Good day, all - THIS IS MY FIRST POST - need direction to proper forum :-)

[TDinTX]

Good day, all.
We have a large number of old DVDs that we have been saving over the years, waiting for TB hard drive to become inexpensive ... and we are there now, IMHO.
We may have over 2000 DVDs, not sure.
Some of the DVDs are VERY low resolution , and some contain copies of Canon video recorder flash memory cards.

To make a long story short - I want to place every DVD onto 8+TB hard drives "at the absolute best quality possible" - and I could care less how much disk space it takes up, TB drives are cheap!

Once I get all DVDs onto the TB hard drives at the highest resolution possible, I plan to set up a private server so family members can download high resolution copies, and or simply watch on their cell phones, or whatever comes in the future. Backup at this time is simply multiple copies of TB hard drives stored in large ice chests in a closet. So far, so good.

So my question is: what forum will I find folks that are knowledgeable of converting a DVD to something like MP4 or? file(s) for whatever the future brings?

[ProWo]

I want to place every DVD onto 8+TB hard drives "at the absolute best quality possible"

If so, the easyest way is to copy the VIDEO_TS folder from the DVD to your HD, maybe as subfolder of a folder named by the Moviename.

[TDinTX]

Thanks, but I really want all video on the DVD placed into one file.
At the moment, I'm thinking MP4 - H.254 is the place to start, but I do not have a clue as to the best software and hardware
to do the conversion. What I want is ONE file that is as good as the original DVD, and ideally enhanced in the conversion.

[ProWo]

Handbrake and MakeMKV are your friends.

[johnmeyer]

Handbrake, etc. would re-encode, yes? That would lose quality. I'd just rip the DVDs and specify in the ripping software that the VOBs be combined together into one file. There would be zero quality loss doing it this way.

[ProWo]

For johnmeyers spot you have to identify first all VOB's regarding your movie.
Then you can use type VTS_01_*.VOB > X:\output.vob (into a windows console, located into the VOB's folder)
Replace 01 with your video identification number. Replace X:\ with your destination folder path.

[TDinTX]

THANKS!!
Not interested in going to MKV, but Handbrake is at the top of my list

I "think" I want only MP4 - H.254 - but it's the details that I do not understand.

That is, what are the BEST settings to rip a DVD and end up with "ONE" MP4 file
that will play back as good, or better than the original DVD when played back on a PC or TV.

I assume that once I get a ripped MP4 - H.254 max quality large file created from a DVD, it will be extremely easy
to take that MP4 file and generate a smaller sized MP4 file for streaming.

I have no problem investing in any software and/or hardware to get numerous 8+TB hard drives filled
with MP4 files, with file names in this format: YYYYMMDDhhmm-location-description This name auto-sorts ,
so all I have to do is make a simple BAT file ( or whatever they are using these days ) and I can let it run
overnight backing up, or creating a complete set of smaller MP4 files for streaming, etc., etc.

[johnmeyer]

THANKS!!
Not interested in going to MKV, but Handbrake is at the top of my list

I "think" I want only MP4 - H.254 - but it's the details that I do not understand.

Do you understand that if you put the DVDs into MP4 format that it will degrade the quality? It will take MUCH longer to complete your task -- possibly 10-50 times longer -- because you will be re-encoding. This is also what causes the quality loss.

By contrast, if you simply rip the DVD to your hard drive and specify, in the ripping software's preferences, that you want one single file, you'll get what you want. In addition, if you want, you can change the VOB to MPG and take out all the un-needed VOB plumbing for multiple audio tracks, subtitles, and other stuff you're not using.

[TDinTX]

THANKS!
I have a lot of research to do


Do you understand that if you put the DVDs into MP4 format that it will degrade the quality?
I hope to find software that will do image stabilization, color enhancement, etc., etc. during conversion to MP4.
Hope to enhance overall video quality and end up with a MP4 - H.254 file.

Do you also understand that it will take MUCH longer to complete you task, possibly 10-50 times longer because you will be re-encoding (which is also what causes the quality loss).
I think it depends on your hardware and software, but may be expensive - which is OK.

By contrast, if you simply rip the DVD to your hard drive and specify, in the ripping software's preferences, that you want one single file, you'll get what you want.
I only want a file that is suitable for for streaming - like YouTube videos.

In addition, if you want, you can change the VOB to MPG and take out all the un-needed VOB plumbing for multiple audio tracks, subtitles, and other stuff you're not using.
I understand that MPG is not as good as MP4 - H.254 for streaming to many devices, including cell phones.
I am not seeing servers using MPG/VOB, they seem to use MP4.

I think I really need to learn how to use MP4/H.254 HandBrake options - but there are SOOO many options

[smrpix]

Based on your responses, you appear to have no idea of the enormity of the task you have set for yourself.

Here are a few suggestions.

1. Rip the DVDs to your hard drives as-is.

2. Start experimenting with handbrake on a small subset of the files. See how long it really takes you to convert, color correct, trim and do whatever other modifications you want. (While it's a decent converter, I suspect you will quickly find handbrake inadequate to the task as you now describe it.)

3. Choose a few files you want your family to be able to access immediately and without conversion upload them to YouTube or Vimeo. Let those services do the h.264 conversion for you. They will also automatically make multiple versions compatible with different devices or stream types.

[lingyi]

STOP. Both the OP and especially ProWo.

Oh so many wrong assumptions and statements in both your posts. And this is the right forum to ask your questions.

johnmeyer is right, you need to RIP your DVDs first. That's one stop of a process, even with Handbrake which will RIP and ENCODE if you want. Read and digest the following thoroughly.

First, what other than your homemade DVDs, what are the others? If they're commercial DVDs, do you have any new ones or are they all older releases? If they older releases, you should be fine with MakeMKV (More about this below) or DVDFab (Free 30 day trial and free DVD ripping forever). If they're newer, within the last 3-6 months, you may have to wait for an update to both programs (More below)

Second, when you say you want to share your videos from a private server, do you mean from home or hosted on a webhost? From home, you can using something like Plex which will allow internet access from your family and friends to your videos.

Third. Understand the following.

A RIP is the highest quality you'll get as it's original and true meaning, an exact bit for bit copy of the video on your DVD, less any copy protection if present (on commercial DVDs). Handbrake does a RIP and and ENCODES to other formats (more following) and with conversion there's always a loss of quality.

You mean H264/X264 not H254 which AFAIK is not a real format.

H264 is a format/CODEC (COmpressor/DEcompressor) that is lossy and will give you lower quality when you use it to ENCODE the MPEG-2 or other format your Canon camera may have recorded your videos as (more below)

.MP4, .MKV, .ISO and others are CONTAINERS, which contain multiple different formats such as H264, MPEG-2 and others. Saying you have any container is meaningless without knowing what video format is inside.

.MP4 and .MKV can contain individual videos only, no menus. An .ISO can retain the entire structure of a Video DVD including menus and file structure.

Fourth, as mentioned above, most commercial DVDs have copy protection, which is continually updated to thwart programs like DVDFAB and MakeMKV ripping them. However to date, 99% of copy protections have been defeated. New commercial discs may require 3-6 months for the programs to beat the new protection schemes.

I have to go to work, so won't be able to continue until I get back home this evening.

Disregard anything ProWo has stated as he/she has a one track mindset that may work for him/her, but is far from the best/correct approach. johnmeyer and smrpix are on the right track, but there's a lot more questions about what you want/need to do that hopefully will be addressed before I get back.

[johnmeyer]

I understand that MPG is not as good as MP4 - H.254 for streaming to many devices, including cell phones.
I am not seeing servers using MPG/VOB, they seem to use MP4.

That may or may not be true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your project.

Why?

Because your video is already encoded as MPEG-2 on your DVD!! If you take that video and re-encode it to MP4, the re-encode process will degrade the video because re-encoding always adds new artifacts. There is nothing in that process that will make the video look better because there is no "magic" in the h.264/MP4 encoding that somehow enhances the video.

Now, if you are starting from scratch with the original source of each video then yes, you could choose which codec to use, and the h.264/MP4 codec might produce slightly better results than MPEG-2, although with any video transfer which starts from consumer videotape, the differences would be small.

So, listen to the advice here and do nothing except rip each DVD to one file and then, if you want, change the VOB file that results to MPEG-2, although this step is not really needed if the DVDs are one that you or someone else made from videotapes.

[DB83]

Apart from all the standard advice given here, there was one line in the OP that hit me between the eyes


" Backup at this time is simply multiple copies of TB hard drives stored in large ice chests in a closet."


Is the OP being serious here or is he just having a laugh at our expense ?

[johnmeyer]

Well, an ice chest is a nice container, and it would perhaps provide a slightly more stable thermal environment.

Now if he is planning to put ice in there every day, then that is definitely a good joke.

[manono]

Apart from all the standard advice given here, there was one line in the OP that hit me between the eyes


" Backup at this time is simply multiple copies of TB hard drives stored in large ice chests in a closet."

Hehe, yes, ice chests have uses other than just keeping your beer cold.

[lingyi]

I was going to comment on the ice chest later. LOL

While it's well insulated, I don't think it's a good choice for storage of hard drives, SSDs or optical discs because any of the potential for moisture to seep in and stay there. Maybe if silicia gel packets or containers were kept in there, it would be okay.

[lingyi]

Back to where I left off. Now where was I...

Fifth, @ProWo and johnmeyer (whom I highly respect and trust in most matters), ripping to folders and .VOBs is the wrong approach. .VOBs are a specialized CONTAINER for Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 video as well as other info such as subs, chapters and menus, to use in the very specific specs for a Video DVD (read what What is DVD?. A significant issue with .VOBs is that it's limited by spec to 1GB. So even if convert the .VOB to it's native Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2, you not only lose the subs and chapters, you have usually have to join the multiple converted .VOBs automatically by the software or manually.

There are only two reasons that I know of to RIP a Video DVD (to distingush it from a Data DVD that I'll get to below) is to: 1) Edit the DVD menu or subtitles (change color, style, etc) or 2) Edit the .VOB itself, changing chapters, audio or subtitles, etc. AND converting it to an .ISO for storage on your hard drive or burning to a blank disc.

Sixth - Video vs Data DVDs. As I stated and linked to What is DVD? above, a Video DVD has a very strict and specific structure and video requirement. Only Mpeg-1 or Mpeg 2 can be used with a max resolution of 720x480 for NTSC, 720x576 for PAL and a max bitrate of ~9800bp/s. That's it. Any other video types or higher resolutions must be burned to the blank DVD (or for Mpeg-2, to a Blu-Ray blank) as a Data DVD. A Data DVD can contain any type of video or other file just like those on your hard drive.

Which brings us to the OP describing and understanding what types of DVDs he has. 99.9% of commercial DVDs are Video DVDs, the 0.1% being an out of spec Hybrid. 99% of commercial DVDs released in the Western Hemisphere contains copy protection that must be removed during the RIP process. Something Handbrake can't do (with one possible exception below). You need to use a program like DVDFab, AnyDVD or MakeMKV to remove the copy protection. If the OP has homemade Video DVDs or ones that were provided by a paid service, e.g. wedding photographer, the DVDs are extremely unlikely to be copy protected.

If the video files, such as from the Canon camera were just copied and burned to the disc as is, the disc is a Data DVD and the videos and other files can just be copied straight off the disc as if it were a hard drive or any other storage device. They may or not be Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2. They'll be in whatever format the camera recorded to, possibly even proprietary.

In either case, ""at the absolute best quality possible" will only be keeping the file as is in it's original format. Note not container*

*As I stated above, .mkv, .mp4 (and others) as well as .iso are containers. They're like the box you bring the cake home from the bakery. The box is a container, the cake is the format. If you take the cake out of the square box and place it into a round home container, the cake (format) is exactly the same, just the container has changed. The analogy for .VOBs would be that instead of a cake, .VOBs are like a box of cupcakes made from the same mix as a cake. Exactly the same ingredients (videos) as cake, just split up into individual cupcakes. If you could somehow magically undo the baking of the cupcakes and reform them into a cake, you'd have the ingredients in it's cake form.

Seventh. *Phew* Sick and tired yet! Almost there! "Ripping" with Handbrake and MakeMKV. In general, Handbrake is used to do three things, RIP an non-copy protected DVD AND encode/reencode it to another format (e.g. H264/X264) AND place the encoded (no longer original format, quality video) into a container of your choice, e.g. .MP4.

MakeMKV does two things, RIP any DVD, copy protected or not and place the original quality, slightly smaller size (because of the removal of anything that's not the video/audio/chapers in the .VOB container) Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 video AND places it (remuxes) it into a .MKV container.

But the OP want's .MP4! There are two ways to do this, one is to remux (take the video from the .MKV container and place it into an .MP4 container without any encoding), I'll leave it others to recommend a program, since I've never had to do this, I think AVIDemux can do it. Or open the .MKV in Handbrake and encode it to H264 (or any other format), and place the video into an .MP4 container. The first retains the full quality of the original video, the second loses quality, no matter how small.

How to use Handbrake to RIP and encode copy protected DVDs. I recently found out about this through Reddit. Reportedly (haven't tried and don't have any need to) if you go into MakeMKV and go to View>Preferences>Integration, you can use the decrypting portion of MakeMKV to passthrough the copy protection free video to Handbrake or other programs for encoding to another format and container.

Eighth. Getting real close to the end! MakeMKV, .MKVs and .ISOs from DVDFab or AnyDVD. What's the difference and which to choose? MakeMKV (other than using it as a passthrough to Handbrake or other program) can only remux** the .VOBs in a DVD to an .MKV. An .MKV (or .MP4) can't contain menus. So each video from a DVD will be a separate file. You can merge multiple videos together and mux the subs if any into an .MKV or .MP4 container, but never the menu. Not at this time and probably never.

**MakeMKV can RIP and save the folder structure and files of a Blu-Ray disc only, retaining the menus and structure of the disc. However, you must remux it into an .ISO (container) or burn to a new disc to ensure everything in the menu works correctly.

DVDFab and AnyDVD can RIP to folders (which I've stated above is basically useless) or .ISO (container). The advantage to an .ISO is that it's an exact replica of the structure of a disc, DVD or Blu-Ray, retaining any menu or special functions of the original disc.

Ninth. .MKV vs .MP4, Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 vs H.264/X.264. While both .MKV and .MP4 are containers capable of containing multiple different types of video/audio formats , .MP4 is currently usually associated with containing videos in the H.264/X264 format (there are also numerous video and audio format settings that may be incompatible with certain players). So must people, just say "MP4 is the most compatible!" without understanding that .MP4 is just a container and it's the H.264/X.264 format that's widely supported. Actually, for Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 has for decades been the most compatible format. It's only recently that devices like the Sony Playstation PS<whatever> and Microsoft X<whatever> dropped support for Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2, probably for two reasons, larger file size for original videos (e.g. in Video DVDs) and because offering Mpeg support requires paying a license fee.

On a related note I keep writing H.264/X.264. That's because while they both function the same. H.264, H.265, and in the future H.266 are proprietary to Fraunhofer and requires a license fee just like Mpeg-2 (I think Mpeg-1 doesn't require a license fee anymore, but I could be wrong). Open source developers reversed engineered the H.264 and H.265 codecs and developed their own free versions. Trivia. How many remember when MP3 hardware required a paid license from Fraunhofer?

Tenth. Okay, finally there! DVD ripping, editing, storage, backups and sharing. Didn't want to go to thirteenth or fourteenth!

DVD Ripping - OP, understand that ~2000 discs whether you rip or just copy the files directly is a weeks or months long project. Ripping a DVD takes ~10-15 minutes per disc, multiple times that time if you're ripping and encoding as johnmeyer stated. Add several more multiples of that time if you're editing and tweaking. Now you're talking hours per disc! 2000 discs = 20-30,000 minutes, ~300-500 hours!

I'm sure there are many tired of my posting about this, but a real life self torture due to stupidity. I accidentally formatted both my primary and backup drives (more about backups below). I had to re-RIP over 600 DVDs which took months. I used three DVD drives at one, swapping out discs every 10-15 minutes. Giving me just enough time to choose which audio, subs and whether I wanted to retain the menu or not, then properly rename the rips, Video DVDs follow a strict naming convention, all caps and no spaces, _ instead of a space and organize them into their proper folders.

There's a project called Automatic Ripping Machine which currently only runs on Linux that allows 6+ drives (assuming you have the space, connectors and power for them), but you're still stuck properly renaming the rips if that's what you prefer.

Using MakeMKV is slightly more forgiving in the naming aspect, because you can choose to rename the .MKV file name before the RIP and REMUX begins, but you still have to individually select which subs and audio for each file unless you leave it at default and are willing to sort through all the files it creates.

Editing. Not only is editing time consuming, but there are too many variables for any number of preset filters to work for every video. If you're at all serious about tweaking your videos, you'll need to learn command line AVISynth scripting which can take hours, days or weeks in itself.

Storage. Glad to hear that you're willing to buy enough storage for all your RIPs, because a single 8TB drive likely won't do it for you. A single sided DVD can hold up to ~4.38GB and a double sided DVD can hold ~8.75GB (this is actual capacity after formatting). A 8TB drive can hold ~7,450GB/7.28TB. So even if all the discs you have are single sided and not filled to capacity, you'll barely scrape by with a single 8TB drive. Better to a 10, 12 or larger capacity drive(s) which fortunately can actually be a few dollars less per TB than a 8TB drive. Lowest price so far is ~$14-$15/TB for 14TB drives in U.S.

If you're planning to reencode to .MP4, still keep your originals. So that's 1/4 to 1/2 additional storage you'll need for the .MP4s.

Which leads to backups. 3-2-1/1-2-3. Three copies of your data, two on different media, one offisite. One original (which you can count your DVDs as), One backup (your main drive) and One backup offsite, a second (third) hard drive at either at someone else's home or cloud. After spending hundreds of hours+ backing up your discs, you never want to do it again! Voice of experience!

Sharing. You say "private server" and I asked, At home or on hosted server? Making TB's of data available for others to share from you home, may get a cease and desist letter from your ISP as their Terms of Service usually forbids using the service for direct file sharing. There's a reason home service is rarely symmetrical, e.g. 200 down/ 10 up. Upload bandwidth is at a premium because those who need it, usually do it constantly. Note that's the reason by torrents work so well, the upload bandwidth is distributed between hundreds or thousands of users and as long as you don't share warez (some legit torrents are for things like Open Source Linux .ISOs and other software), the ISP's generally don't interfere.

If it's just a handful of people you want directly allow to stream the files, you may be able to use Plex and allow it to transcode and tweak the file size/format for whatever device is accessing it. The major cons are Plex doesn't work with .ISOs and you can't allow anyone outside the household have access to any commercial/copyrighted material (this hold true for any type of sharing also). Fair Use only allows you to make/view a backup for your own personal use.

If you host the files on your own webhost, you'll probably be fine as long as you're not streaming the files. Again, look at the terms of service, there may be unlimited storage, but once you pass a certain download limit, you'll start paying extra. Even a generally text only site like this forum, can cost hundreds of dollars+ to maintain. TY Baldrick!

Your best options are to host the files somewhere like Goggle Drive or One Drive or lose some quality and upload them to a private channel if you like to YouTube or Vimeo.

[lingyi]

TL;DR

@TDinTX, you're special but not that special.

The walls of text I've posted are so I can point other with the same types of questions to a specific subject without having to repost it again and again, like my 600 DVD rip story!

Skim it if you like and definitely ask questions. Just don't think what you're planning to do is new (there's hundreds of similar posts before) or unique (far from it). What is a bit different in that you seem willing to take the right path, willing to take the time and expense to save the original quality RIPs, but have some wrong assumptions and was being lead down the wrong path by ProWo.

@ProWo

Please stop recommending Handbrake and ripping to folder/files for every situation. As I said above. If it works for you, fine. But it's far from the best answer for most people and outright wrong for those looking to maintain quality. Not everyone wants or needs the quality loss that Handbrake gives at the cost of a few cents cost savings.

[johnmeyer]

Fifth, @ProWo and johnmeyer (whom I highly respect and trust in most matters), ripping to folders and .VOBs is the wrong approach. .VOBs are a specialized CONTAINER for Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 video as well as other info such as subs, chapters and menus, to use in the very specific specs for a Video DVD (read what What is DVD?. A significant issue with .VOBs is that it's limited by spec to 1GB. So even if convert the .VOB to it's native Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2, you not only lose the subs and chapters, you have usually have to join the multiple converted .VOBs automatically by the software or manually.

That's why, in both my posts, I suggested that he might want to eliminate the VOB structure by converting to an MPEG-2.

As to putting it into a different container, that seems like a step that provides no benefit. The video will be the same regardless of the container, assuming you can put it into another non-MPEG-2 container without re-encoding.

[lingyi]

Some devices, especially new devices balk at files with the .mpg or mpeg extension. I suspect it's because of the licensing requirement or poor implementation of how the software recognizes the file, by contained format or by extension/wrapper/container. The super cheap/awful built in media players are notorious for this.

As you stated, it's the same issue with .VOB. Yes, there's some extra overhead and features in a .VOB, but it's just a container, yet some editing software balks at it. I don't know how hard it is, maybe it's really difficult to have the software just look at the format and ignore everything else.

[ProWo]

@lingyi

STOP. Both the OP and especially ProWo.
Disregard anything ProWo has stated as he/she has a one track mindset that may work for him/her, but is far from the best/correct approach

What does my "one track mindset" (i think you refer to my software) have to do with my posts in this thread? I showed the OP two options, one is the merged rip of the VTS.vobs (lossless) and the other is the rip with subsequent encoding with Handbrake and MakeMKV. No more and no less.

@ProWo
Please stop recommending Handbrake and ripping to folder/files for every situation.

Every situation ???

[abolibibelot]

@ lingyi
Well that was... thorough ! Definitely TL, but I did read... or at least attempt to gather the gist of each paragraph in a few broad glances.

Video vs Data DVDs. As I stated and linked to What is DVD? above, a Video DVD has a very strict and specific structure and video requirement. Only Mpeg-1 or Mpeg 2 can be used with a max resolution of 720x480 for NTSC, 720x576 for PAL and a max bitrate of ~9800bp/s. That's it. Any other video types or higher resolutions must be burned to the blank DVD (or for Mpeg-2, to a Blu-Ray blank) as a Data DVD. A Data DVD can contain any type of video or other file just like those on your hard drive.

This was definitely worth mentioning — it's not clear at all if those 2000 DVDs are video DVD, data DVD with video files stored in them, or both. Not the same approach at all.

But the OP want's .MP4! There are two ways to do this, one is to remux (take the video from the .MKV container and place it into an .MP4 container without any encoding), I'll leave it others to recommend a program, since I've never had to do this, I think AVIDemux can do it. Or open the .MKV in Handbrake and encode it to H264 (or any other format), and place the video into an .MP4 container. The first retains the full quality of the original video, the second loses quality, no matter how small.

As far as I know, can't put MPEG video / audio into a MP4 container.
Avidemux may not be the most convenient for batch processing (well I haven't used it in a long time). Handbrake is has a relatively easy to use interface, but some default settings are sub-optimal (for instance it can decide to crop to 4:3 based on its analysis if there happens to be a mix of 16:9 and 4:3 sequences in a documentary – at least that's how it behaved when I used it regularly, also quite long ago), and it takes about as much effort to get it right as to learn to set the right settings with a more complex software, like MeGUI. Or ffmpeg if a command line interface isn't too intimidating – once it's set right it's very easy to batch process a gigantic folder, here's a recent example.

DVDFab and AnyDVD can RIP to folders (which I've stated above is basically useless) or .ISO (container).

VLC Media Player or MPC-HC (and probably other software players) can play DVD folders just fine.

So must people, just say "MP4 is the most compatible!" without understanding that .MP4 is just a container and it's the H.264/X.264 format that's widely supported. Actually, for Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 has for decades been the most compatible format.

But not for streaming – although I couldn't explain exactly why.

I'm sure there are many tired of my posting about this, but a real life self torture due to stupidity. I accidentally formatted both my primary and backup drives (more about backups below).

And you couldn't recover the files after the (stupid indeed) fact ? Normally after a simple format it's quite easy to recover almost everything. Most of my movie collection is made from recoveries of a few 3-4 TB HDDs purchased used and formatted by the owners ! (Including ~150GB of kung-fu / katana movies, happy me. There was also a huge folder of p0rn on the same one as those, deeply nested inside a folder named "Other". Not the worst kind, guy had very decent taste actually. I've seen much worse on a laptop HDD why had presumably belonged to a nice and polite family man – like hundreds of pictures of boring vacations and sunday lunches with relatives, and then a big (sub-sub-)folder with the likes of "GB my face IV". Urk.)

If you're planning to reencode to .MP4, still keep your originals. So that's 1/4 to 1/2 additional storage you'll need for the .MP4s.

Well, if it's meant to be watched on a cell phone, 1/10 may be enough...

A single sided DVD can hold up to ~4.38GB and a double sided DVD can hold ~8.75GB (this is actual capacity after formatting).

This is the actual capacity, period. It's always due to the confusion between base 10 units used for marketing and base 2 units used in computer talk. Hence "4.7GB" being actually only 4.377GB. There's no special "formatting" involved in regular DVDs, only discs formatted in UDF for "packet writing" have a significantly reduced capacity. (I used that long, long ago for doing backups on CD-RW.)

DVD Ripping - OP, understand that ~2000 discs whether you rip or just copy the files directly is a weeks or months long project. Ripping a DVD takes ~10-15 minutes per disc, multiple times that time if you're ripping and encoding as johnmeyer stated. Add several more multiples of that time if you're editing and tweaking. Now you're talking hours per disc! 2000 discs = 20-30,000 minutes, ~300-500 hours!
[...]
Editing. Not only is editing time consuming, but there are too many variables for any number of preset filters to work for every video. If you're at all serious about tweaking your videos, you'll need to learn command line AVISynth scripting which can take hours, days or weeks in itself.

There's that. And the related question is, is someone going to actually watch it all, making it worth the trouble ? It may be wiser to sort out what among this humongous mountain of bytes is 1) really interesting, 2) mildly interesting, 3) barely interesting, and 4) probably not interesting at all for any living soul. Start with ripping category 1) and perhaps 2), see how long it takes, decide which discs among category 1) would benefit the most from special enhancements, decide if it's more important, with the amount of time you can reasonably devote to that task, to improve those as much as possible before showing the result (considering that, as it's been said, this would be a much more complex task, and much more time-consuming per hour of footage) or to continue ripping the discs from the next categories. Or, if all 2000 discs shall be processed with specific enhancement filtering, perhaps begin writing some detailed instructions for your heirs to carry on the project "when this mortal coil slips its icy cold fingers around your neck and chokes the last bit of life out of your bones" (still, make sure they have enough spare time to produce offspring of their own, so that someone, someday, can benefit from the whole endeavour, and marvel at what life used to be like all those decades ago, rather than, I don't know, living their own, if such a thing is still possible by then, yeah I'm in a good mood these days).

To quote myself :

There's a brilliant little novel called L'ironie du sort by the almost forgotten french writer Paul Guimard, where near the end the main character opens a book of pictures and tells the story of the entire family tree of his future wife over a century by describing about a dozen of pictures – that's about all there was then and each one meant a world. Now we're flooded by countless pictures devoid of meaning beyond the split second they were taken, that for the most part noone will care to look at in the future, and yet people are somehow relieved that they have them stored somewhere, as if they felt that any event not thoroughly documented and stored as digital files did not actually happen, and therefore they didn't actually exist.
------
In my case, [...] I did some tests, but not thorough enough to be able to say anything conclusive – and after all those years, those tapes may have further degraded, to the point where I'm wondering if it's even worth the trouble. Most of those tapes contain TV footage recorded between 1999 and 2002 (generally on 4 hours tapes, which means that in LP mode each of them contains a whopping 8 hours of footage), most of which can not be found anywhere (for public access at least). But nowadays, I record each year such an insane amount of stuff that I couldn't possibly catch up and watch even the best 10% of it, unless someone designs some kind of Dragon Ball Time Room, or unless it's the end of the world and I have Time Enough At Last... There always seems to be something more interesting to do – like reading forum threads on the best possible methods to digitize those old and mostly obsolete recordings, which, if I ever get it done finally, I may not even have the time and desire to actually watch anyway !

[sophisticles]

And you couldn't recover the files after the (stupid indeed) fact ? Normally after a simple format it's quite easy to recover almost everything. Most of my movie collection is made from recoveries of a few 3-4 TB HDDs purchased used and formatted by the owners ! (Including ~150GB of karate/katana movies, happy me. There was also a huge folder of p0rn on one of those, deeply nested inside a folder named "Other". Not the worst kind, guy had very decent taste actually. I've seen much worse on a laptop HDD why had presumably belonged to a nice and polite family man – like hundreds of pictures of boring vacations and sunday lunches with relatives, and then a big folder with the likes of "GB my face IV". Urk.)

I have never been able to recover any file after a delete, much less a format.

I used Linux, and have tried with btrfs, ext4, ntfs, and xfs file systems and no matter was tools I have tried, including photorec and testdisk and the best I have been able to do is recover the name of a title and some text files and pdf's but these files would not open and showed as corrupt.

In the old FAT days it was possible to recover data fairly easily, but with modern file systems, I would like to see someone actually do it.

[abolibibelot]

I have never been able to recover any file after a delete, much less a format.

From what I read Linux filesystems are less forgiving when it comes to data recovery by means of filesystem analysis {*}. But so-called "raw" file recovery by means of file signature search, which is what Photorec does, should still yield results. However, if the files were fragmented, then that result will be very poor, as it's almost impossible to guess where the next fragments are located on the drive's surface with no reference to the cluster chain in the filesystem's metadata. (Photorec attempts to do so but in my experience it's not reliable at all. Some more advanced file carvers purport to recover fragmented files with a high degree of efficiency – haven't tested so couldn't say.)
There's also the special case of SSDs – they have a specific feature called the "Trim command" which effectively wipes deleted files as a background task, so when a file is deleted from a fast SSD it usually gets very quickly overwritten with "00" bytes, thus becoming unrecoverable.

{*} Although, to speak from my own, arguably limited, experience, I once did a recovery for my former neighbour's sister of her old 250GB HDD which was having a lot of trouble (her future husband who thought he knew computers quite well had tried a bunch of data recovery softwares to no avail, they all choked during the scan because of too many bad sectors without actually recovering a single byte worth of data), and which, if I remember correctly, was formatted from Windows NTFS to Linux Ext3 filesystem, then back to NTFS. I first imaged it using ddrescue (with is the wise approach in a case like this – every sector that is correctly read gets secured right away on a "healthy" device, in this case it could copy almost everything except a few MB of bad sectors), and then R-Studio (an excellent recovery software which can analyse several filesystems) could identify both the NTFS filesystem and the Linux filesystem (with their specific structure and contents – some files / folders were on both, some only on NTFS, some only on Ext3, so it was like two snapshots of the same partition made at different times), with most files perfectly valid.
(I got paid two bowls and a pack of washing machine soap for that job.)

[lingyi]

@lingyi

STOP. Both the OP and especially ProWo.
Disregard anything ProWo has stated as he/she has a one track mindset that may work for him/her, but is far from the best/correct approach

What does my "one track mindset" (i think you refer to my software) have to do with my posts in this thread? I showed the OP two options, one is the merged rip of the VTS.vobs (lossless) and the other is the rip with subsequent encoding with Handbrake and MakeMKV. No more and no less.

@ProWo
Please stop recommending Handbrake and ripping to folder/files for every situation.

Every situation ???

I stand corrected. Looking at your history, you've posted in a lot more threads than I've read. But in those I have read/participated in, you often recommend Handbrake even if the OP is looking for other solutions, sometimes in the best quality (i.e. uncompressed) as the OP in this thread requested.

[lingyi]

According to this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats, .MP4 supports Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2. Don't remember if I tried Mpeg in an .MP4 container, but a while back, I did try putting several different formats into different containers to see if it made a difference in PotPlayer and VLC. They all worked fine, though it's probably not a fair comparison since they'll play just about video file regardless of container or extension, include none.

I didn't [try] unformatting a drive, I didn't do it back then, but I did try it on a later brain fart moment (one of too many more) using Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro, the paid version and while it did seem to be working, the recovery was going to take days, possibly weeks. Since I did have a backup this time, I just did a restore in ~24 hours for ~8TB.

Video files are more difficult to recover because of their size, more so if they're on a fragmented disk. I use Recuva for general file recovery and while it works great for smaller files, it's sometimes unable to fully recover recently deleted video files even though there's been on activity on the disk between deletion and recovery.

Back in the days of <2GB drives, I used to use and love Spinrite. I was able to AFAIK, fully recover the data on ~250GB drive that was riddled with bad blocks and sectors. Took several days but it was done!

[abolibibelot]

According to this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats, .MP4 supports Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2. Don't remember if I tried Mpeg in an .MP4 container, but a while back, I did try putting several different formats into different containers to see if it made a difference in PotPlayer and VLC. They all worked fine, though it's probably not a fair comparison since they'll play just about video file regardless of container or extension, include none.

Extension is irrelevant for software players, and for most if not all programs ; it's just a convenience to have the system directly identify what the file is and which program should open it by default ; I don't recall a situation where a program refused to open a file because it had the wrong extension.
Some software players may be able to play a MP4 file with MPEG video / audio, but I doubt most standalone players would happily play that. (Even models with decent playback abilities tend to choke at less "non-standard-ness" than that – recently I created this thread about a LG BRD player which won't play MKV files identified by MediaInfo as having a "variable framerate".)

I didn't unformatting a drive, I didn't do it back then, but I did try it on a later brain fart moment (one of too many more) using Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro, the paid version and while it did seem to be working, the recovery was going to take days, possibly weeks. Since I did have a backup this time, I just did a restore in ~24 hours for ~8TB.

Not sure I understood the beginning correctly... As for the recovery taking "days, possibly weeks", that's clearly abnormal if the drive itself is in good condition. With an NTFS filesystem, a quick analysis (which parses the MFT, not the full drive's surface) takes a few minutes at most, and is usually enough to display most if not all files / folders. Then the extraction process should be as fast as a copy of the same files / folders from the same drive. It can be significantly slower when copying a large number of small files, but that's the same when doing a regular / direct copy (i.e. not through a data recovery program) ; if the estimated time is calculated on the basis of the current extraction rate when copying a folder with thousands of small files, and the drive contains otherwise mostly large files, it won't accurately reflect the total time required for the whole extraction process.

Video files are more difficult to recover because of their size, more so if they're on a fragmented disk. I use Recuva for general file recovery and while it works great for smaller files, it's sometimes unable to fully recover recently deleted video files even though there's been on activity on the disk between deletion and recovery.

That's because large file (or even not so large files which are heavily fragmented) can be referenced by several MFT records, each one containing only a part of the cluster chain, and when such a file is deleted, the references to the secondary MFT records is wiped from the primary MFT record, so it's no longer possible to retrieve the complete cluster allocation information. Apparently for files larger than 4GB the cluster chain is wiped from the (single) MFT record even if the file is not fragmented, although I don't know exactly why, and I'm not sure if it's systematic (I'm pretty sure I've seen files larger than 4GB being fully recoverable).

https://forum.piriform.com/topic/41854-files-data-could-not-be-found-on-the-disk/
https://forum.piriform.com/topic/36987-finds-the-file-but-cant-recover-it/

Back in the days of <2GB drives, I used to use and love Spinrite. I was able to AFAIK, fully recover the data on ~250GB drive that was riddled with bad blocks and sectors. Took several days but it was done!

Data recovery experts strongly warn against using Spinrite, especially on a failing HDD. Whatever it does is unlikely to fix anything, and while it proceeds to trash the drive for hours or days, not a single byte is recovered.

[lingyi]

[QUOTE=abolibibelot;2588920][

I didn't unformatting a drive, I didn't do it back then, but I did try it on a later brain fart moment (one of too many more) using Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro, the paid version and while it did seem to be working, the recovery was going to take days, possibly weeks. Since I did have a backup this time, I just did a restore in ~24 hours for ~8TB.

Not sure I understood the beginning correctly... As for the recovery taking "days, possibly weeks", that's clearly abnormal if the drive itself is in good condition. With an NTFS filesystem, a quick analysis (which parses the MFT, not the full drive's surface) takes a few minutes at most, and is usually enough to display most if not all files / folders. Then the extraction process should be as fast as a copy of the same files / folders from the same drive. It can be significantly slower when copying a large number of small files, but that's the same when doing a regular / direct copy (i.e. not through a data recovery program) ; if the estimated time is calculated on the basis of the current extraction rate when copying a folder with thousands of small files, and the drive contains otherwise mostly large files, it won't accurately reflect the total time required for the whole extraction process.

LOL, I fixed it to "I didn't [try] unformatting the drive..."

As for the recovery taking days, it makes sense since it was an 8TB drive that takes ~20-24 hours to transfer drive to drive and another ~8-12 hours for a verify using Teracopy. From my understanding, unformatting isn't just restoring the File Allocation Table, it's scrubbing the drive restoring the data block by block or sector to sector. At least with Easeus Partition Magic, it takes multiple times the just copy operation when you move partitions. You can watch the read and write progress in the program.

Data recovery experts warn against using Spinrite, especially on a failing HDD. Whatever it does is unlikely to fix anything, and while it proceeds to trash the drive for hours or days, not a single byte is recovered.

I'm not an expert, but SpinRite definitely did allow recovery of data from drives that were badly corrupted. The drive I "fixed" and numerous others I used it on gave me back data that I couldn't access, at least with Windows. This was during the days before I discovered Linux distros. I even used it on a few corrupted flash drives. Note that this was always a last ditch effort, if the drive dies during the process, it dies. And was trashed after recovery. I always have a fan facing the drive during recovery because the temperatures spike as the programs works on a single block or sector.

I don't really understand how SpinRite actually works (worked), but my basic understanding is that at some level it's the same as what ISOBuster does for optical discs. It continually tries to read and verify the data in a bad block or sector until a set number attempts either works or falls, then it moves on. I used to love watching the DynaStat screen to see it trying to get past a certain section. It may have all been just fancy graphics (in DOS terms), but the program for me, worked well beyond anything the Windows utilities or the manufacturer's software could do.

I've read many of the 'expert' reviews about SpinRite and often the writers have a bias against Steve Gibson himself, not only claiming he didn't create SpinRite (which I believe is true since he's been unable/unwilling to update it), but some of his other free software also.

Bottom line. Real world experience for me. It worked!

[TDinTX]

Good day, all.
Does anyone know what format YouTube uses to store their HD video files on their servers for streaming?
When you upload an AVI file to YouTube, what format does YouTube convert the AVI file into for before storing it for streaming in HD ?
What software does YouTube use to do the conversion?
How do you know how YouTube does this conversion, personal knowledge??
THANKS!!
td

[manono]

They store in a couple of formats and many different resolutions. They use ffmpeg to encode. Why not install a YouTube download app that'll tell you all the various versions they've made?

How do you know how YouTube does this conversion, personal knowledge??

Just download one and have a look. Maybe try the free version of 4K Video Downloader.