Ripping DVD's with preserved menus and compressed size

[DreamT]

Hi!

This is my first post, so please be gentle (i've actually used videohelp.com from time the last 15 years, but I've never had to actually post a question).

The TL;DR of this post is: I want to rip my DVD's to a format that preserves the menus but at the same time shrinks the size to "something smaller" than the original size. And, I need software that actually can play the result.

Background: A while ago I decided to rip my DVD collection. My main concern was that I wanted the DVD's to work as it's physical equivalent, to get the same "feeling" when watched it digital, compared to putting it into the DVD player and watching it "for real". So, I started to rip them to ISO's. This worked great for the most part, the most of them were playable in Kodi, with preserved menus and all.

But, the ISO's took a lot of space. So, I switched strategy. I started to rip the DVD's to MPEG-4 instead (H.264). This meant that the size got reduced a lot, but of course I lost the menus. (another advantage if this was that I could start using Plex to watch the movies remotely).

At this point, it felt more important to reduce the size as much as possible than to have menus. So I continued on this path, and ripped the entire collection to MPEG-4 instead.

This was about a year ago. It has worked great - But, I really miss the menus. So, what i'm looking for is the following:
- A method and software to rip DVD's to a suiting format ("MPEG-4 with DVD menus"). Preferably, the software should be for MacOS, but in the worst case it can also be for Windows or Linux.
- Software (for Android) that can play this format, and has about the same features as Kodi (media library etc.). (Maybe Kodi itself can handle this kind of format?).

Is it possible?

[videobruger]

DVDShrink - but not only is it Windows it also uses MPEG2 video codec.

[DreamT]

DVDShrink - but not only is it Windows it also uses MPEG2 video codec.

Ok! I never said in the original post, but I want the quality to be as close to the original as possible. I guess compressing it with MPEG-2 to a smaller size gives a quality loss?

[videobruger]

Yes - but all reencodin from one lossy format to another is a loss in quality.

The only way I know of to use MP4 files with a menu is to create a web page with "buttons" to invoke the mp4 files.

[DreamT]

DVDShrink - but not only is it Windows it also uses MPEG2 video codec.

Ok! I never said in the original post, but I want the quality to be as close to the original as possible. I guess compressing it with MPEG-2 to a smaller size gives a quality loss?

Absolutely. But reencoding MPEG2 to MPEG2 with a target size of 2GB, compared to reencoding MPEG2 to MPEG4 with the same target size will probably give much worse quality in the first case?

[teodz1984]

actually there is no compressed version with menus that will fit your bill..its isos or nothing

[jagabo]

Absolutely. But reencoding MPEG2 to MPEG2 with a target size of 2GB, compared to reencoding MPEG2 to MPEG4 with the same target size will probably give much worse quality in the first case?

Yes. And DVD Shrink's method (DCT domain re-quantization) is the worst. But there's no other way to shrink and preserve DVD menus.