Hello all.. I need some help please.. I have been ripping all my DVDs to ISO images so that I can play them using an WDTV and external USB drive. I strip out everything except the main movie and the AC3/6 sound track but the ISOs still tend to be 5GB in size. I would like to ask which method of converting these ISOs to avi files using Xvid, x264 (or something else) and would give me a lossless video movie which is smaller in size than the original ISO. I won't bother converting these ISOs if the video isn't 100% as good as the ISO version. Basically I just want to save space without giving up video quality. Can this be done? Thanks for your help..
No, you will always lose quality during the conversion. The best quality I've ever been able to achieve is using the DIVX codec, the finished conversion was to my eyes DVD quality. With DIVX sometimes I had audio/video sync problems and I moved to other codecs. Now I use the h264 codec, it is almost as good as DIVX, it just doesn't have that "pop" in color that DIVX has, but it's good enough for me. XVID will never look as good as h264 or DIVX unless you crank up the bitrate. A good h264 conversion will be in the 1GB range for a 2 hour movie. Fairuse wizard lite is a good free program you can try out to see which codec works for you, it has all the codecs (divx/h264/xvid) so you can test the codecs. It only converts ISO which you already have, and is the only software I use that can keep the audio/video in sync everytime. Make sure you always use the 2-pass mode, it's slower but gives you the best quality especially in fast changing scenes.
thanks for the reply.. I will give fairuse wizard a try. However I will probably just stick with my 5GB iso's since I don't want to sacrifice picture quality.. I was hoping I could find something lossless sorta like how AIFF's can become ALAC's with zero loss.
