Lossless (-ish) codecs?

[Hatgirl]

I'm a gadget junkie, and I tend to change portable media players relatively often. I like to use my media players to watch TV episodes which I have converted from my DVDs to whatever format my current media player uses. But, as I'm sure all of you have found out, ripping TV episodes can be a lot more time consuming than ripping a film, as often one episode will be spread out over a number of VOBs. Getting a complete episode often involves fiddling around with editors (I usually use Virtual Dub).

Anyway, I am sick to death of having to rip everything from scratch for each media player. I bought an external hard-drive, and intend to create a high-quality version of each episode. When I next get a new media player, I (hopefully) will just have to batch-run the files through whatever converter it uses, and voila! Instant TV goodness.

That's where you come in. I have googled 'till I can't google no more, and I can't figure out what the best codecs to use would be. It needs to be lossless (or almost so). I will be happy if a 45 minute program comes to 700MB or under. I'm based in Ireland, so my DVDs are a mixture of PAL and NTSC (I own Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs). For ripping I generally use AutoGK, and have DVD43 running if it's a Region 1 disk. I edit with VirtualDub 1.6.15.

Suggestions, anyone?

[CrayonEater]

Simply put, huffyuv is the first one that comes to mind, but you may be looking at 1Gb per minute, or more. DV is compressed but is around 200 Mb per minute.

[jagabo]

HuffYUV for lossless (from a 4:2:0 colorspace source like MPEG) but the files will be much larger than the MPEG source. PicVideo MJPEG for something a bit lossy, but again, at the highest quality settings the files will be larger than the MPEG source.

Rip your episodic DVDs with DVD Decryptor in IFO mode and you can have each episode as one VOB file. That's your best bet.

Oh, there's another lossless codec called Lagarith. It delevers files about half the size of HuffYUV, but again, they will be larger than the source VOB files.

[Cornucopia]

An admirable request, but not workable.

700MB * 8bit/byte = 5600Mb
5600Mb * 1024 k/M = 5,734,400kb

45min. * 60sec/min = 2700sec.

Needed bitrate = 5,734,400/2700 = 2123.85kbps

You can get a pretty decent quality MPEG4 file (or DivX, Xvid, WMV, h.264, etc) for that bitrate, but that's about it.

And those are LOSSY!

Remember, Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 is 720x480x30x12 = 121,500kbps
Your target file would be using a compression ratio of ~57:1!

I'd guess that the original MPEG2 video from the DVD is ~6500kbps, or a compression ratio of ~18:1. And that's LOSSY, too!

Lossless would, if you were very lucky, probably be ~2.5:1. Maybe 3:1.

You're better off ripping your DVD's and keeping those ISO's/VOB's/MPEG's on the hard drive. But you'll need alot more space than you were anticipating...

Scott

[jagabo]

You could probably get 45 minutes down to 700MB with h.264 (or the open source x.264) with decent quality. Be prepared for some long encoding times though.

[Hatgirl]

Rip your episodic DVDs with DVD Decryptor in IFO mode and you can have each episode as one VOB file. That's your best bet.

Not really suitable for a lot of TV shows, I'm afraid. Try it yourself with the 4th disk of the R2 verison of Firefly, if you have it. IFOs all over the place, and not a sign of "Objects in Space", which is why I end up editing things together with VirtualDub.

Right, so Lossless is a bust. How about "lossless-ish"? Is there anything out there better than XVID that gives 700MB or less?

Really appreciating the help, guys!

[Soopafresh]

Lagarith Codec is excellent, and is now multithread aware - About 1.5 times the size of High Bitrate Mpeg2.


Also, just load your VOBS up in Mpeg2cut2 (brilliant freeware app) and you can cut and save episodes VERY quickly. It allows you to load multiple VOB segments, and will save as regular MPEG2 files or back to new VOBs. No re-encoding done, just a straight chop and save. Then, save these as your source material.

[Nelson37]

You are talking about bitrates lower than SVCD, or at least compression equivalents. SFAIK, XVID is currently about the best choice to reach the target file size. Nothing even close to lossless, considering that an additional compression will be the next step, I would seriously re-evaluate your storage size goals.

[jagabo]

x.264 can usually get away with about half the bitrate of Xvid or other MPEG4 codecs. Set it up in Single Pass Quantizer mode (constant quality) and set the quantizer to about 20. With a full D1 frame size that will give you very roughly 700 MB (depending on the particular video) per 45 minutes. Try encoding some short sequences and see what you think of the quality. If you want more quality use a lower quantizer, if you want a smaller file size use a higher quantizer.

[Hatgirl]

Wow! Mpg2Cut2 is great! The resulting file is 1.75 MB for a 45 minute episode, but considering how great the result is, I really don't mind. Think I'll change my plans slightly and only convert those episodes that I can't rip using the IFO.

I'm going to give those other codecs suggestions a go as well. Thanks for all your help, folks.

[Cornucopia]

I think the problem you're having with the IFO rips is that ArcCOS, etc. has those IFO's pointing over and over to the same media. So it looks like its ballooning the size beyond what could be stored on disc.

Workaround:
Don't rip in IFO mode, rip in ISO mode and then use DVD shrink to save only the main movie.

Anyway, I'm glad your finding a workable, affordable solution.

Scott

[Scarpad]

Simply put, huffyuv is the first one that comes to mind, but you may be looking at 1Gb per minute, or more. DV is compressed but is around 200 Mb per minute.

You sound like Me. I was ripping to my Current Zen M at 320x240 but found that that limits me on my PDA (which is 640x480) and on my Dell Widescreen Monitor which is 1650x1080. Since my other devices supports encodes up to 720x ??? I figure why not rip to the Best and let the devices scale it, and then it looks great on my monitor/TV as well. So I'm beginning to encode in AutoGK at a fixed width of 720, which yields 720x544 for 4:3 material and 720x416 for Widescreen.

I know what you mean about constantly reripping and I'm tired of doing it as well, so I'm figuring on keeping with this method for the forseeable future.

Now you say you're also fine with lossless, well if you have the space then that's fine, however portables might have problems with them. When I use DVD Decrypter to rip the Episode disks, I have decrypter set to not slit the vobs, so I'll get one 1-2Gb vob files that I usually encode. You could just rename those vobs to the TV Ep names and they should play fine

[jagabo]

So I'm beginning to encode in AutoGK at a fixed width of 720, which yields 720x544 for 4:3 material and 720x416 for Widescreen.

You could just leave them at 720x480 (or 720x576 PAL) and use the PAR flag. I usually use square pixel 640x480 (640xwhatever for widescreen) because my old Divx/DVD player doesn't use the PAR.

[Scarpad]

Auto GK automatically makes a Fix Width 720 encode come out to 720x544 for a 4:3 program