Converting DVD video to....HELP!

[Froggy_Doddy]

Over the years, I've converted tons of hours of home videos to DVD. Now I want to start a new project, extract the DVD video files and sort them all onto a hard drive. Basically I want to ditch my DVD's and Blu-Ray disks (home videos).

My question is: What is the BEST format to convert my DVD videos to. I want superb quality and decent file sizes. I'm thinking DIVX. Uncompressed, or leaving it in MPEG2 would be too big (file size).

-What specific codec would you use to convert standard DVD video to?

-What about 720p HD video? You you just use AVCHD?

Any info or suggestions would be appreciated. I want to make sure I use the best codec before I start this long process.

Thank you.

[Moontrash]

if you go down to a divx/xvid format and you try to play that from storage(flash drive, hard drive, dvd data etc), the picture quality over a large LCD/plasma tv wont be that good. Even with upconverting I doubt the quality will be even decent.

With BR its much easier. U can go down to a 720p size into an mkv container using x264 or AVC and from what I hear the quality is pretty good considering the original size. Taking a 25gb BR movie only down to say 7 or 8gb's and it's suppose to be reasonable in terms of quality.

also remember the amount of drive space you're gna take up with all this storage. Of course this is if you have a fairly large collection but if its not too big then its not a bad idea. Maybe even do 3 BR size discs down to 3 8gb files and store them on a BR as data...3 mkv/x264 encoded movies on 1 disc.

[Froggy_Doddy]

Thanks for the reply.

Ok, so you think that going from standard DVD (480 30fps) to DIVX would degrade the quality too much? Maybe I should keep them in it's native 480 30fps MPEG2. I was hoping to avoid that to end up with smaller file sizes. 1GB DIVX vs 4GB MPEG2. But I really want the videos to still look good on large screens. (as good or very close to DVD anyway)

Looks like you're saying to use AVCHD for the high definition stuff. great!