How should convert and save a few movies onto my laptop?

[Denvers Dawgs]

I'm thinking about saving a few of my movies onto my laptop. What would be the best way to do this. What I want to do is have the movies at a much smaller size (not 4.37GB), but not too much that the video looks hideous....Any help would be greatly appreciated

[guns1inger]

Try using something like autogk with a quality target instead of a size target. You will get smaller files, and should keep the quality fairly high.

[FulciLives]

I second using autoGK as it is a great program. I would use XviD with 192kbps MP3 CBR audio.

Force it to make the output 640 in width and just use a decent bitrate. Most movies look fine at 2 CD size and that is a big reduction in size over the original DVD size.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mastersmurfie]

I third autoGK

I tend to use the size target of 1000MB (that way, I can better calculate how much "room" I have left), with 320kbps VBR audio though. Video quality is very good (in my eyes)

[Denvers Dawgs]

So using autoGK how much space would a 6GB take up with very good to good video? Are we still talking GBs or MBs for a whole dvd?

[FulciLives]

So using autoGK how much space would a 6GB take up with very good to good video? Are we still talking GBs or MBs for a whole dvd?

If you set the output size to 2 CD's then you are talking 1400MB although I would set the custom size and make it 1390 ... this way you get one large file. If you set it to the preselected 2 CD size then you get 1400MB but it splits it into two files so it will fit on two CD discs.

I mean every movie is different but at a width of 640 I find that the 1390MB size is good for most movies. If you have an extra long movie or one that is hard to compress (i.e., extreme action and camera movement) then you can always go for the "MAX" size which is 2GB or something like 2000MB in size.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Denvers Dawgs]

Thanks for the help....I definitely want one file so the 640 x 1390 seems the way to go for me.....

[Denvers Dawgs]

Will I be able to play these autoGK movies on windvd? If not what program will I need?

[guns1inger]

WinDVD should be able to play them, but if not, VLC or MPC would both be good choices.

[Denvers Dawgs]

I just installed autoGK, it also installed. Avisynth 2.5, VOB sub and Xvid. Now how do I go about turning a dvd into a Xvid? Do i only use autoGK?

[kschang]

Yes, just put in a DVD, get the job started (telling it which subs / audio channels to rip), then give it a few hours, and it'll spit out an AVI file of the size you wanted. Simple, right?

[Denvers Dawgs]

seems that way

[giannid]

You need to rip the DVD first to your hard drive before using AutoGk. If your DVDs are more than a year old or so, you can use DVD Decrypter. They stopped updating that program and so it may give you issues with more recent releases. DVDfab Decrypter has pretty much taken over where DVD Decrypter left off, and you can use that for more recent DVDs.

Also, I might add that you may wish to encode your widescreen sourced DVDs at 720 width as opposed to 640 because widescreen takes up much less pixels. As for audio, I use 128cbr. This is generally plenty good enough. Sometimes if it's something musical, I might use 192. I use cbr because it gives less issues for play back on stand alone dvd players. On a laptop this probably doesn't matter.

You can choose in the options of AutoGk to fix the width. For example 720 (for widescreen), 640 (for fullscreen) and 128 cbr audio. Then opt for quality percentage. 75% will usually give good quality, but you won't have too much control over the exact size that you will end up with. This won't matter much for you if you just want to keep them on your laptop.

[tousaboy]

You should try the SPAM,which also has many additional and exciting features such as Sutitle offset, DVD Crop, DVD Letterbox, Text watermark, Image watermark, etc.