Best Way to Archive Episodic or Compilation DVDs

[pixelmonkee]

OK, I've been reading around trying to find the best solution for backing up my animation & short film compilation DVDs to divX files. If this has been addressed thoroughly in another post, I apologize and please just direct me to that post.

If not ... I'm building a hometheater PC and i want to have instant access to my ENTIRE DVD collection. I'm having no problems backing up the regular feature film discs, but the discs with many short pieces are posing a problem.

So here are the problems I have experienced:

* I can rip each Program Chain individually (even though there are 20+ on some discs), but then I'm not sure what bit-rate to use for each show. Should I just use "total backup size"/minutes? I find out how large one minute of video can be (800MB/120 minutes = 6.7MB/s), then multiply the length of the film x 6.7 to get the total size for that particular file. Then I was going to join them all together again using some program (not sure what program to use to string together divX AVIs). I've been having problems with severe pixelation and just crappy quality in general. Am I doing something glaringly wrong?

* I've tried re-authoring the disc using DVD Shrink so that all the segments I want to archive are in the right order, but that does not effect the number of Program Chains so I'm right back to the previous problem.

* I've used Auto-Gordian Knot and this has produced mixed results. I've either gotten all PGCs and the sound eventually loses sync, or it just grabs the longest PGC and only rips that one film or animation. The gradual loss of sync is another side problem I'd really like to solve as well!

SO, to sum up, I have some discs with variable length short films and animations on them and I'm trying to back them up to divX AVIs to store on my hometheater PC.

Thank you for any help in advance!!

PiXELMoNKEE

[reboot]

FairUse Wizard to rip to avi.
Virtualdub to edit.
Choose a good compression codec, such as DivX5.

[pixelmonkee]

kewl ... thanx jim!

trying that as we "speak".

[pixelmonkee]

OK, so I've been using FairUse Wizard v0.42e and things are working fine. My only issue is that I still have to set up the compression for every single Program Chain and I get lots of individual video files. I can put the back together using NanDub, but I'm trying to streamline the process (I have a lot of these collections I want to compile into Best Of ... series).

Am I doing something wrong?

PM

[reboot]

Nope.
I can't think of any other way you're going to get all those separate clips ripped, then strung together.
There's other ripping software (DVDx for example) but you're still going to have a multitude of small clips to work with.
I realize it's a lot of work.
Maybe someone else has some suggestions.