DVD to Divx and Back

[willgonz]

Here is what I like to do.
I got one of those WD TV Live Plus devices. Works pretty sweet lets you play a movie from an ISO with complete menus. Now what I want to do is rip all my movies and store them and make a jukebox. However, all the reencoders only are doing to DVD size. I want to retain the menus and the extra content. I would like all video to encode like Divx where you get 700mb per 90 minutes. Any idea?

Must keep menus and extra videos.
Must be an ISO when done.

Thanks,
WillGonz

[Baldrick]

ratDVD could almost do that( no iso support and only wmp playback). But it's no longer developed so it's pretty useless. I haven't seen any other software with similar features.

[jman98]

Can't be done. Your size requirements are unrealistic (well, if you care nothing about quality they can be met), but it's essentially impossible to compress that much and keep the extras and menus. You could do it theoretically, but it would be a very involved manual process that would require you to basically create a DVD shrunk down to sub-VCD quality. In other words each movie would take a lot of customized work to do what you propose and it would look like crap. There are no user friendly programs that can do that much compression for you unless maybe the very old DVD Shrink program will let you compress that much. I don't know that you can, but I've never tried to do anything like what you propose so I cannot say for certain that it can't do it. But if it can, you're not gonna like what you get after you do it.

You CANNOT convert DVD to any other format and retain the menus and extras. End of story.

You joined 6 years ago and this is your FIRST POST?!?

That's got to be a record.

[Ai Haibara]

Ah, but the OP wants to keep it as an ISO (given the criteria in the first post, it'd still be in DVD-Video format), while compressing it down to DivX/Xvid 700MB levels. And, since this is in the ffmpegx forum, most likely using Mac tools.

You can convert to DivX and then create a DVD from that, yes. But, as jman98 mentions, you won't be able to retain the menus when you do that. The conversion back to MPEG-2 (for DVD) will probably ramp the filesizes up, again. Also, note that that's converting twice, which means quality takes a hit twice. Though, the quality would probably suffer more running a DVD Shrink-type of operation on the ISO to get it down to those levels...

I believe there are at least two or more DVD Shrink alternatives for OS X, but I couldn't tell you how the quality would turn out if you attempted to compress a DVD-Video ISO down to DivX/Xvid levels. You'd probably be limited to doing that if you wanted to keep the menus and extras on the discs, though.

[willgonz]

The whole ISO doesn't have to be 700mb. But each VOB file would compress down. The Ratio would be 700mb every 90mins.

[Baldrick]

Still too much compression for dvd mpeg2 video. It will look like crap.