Shrink Movie Collection down to a smaller size

[adrian2055]

I decided to go fully digital and copy all my dvds to my external hard drive, but it's taking up too much space so I want to convert them from vobs to a different format without sabotaging the quality. I've been out of the loop for awhile so I need to get up to date as to what is being used now. The last time I did this I was using divx and xvid, but the movies sizes were huge. I see some sites with 400mb movies and I'm wondering how they do that. I don't mind if the movie size is higher than that, but I do want to keep the movies 1GB or less in size without screwing up too badly. Is this possible and what codecs/file formats/programs do I need to use to make a decent file? I'm only watching movies on my laptop so I don't have to have ultra high quality files.

Thanks In Advance.

[smrpix]

What's being used now, by many, is to get more drives and maintain the original quality of the sources. 4TB drives can be had under $125. That's 500 to 700 DVD movies. The cost is more than made up for by the saved time and effort.

[hech54]

I want to convert them from vobs to a different format without sabotaging the quality.

NOT going to happen.
NEXT.

[redwudz]

Or.... You can try some conversion programs and determine for yourself if the quality loss is acceptable. I convert my DVDs to MKV (H.264 video/AC3 audio) and they look OK. I still have the originals and many of them were not the best quality to start with.

What I use is VidCoder. I convert directly from the discs at about 15 minutes per DVD.
I use Detelecine and Decomb at default settings, framerate same as source, constant framerate and a quality setting of 19.5. Most everything else at default. You can batch the DVD files and do a handful at a time, one after the other, overnight if your PC is slow.

That gives me an average filesize of about 1.1 to 2GB. Try VidCoder or similar and judge for yourself.
If the files are too large, change the quality number. I like the MKV format and it can still look good at low data rates.

[Theboardrider]

A couple easy fixes are to use Mp4Tools, or my personal favorite for MKV (to mp4, mov, avi, m2ts, mpeg or wmv). It's simply, and appropriately titled "Video Container Switcher."

It only works to convert MKV to various files, but it's very fast and flawless, as all it does is change the container.

Currently it's version 2.0.7 and created by Florian Fahrenberger. Given the generic name of the app, thought I'd help narrow it down in case it's not easy to discern.

[glenpinn]

I want to convert them from vobs to a different format without sabotaging the quality.

NOT going to happen.
NEXT.

The guy can get his DVD's way down in size from the originals by simply converting them to h264 in an MP4 or MKV container, using around 50 to 75% of the DVD Bitrate, and still have them in good enough quality where he probably won't notice any real quality drop from the original DVD's.

It all depends on the individual and how much he wants to reduce the overall file size of each DVD, but i think he is doing the right thing by converting his collection now while the DVD's are still able to be read.