Best method for backing up TV shows from DVD

[android6011]

I just created a NAS to stream all my stuff and I want all the season tv shows I have on there. I want the best possible quality, but not really the size of a full rip. Any suggestions?

[tomlee59]

Yours is one of the most common questions. But you must understand that there is a tradeoff between size and quality. You can have small filesize OR great quality, not both. All reductions in filesize will cause a degradation in quality. No way to get around that.

H264 can give you pretty good quality at lower filesizes. It's a computational pig, though, so you'll need a powerful computer to chew through the algorithm at a reasonable speed.

The venerable DivX/XviD family requires much less CPU horsepower, but at a tradeoff in quality (for a given target filesize). For my own personal taste, this does just fine for general-purpose TV show work. A lot of my TV series are stored on my NAS box in XviD. A few are in H264 (for CGI-intensive shows).

Try a couple of conversions with each type, and see if you like what you get. That's really the only way, since personal tastes differ. I have fussy friends who have far higher standards than I, and other friends who are perfectly happy with VHS-quality vids. De gustibus...

[android6011]

tomlee, what program do you use to encode in h264 , also what are you running as far as OS on your NAS, and do you copy the files to your NAs after or just have your nas do the ripping as well

[tomlee59]

I rip straight to my NAS box in most cases -- the total conversion speed is limited mainly by my computers, so the small communication overhead to the NAS is negligible.

I have both Macs and PCs, so I use a variety of tools for ripping. For conversion into XviD, my favorite tool is D-Vision3 (Mac-based). For H264, I've used the Elgato Eye (also Mac-based), which is a hardware-based dedicated converter; it works great, and frees up my Mac for other tasks.

For straight rips of DVDs, it's hard to beat DVD Fab Decrypter (PC-based). And I have a large library of old (mainly Asian) movies in VCD and XVCD format, created with TMPGEnc and VCDEasy, and/or EazyVCD.