Best ripping format to use for a PC DVD "jukebox"?

[shalomart]

Hi all.

I am in the process of putting together a computer that I will set up near my TV set and dedicate to play movies from the PC to my *analog* TV.

I believe I have all hardware I am going to need including a 3 year old Dell Dimension running Windows XP on a P4 2Ghz processor with 512MB RAM. I will be inserting two 500GB hard drives (one for backup), a DVD drive and Xilisoft DVD Platinum 4 to rip my DVD collection to the hard drive. I also have a few year old ATI All-In-Wonder 128MB Rage AGP video card with video out and the accompanying cables to stream the video & audio out to the three RCA jacks on the TV (also not that new hence no S-Video or Composite).

So, although I haven’t assembled it all yet, I think that it will finally come together as a sort-of DVD jukebox in the end.

My question is … what would be the most optimal format & settings to use to rip the DVDs to?

Should I consider a format that would work with an analog TV today & digital TV tomorrow? (does that make sense? )

The Xilisoft software allows for a LOT of output formats, most of which are obviously not the ones I need for this project. I am wondering whether to use MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX AVI or what ??? I don’t need the VERY best of quality, so while DVD quality would be very nice, VHS quality would suffice if DVD would gobble up too much disk space. I’m also not certain as to what settings to use (bitrates?, audio sample rate? etc) along with the format I would use based on your expertise.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Jonathan Greenfield

[redwudz]

I use a video server computer in the back room that delivers my video to my HTPC in the front room and then on to the TV or video projector. To keep the videos compact, I prefer Xvid or Divx. If you convert them at about 1500Kbps, you should have decent quality. If you need a smaller file, Xivid or Divx at about 700Mb per file is what you will commonly see on the net for converted videos.

You can use higher compression like X264, but it takes a lot of CPU power both to convert and to display. It does use less space though, for decent quality, compared to Xvid/Divx.

Divx or Xivd, if encoded properly, can also be used on a DVD or CD for most Divx set top players, so it seems the best option at present. MPEG takes up much more room to achieve equivalent quality. The best quality from a DVD would be to keep the video in the same format. But expect to use about 7GB average per video. You could transcode them with a program like DVD Shrink and reduce them to about 4.4GB and keep all your menus and extras if wanted.

I haven't used the Xilisoft software, but there are many programs that can convert DVD to a format like Divx/Xivd, many are freeware like AutoGK. You could also use FairUse Wizard (Freeware version) or several other freeware converters to Xvid/Divx formats.

[nic2k4]

If speed (to get the job done) is a concern, DVDfabDecrypter and rip movie only. You'd be looking at about 10min per movie. This would net you about 100 movies on that 500Gb drive, keeping in mind most movies occupy between 3 to 5Gb on a DVD. You would preserve the quality, the subtitles and the audio features.

If you feel you need to store more than 100 movies, you could run those rips through Nero Recode/DVDshrink and reduce the size to 70-75% without much loss of video quality (especially with the quality options enabled). But this could increase the time up to 1hr per movie.

If you want to add even more movies, re-encoding to Xvid, Divx, MP4 or WMV could reduce the size of a movie to 700Mb (a CD) with good results. But this takes a lot more work and time. The tool of choice is FFMPEGX. It has a bitrate calculator, to help set all that stuff. Try this calculator, it'll give you an idea of what to expect:

https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

[shalomart]

Thank you both so much for your suggestions. They were just what I was looking for and I will use them to proceed with my future ripping.

Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise with all of us !!!

Jonathan