Encoding TV shows from DVD with bookmarks...

[nzdreamer55]

I have a little project where I am taking TV series (think things like Friends, Seinfeld) that we have on DVD (owned not Netflix or other source) and am trying to convert to a compressed format (e.g. mp4) for play on my blackberry storm, blackberry curve, and ipod for keeping the wife calm on our winter travels via airplane. Right now I have windows based computers (XP and Vista) and use itunes for the ipod file management. The blackberry management is simple drag and drop from my computer.

I realize there are many ways to do this so let me tell you where I have been so you have a starting point of where to suggest I go (hopefully not the H.E.double hockey sticks).

I don't have any problem with getting the VOB files from the DVD's to a hard drive. I am using DVD43 for decrypting and 1click DVD Copy Pro for this.

To date I have used handbrake (0.9.3) build for windows for converting to a compressed format and have settings that I am fairly happy with. I could use a different program though.

I would like to be able to create a compressed file format (e.g. mp4) file of an entire season of the show with bookmarks/chapter marks (are these different?) so that one can skip through the season and the files can be organized by entire season.

I know how to join VOB files and use VOBmerge with good success.

In an ideal world this process of combining VOB files then converting to a compressed format (.mp4) would be able to be batched process, but if you have a solution that is not automated that would be considerable too. I have posted in the newbie section as this is my first post to the forum and my searches seem to only turn up slightly relevant issues.

I am sure that this info is on the forum somewhere and would be happy with just a reply as to where to look if a more in depth response isn't available.

Thanks you in advance.

Steve

[Baldrick]

mp4 and mkv supports chapters but I guess the problem is that many software players and portable devices does not supports such features so it pretty useless today.

But you can try, convert episodes to several mp4s using handbrake and then join them all to one mp4 using YAMB and add chapters for each episode and see how it works.

[nzdreamer55]

Thanks so much for the reply.

I see that you post a lot so, I assume that you know a lot about this kind of thing.

Is there a better way of doing something like this?

I want to take several DVD's that have between 4-6 episodes per disk and convert them into one mp4 file that can be loaded onto an ipod (or other portable media player) but has some sort of way to skip through the episodes quickely other than just fast fowarding through them.

Maybe making 1 mp4 file isn't going to work, but any help you can give me is much apperciated.

I tried the Tmpgeinc DVD authoring works 4. This was great to put the episodes together and output in DVD format. From there I could encode with handbrake, however if the episoids were larger than 8.5gb authoring works would not write the file since it was not compatible with standard DVD sructure. I tried writing a Blueray disk, but handbrake does not encode from this type of format that I am aware of.

Thanks Baldrick.

Steve