Converting DVDs to playable PS3 format with hardcoded or external subtitles

This is my guide to converting DVDs to a high quality playable PS3-supported format with subtitles, which can be streamed through a media server such as TVersity without transcoding. Naturally this requires quite some time, but I prefer the ability to stream media in the long run, rather than using DVDs. I have a set of specific requirements that I couldn’t find in other guides, so I decided to write my own. Feel free to add any comments or feedback about how this guide could be improved.

I have used many other tools, but found them to be insufficient for my requirements (PS3Video9, AutoGK, VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod (extremely nice tools, but could never find a combination of codecs that worked), GUI for DVD Author, TMPGEnc).

These are my requirements for what I set out to do:
- The end-result must be a movie of high quality, both concerning video and audio
- I have never been able to get the PS3 to play off external subtitles properly, so I chose to hardcode the subtitles. I have included instructions for external subtitles in my guide. If you do not require subtitles at all, you just need to follow the first step of this guide (if needed), then skip to my note at the end about VOBMerge.
- I am a power PC user, so I like something with a lot of options, but that still doesn’t require huge amounts of hours to setup
- No commercial tools, just freeware

Tools you need for this guide:
- VobSub
- RipBot264 (requires MatroskaSplitter and Avisynth)
- TVersity (or some other media server)

Optional Tools:
- DVD Shrink (if you don’t have your DVD files extracted on the hard drive)
- mkv2vob (for higher quality audio)
- SubRip (for external subtitles)

1. DVD Shrink (if you don’t have your DVD files extracted on the hard drive)
Insert the DVD you want to copy, click “Open Disc” and select your DVD. You should see an overview of the structure and components of the DVD. You can untick the stuff you do not want in the right column. I usually remove all the languages that I do not need as well as extras and leave just the movie and subtitle. Set the video-setting to “No compression”.

Now we are ready to make a copy of the DVD, so press “Backup!”.
- Set “Select backup target” to “Hard Disk Folder” and choose a folder.
- On the next tab, “DVD Region Code” should be “Region Free”.
You don’t really need to change anything else, so press “OK” to start copying. This should take around ten minutes or so. When the process is done you will have a copy of the files on your local hard-drive.

2. VobSub
We will use VobSub to extract the subtitles from the DVD-files in a format that RipBot264 can use. From the start-menu, launch “VobSub Configure”.

Press “Open” and change the filetype to the bottom option, then select the first IFO-file where your movie starts from the VIDEO_TS folder (the IFO-file that matches the name of the first 1gb vob-file). Now select a folder where the files will be saved to.

You will now see a window with the subtitle information. By default all subtitles will be selected in the right column. You can remove or add subtitles by using the arrow-buttons. There is no need to touch the other options in this window unless you know what you are doing, so press “OK” to continue.



VobSub will now process the subtitles, which should only take a few minutes. Finally you can change subtitle colors and position, but I don’t think doing this will have any effect when using them with RipBot264, so press “OK” to close. You now have two files prepared, one idx and one sub. The sub-file contains the subtitles, we will use this to load the subs in RipBot264. Continue to step 4.

3. SubRip (for external subtitles)
SubRip is a tool for semi-automatically converting binary subtitles (.sup) from a DVD to readable text subtitles (.srt) through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). You need to go through this step in order to use external subtitles, you just won’t be hardcoding them in step 4.

Click on the upper-leftmost icon, then click “Open IFO” and select the file containing the start of the movie in your VIDEO_TS folder.

Select the subtitle you want to translate from the list under “Language Stream”. In the right column, “Subpictures to Text via OCR” should be selected. Press “Start” to begin.



You will now have to enter each character (sometimes its two or three at a time) that SubRip can’t guess by filling in the characters that are highlighted in blue in the text-field below. Make sure the correct “Language” is selected in the drop-down list. Enter each character that appears and press “OK” to go to the next set. Depending on the amount of subtitles, this can take everything from 15 to 30 minutes. It can be tedious at first, but once you get the hang of it, it isn’t so bad. When you are done, be sure to hit the “Save As” button at the bottom.

It is a good idea to take 10 minutes and go over the .srt file with notepad and check for errors (the most common is lack of space between words) before starting on the next step.

4. RipBot264
RipBot264 is a very fast video encoder, that works excellent for machines with multiple cores. It has specific profiles for consoles, which means you can encode your favourite movies to a playable format on the PS3, Xbox360, PSP, etc. It supports a good amount of video formats/containers: avi, divx, flv, mpg, m2t, mp4, mkv, ts, wmv, vob, evo, m2ts.

Click “Add” and select the file that contains the start of your movie from the VIDEO_TS folder. RipBot264 will now demux (split) the audio stream from the files. This process usually takes around 5 minutes.



You will now see a window with much more information. In the Profile drop-down, select “[level 4.0] HD . BluRay . Consoles”. Then click […] next to it and set the Max Bitrate at the bottom-right to 10000 and press “OK”. I changed the default value of this in the .ini file in /profiles in the RipBot264-folder so I don’t need to change it everytime. This is to make sure that RipBot264 doesn’t limit the bitrate in any way.

A little note about the video modes you can select below this:
The CQ mode is the simplest and fastest mode. The lower the CRF, the better quality you will have. A CRF value of 18 will give you a decent quality, but it’s not what I am after. For those of you who are not so picky about quality as me, feel free to select CQ mode. Encoding in the CQ/18 mode shouldn’t take more than around 2 hours time, depending on your hardware.

Since I want a higher quality video, I use the 2-Pass mode with a kbps of 6144, which is enough compared to the bitrate of most DVDs. RipBot264 used roughly 6-7 hours to chew through encoding the DVD with a 2-Pass encoding on my quad core Q6600 system with 2gb ram. I do not recommend using this mode unless you got anything less than a C2D machine, or are not pressed for time. But the end result is definitively worth it.

Press the “Properties” button next to the video mode selection. We will now set the size of the movie and add subtitles. It can sometimes vary depending on what media you opened what options you have when it comes to the size, but what I usually choose is HD-Full (1920x1080) for best quality. Press “>” to go to the next page.

Choose “Build in picture” under subtitles, and select the sub-file you got from VobSub. You can skip this if you want to use an external subtitle file instead of hardcoded . Now press “OK”, as we do not need to change anything else in this section.

I chose the .mkv (Matroska Video format) as output, because the MKV container supports a direct copy of the audio stream (select this from the audio profile list), meaning that you won’t have to re-encode to a lesser audio format, such as AAC 320 kbps. Selecting the MKV container as output requires one additional step, using mkv2vob to re-mux the file (takes only a few minutes usually) into a container that the PS3 can read.

If you do not feel picky about audio quality like me, feel free to choose mp4 as output format. If you do, make sure you choose one of the AAC-LC formats in the audio profile list. One final note, I do not recommend to ever turn on normalizing, as it will nullify the delicate balance that movie audio has. It is not the same as normalizing your music files, so you should not turn it on.

Finally press “Done”. You are taken back to the batch job window. You can now either add more jobs to the queue for encoding, or you can just press “Start” to immediately start encoding the movie. Unfortunately there is no pause-button, so you will just have to let it finish, or abort the job by shutting the program down. RipBot264 will indicate how much time is left of the job and how much progress has been done so far in percentage and amount of frames.

If you opted to output in mp4 format, you are now done.

5. mkv2vob (for higher quality audio, if you opted for MKV in step 4)
mkv2vob is a wonderful tool that lets you convert videos from the MKV format to mpeg2 or x264 videos playable by the PS3. If you have followed this guide so far, the last step only requires you to re-mux the file, which should only take a few minutes.

Go to the “Configuration” tab and set:

- Peferred Audio Language -> English (ENG) (or your language)
- Video Transcoding -> Never
- Preferred Subtitle Language -> None
- File Splitting -> None
- Output File Extension -> mp4
- Untick all other options in the right column

Go to the “Add file” tab. Choose the mkv file that you got from RipBot264 and select a destination directory. Finally click “Add file” to start re-muxing. The process should take only a few minutes.

After mkv2vob is done, you can now stream your movie to your PS3!

Note: mkv2vob also lets you re-encode files if needed. Sometimes you need to do this if you get a black screen but hear audio when playing the file on your PS3. Another example is HD rips in the MKV format that has subtitles. By using mkv2vob, you can re-encode these HD rips with subtitles hardcoded. To do this, select the following options in mkv2vob:

- Video Transcoding -> Automatic
- Preferred Subtitle Language -> English [ENG] (or your language)
- Transcoding Codec -> x264 (for a little bit of extra quality, but slower encoding time, otherwise select MPEG-2)
- Output File Extension -> mp4
- Always Encode Subtitles -> On (if you use an external source, also tick “Load Subtitles from SRT”, must be the same name as the video file)

A note about VOBMerge:
If you do not require any subtitles, but would rather just play your DVD files from a media server, you might have noticed that the PS3 will not do this. Well the solution is simple, you can either use some DOS commands or VOBMerge to fix it. I prefer the latter, easier method.

It is very simple. Just start up VOBMerge, and add the 5 files containing your movie from the VIDEO_TS folder. For example:

VTS_01_1.VOB (1gb)
VTS_01_2.VOB (1gb)
VTS_01_3.VOB (1gb)
VTS_01_4.VOB (1gb)
VTS_01_5.VOB (a few hundred mb)

Make sure they are in correct order in VOBMerge, then press “Merge”. Type in a new filename, and all the files will be merged into one, ready to be played on the PS3.