ticking ON the subtitle you wanted on your DVD2OneX disc), DVD2OneX will make it the default subtitle and turn it ON.

I learned this the hard way several times, most recently on my copy of 28 Days Later.

Note: be careful when copying discs like Traffic, which has one of the English subtitles on by default on the commercial disc (the original release; not sure about the Criterion Collection release). It's used for the odd translation of Spanish dialog (rather than hard-coding the subtitle into the compression, which is what most films do).

[wulf109]

The problem I've encountered using DVD2ONE or DVD Shrink to create a miniDVD or XSVCD is the high bitrate that results causes stumbling playback on my DVD players. If you look at the bitrate with Bitrate Viewer they sometimes peak at over 9000. I have found that DVD2ONE in constant mode does reduce the bitrate to about 6000 but quality in constant mode is very erratic.

[AntnyMD]

The terminology in this thread shifted for awhile -- some were still talking about miniDVD/cDVD (DVD-Video on a compact disc), and others were talking about DVD-Video on a 3" DVD (a small DVD).

[thoughton]

I've been trying out this technique but am having a couple of problems:

1. After setting the user defined value in DVD2OneX to 1390MB I selected all the audio tracks (this was an experiment). The final VIEDO_TS folder came out at about 2500MB.
I wondered if this was due to extra audio tracks so I repeated the process (setting to 1390MB) but this time I only selected one audio track (AC3 6 channel english). This time the final VIDEO_TS folder came out at about 1700MB.
I guess my problem is that the 1390 MB specification is only constraining the video and not the audio. What am I doing wrong?

2. Does DVDShrink require Windows XP? I'm trying to launch it in VPC-Win98 but it refuses to launch.

Thanks for any advice!

PS The 1700MB folder looked fantastic on DVDPlayer, at least as good as a forty-two SVCD (which is already great!).

[AntnyMD]

I think if you use the Constant setting with a low user-defined end size, the compromises DVD2OneX must make get to be too great and it sets its own floor in order to maintain the least amount of constant quality for that film.

[thoughton]

Ah, i see what you're saying - so maybe this particular movie (6GB original size) is too big to start with? By the way, I've been using variable ratio (not constant) but I suppose the same theory applies. I was just confused as to why it wouldn't respect my 1390MB setting. I'll try a few more variations and see what happens. Thanks!

PS I discovered DVDShrink requires NT/2000/XP

[AntnyMD]

From what I've read in this thread, this technique works best for sources already 4.4gb or less. Six gb may be too much to start with.

I have an older copy of DVDShrink and I run it in Win98 via VirtualPC.

[Vintageman]

OK fellas I don't see where all the problems are coming from that's why I'm glad people are trying it. I want you to use my original settings except for one difference ( set it to 1400mb instead of 1390mb ) that will be my true original settings that I used on my versions. The reason i set it to 1390mb on the tutorial is to give you a little space to cut either way. I converted a 7gb movie and just the main ac3 audio and it came out perfect every time. You can't set constant on this format it has to be variable because of the amount of compression you are doing. try it at 1400mb and see if that will make a difference. like I said just do the main movie and audio.