Hi, Have read thru the forums but still a little confused on how to best achieve the following: I want to convert some of my DVD collection to whatever soft movie format so as to maintain the highest quality so that I can watch these via a networked Xbox / vista windows media player on my large 58-inch plasma. What is the best tool to use to convert these DVD's to retain quality ? Convert to what particular format ? What about settings, codec's, etc ?
I'm using Auto Gordian Knot 2.48b. It does a real good job of converting DVD to AVI. It's slow like 5 to 10 hours to do a DVD. I do my converting at night when I'm not using the computer for anything else.
The highest quality is to use the free dr.divx 2.0, it can convert VOB's directly to Divx. For me it produces the best quality that I have seen. It has different settings "home theatre", "Hd 720 setting", and a "1080 setting". This is the best free program to use. It's fairly easy to use, just use the default settings and you will get an excellent finished Divx.
Since I always get a debate regarding this, are you discussing DiVx Home theater playback, or just the best method of compression? I realize that many out there own DiVx certified players that allows one to compress a DVD to a single CD and play it back. That's not all that big of a deal anymore since a single CD and DVD are only cents apart in price so why not just go with a type 5 DVD-/+R? Now if you're looking for the latest technology to give you the absolute best compression with good quality that you can store multiple copies on a hard disk for indexed playback or streaming, then perhaps this will help a bit. DiVx and Xvid for mpeg compression have more or less been abandoned to a new but closely similar format, H.264. The developers of Xvid have abandoned it and are now working on X.264 and DiVx is currently beta testing an H.264 decoder. So the reality is to future proof your efforts it would make sense to encode to H.264. There are several different applications that can accomplish this although many are still in a kind of beat phase, but unfortunately many are commercial. Fairuse still offers a free version that limits the video size to 700 Mbs which is the same size of a DiVx home theater copy but with much better quality. A copy of this size probably doesn’t include a surround sound track since it would compete against video quality. I prefer to forget the single to CD disc backups and go for just a reduction in storage size. With Terabyte hard drives running for less than $250 it makes sense to consider hard disk storage. One can after all store. I prefer to encode my movies between 900 Megabytes to 1.2 gigabytes depending on the number of frames in a movie, I can keep a surround sound track and not interfere with the video quality of the encode. Imagine having 800 high quality movies on a single hard drive. You would have to have at least 8 spindles of 100 DVD-R discs at about the same costs to match it. Each time you want to play a DVD you would have to sift through your collection, choose a movie but don’t change your mind, and then put it away, but having movies organized and indexed on a hard drive that has wireless streaming capabilities, all that you will need is a remote control to do all of that. Other tools to look at that are still pretty simple but costs money (unless you're connected) are Mainconcept reference, and Canopus Procoder 3. DiVx will no doubt release one in the near future as well.
Thanks for the feedback Guys. In answer to some of your questions, my goal is to achieve the best method of compression with good quality so that I can create my own library of soft movies to stream from my pc to my TV via the Xbox (at this stage). Agree that H.264 format is the way to go. Will look into Canopus Procoder. Hard disk space is not my issue.. just bought another Terabyte for low $200+.. although I want to keep the files within some size constraints. I assume after reading various other forums that I will be able to play various media types (ie. AVi, DIVX, WMV, H.264, etc) on my TV via the Xbox without probs ... so long as they play in Windows Media Player 11 and I have the appropriate decoder packs applied. Playing these videos via the Xbox / windows media centre is another issue. What do you guys use for streaming you video files to your TV ?
The playback media is not necessarily and issue it's the decoder that is going to make the difference. Right now I am currently a Beta tester for DiVx' new H.264 decoder and it is looking pretty good but won't be available for some time. In the meantime I would recommend Coreavc's decoder because it is pretty fast which can be important while streaming.
After reading this thread, I got looking around myself. I have a pile of kids movies, and I hate going through the stacks of them, and organizing them, and cleaning them, and replacing them, so I thought we'd make a page with filenames and put the movies on a harddrive. I assumed I'd do avi's because the quality was decent for the size, since it looked like I have to make the harddrive a FAT32... but then I saw this thread. It looks like you can get a program to do h.264s for $15 from CoreAVC... but apparently it's just a codec according to the homepage. I don't mind paying a little for the codec, but if it doesn't come with the actual conversion program I had better be sure. What program do you actually use (after dvd fab/shrink/decrypter) to convert it from a VOB to an h264, assuming you bought the coreavc codec? Thanks in advance!
