Compress DVD While Keeping DVD Structure

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by heatvent

The mkv route sounded great but to me, there are noticable artifacts from the transcoding compared to the original DVD.

Presumably when you say the the mkv route you mean the H.264 route. Purely out of curiosity, what settings did you use (or what size were you trying to get the movies down to)?

FYI, I gave MakeMKV a quick try and it rips the dvd in less than a half an hour. Personally, I don't see the point when it comes to Sage, if you are not getting space savings, I would much rather have menu support.

I agree it only makes sense to do something like MakeMKV if the menus are a problem. But they can create problems. I don't like going through menus to get to TV episodes. Also, the menus are (partially) responsible for not being able to stream ripped DVDs over placeshifter.

MakeMKV is interesting, and looks relatively easy to use. I might try it with movies. It troubles me that it doesn't always work though. Taddeusz, when you say it doesn't work, what do you mean? And what do you do in those instances?

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Presumably when you say the the mkv route you mean the H.264 route. Purely out of curiosity, what settings did you use (or what size were you trying to get the movies down to)?



I agree it only makes sense to do something like MakeMKV if the menus are a problem. But they can create problems. I don't like going through menus to get to TV episodes. Also, the menus are (partially) responsible for not being able to stream ripped DVDs over placeshifter.

MakeMKV is interesting, and looks relatively easy to use. I might try it with movies. It troubles me that it doesn't always work though. Taddeusz, when you say it doesn't work, what do you mean? And what do you do in those instances?

I used handbrake using the following presets

Film
Constant quality rate

I noticed edges were not as sharp and visable artifacts under both settings.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by heatvent

FYI, I gave MakeMKV a quick try and it rips the dvd in less than a half an hour. Personally, I don't see the point when it comes to Sage, if you are not getting space savings, I would much rather have menu support.

What's the point of having the menus if all you care about is the movie? Also DVD rips are incapable of being played from Placeshifter making them quite limited.

[stanger89]

Only if you a) use placeshifter and b) watch "DVDs" on it.

Personally I do neither, so I'd much rather have chapters (for movies) and menus (for TV DVDs) than placeshifter support.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Personally I do neither, so I'd much rather have chapters (for movies) and menus (for TV DVDs) than placeshifter support.

I'm really, really hoping we get mkv chapter support in the near future. I think people have been saying that for a while, so I'm not sure how likely it is.

Out of curiosity, why do you prefer to have menus for TV show DVDs compared to pulling out the episodes separately? It seems like tools like BMI work much better when you pull them out, plus you can more quickly get to the episode you want to watch if you don't have to go through a menu.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Taddeusz, when you say it doesn't work, what do you mean? And what do you do in those instances?

When I say it doesn't work the program goes through all the motions and produces a file of the correct length. But when I try to play the video it doesn't won't play in any program. I'm sure it will eventually get fixed.

What I do otherwise is rip the vob set to a single vob with DVD Decrypter. Process the vob through VideoRedo's quickstream fix to a real MPEG program stream to correct the audio sync. Then drop that into mkvmerge.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Out of curiosity, why do you prefer to have menus for TV show DVDs compared to pulling out the episodes separately? It seems like tools like BMI work much better when you pull them out, plus you can more quickly get to the episode you want to watch if you don't have to go through a menu.

"Better" is as always a matter of opinion

First splitting all the DVDs into episodes is a PITA, especially compared to just ripping the DVD.

Second, splitting them out would cause them to be no longer listed as DVDs, but as videos, so they'd be mixed in with all my misc videos rather than nicely categorized with the rest of my DVDs.

If you want to watch a couple episodes in a row (which is actually normal for me) it's easier to just start an episode and let the DVD play than to get interrupted when one ends.

And as for metadata, I use DVD Profiler for all my discs, and it knows nothing about episodes.

The first two are really the big ones. It's way too much work to rip each episode individually, especially when (IIRC) a good number of my discs have all the episodes stored as one title. But even if that's not the case you've got to rename each episode file manually (AFAIK).

Bigger though is that organization of individual imported episodes just isn't very good.

Maybe Blu-ray (if they start tending to not have a playlist of all the episodes) and/or the upcoming Phoenix or Sage 7 will change the equation. If there comes some better TV show handling, something that keeps them separate from misc videos and groups them by show, or if Blu-ray makes viewing some episodes impossible, I'll have to re-evaluate...

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by stanger89

First splitting all the DVDs into episodes is a PITA, especially compared to just ripping the DVD..

MediaShink

Originally Posted by stanger89

Second, splitting them out would cause them to be no longer listed as DVDs, but as videos, so they'd be mixed in with all my misc videos rather than nicely categorized with the rest of my DVDs.

SageMC + BMT + TV Explorer does a wonderful job of handling this. It give me a list of all my TV shows (recorded intermixed with imported) and lets me navigate by show->season->episode. Its fantastic.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

MediaShink

Only works if each episode is an individual title right? I've got a decent number that aren't. And I don't want anything "shrunk"

SageMC + BMT + TV Explorer does a wonderful job of handling this. It give me a list of all my TV shows (recorded intermixed with imported) and lets me navigate by show->season->episode. Its fantastic.

Not a big fan of SageMC personally

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

What's the point of having the menus if all you care about is the movie? Also DVD rips are incapable of being played from Placeshifter making them quite limited.

I'll explain. MakeMKV does lossless conversion to MKV. If you have a 6GB DVD, you basically end up with a 6GB MKV instead. So if I'm not a placeshifter user (it may be hard to believe, but I am not), I just lost my chapters. To answer your question specifically, the reason the DVD people came up with chapters, is if you want to go to specific point in the movie for some reason. You may think it's crazy, but the DVD industry seems to thing it's worthwhile.

Now suppose I was a placeshifter user. I probably would use some other program to go from DVD to MKV and save space. Placeshifter is just going to transcode and lower the quality anyway.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by heatvent

To answer your question specifically, the reason the DVD people came up with chapters, is if you want to go to specific point in the movie for some reason. You may think it's crazy, but the DVD industry seems to thing it's worthwhile.

I definitely detect the sarcasm. But MakeMKV does in fact extract the chapter markers along with all the other streams. Certainly it's a slight inconvenience for now but I expect that SageTV will eventually support MKV chapters. Not sure how soon but they've been progressing since they now support MKV subtitles.

Originally Posted by heatvent

Now suppose I was a placeshifter user. I probably would use some other program to go from DVD to MKV and save space. Placeshifter is just going to transcode and lower the quality anyway.

However, I'm not JUST a Placeshifter user. For me MakeMKV has the advantage of keeping the original quality of the DVD for viewing at home and putting it in a format that is capable of being played from within Placeshifter. Certainly this is not a perfect solution for everyone but for me it is much better than either of the alternatives. When MKV chapters are supported it will then be a perfect solution.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Only works if each episode is an individual title right? I've got a decent number that aren't.

It'll handle two cases...

1. When each episode has its own title
2. When each episode has its own title and there's another, separate, title that includes all the episodes

The overwhelming majority of DVD's I've run into are #2, a few are #1, and I've only seen a one that has all of the episodes in a single title, separated only by chapters, without individual titles (Sports Night). Out of curiosity, which DVD sets do you have that are that way?

Originally Posted by stanger89

And I don't want anything "shrunk"
Not a big fan of SageMC personally

Perfectly valid reasons.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

It'll handle two cases...

1. When each episode has its own title
2. When each episode has its own title and there's another, separate, title that includes all the episodes

The overwhelming majority of DVD's I've run into are #2, a few are #1, and I've only seen a one that has all of the episodes in a single title, separated only by chapters, without individual titles (Sports Night). Out of curiosity, which DVD sets do you have that are that way?

A bunch of anime sets, it's probably darn near half of them.

[[JiF]Mike]

I'm sorry but I have to disagree that storage is cheap enough that you should simply drop a whole DVD worth of data onto your hard drive. Sure 1TB drives are around $100 and that is cheaper than it use to be...but it's still $100! I don't have cash to just throw around, and I doubt I am the only one. Plus many of the bonus features I never even watch, or watch once, so why waste the space? I use DVDShrink to create an ISO of my DVD and then use Fair Use Wizard to compress the movie using xvid. I usually set my file size depending on how much action there is, action movies with surround sound clock in around 1.5GB but comedy movies I go with stereo sound and make them around 800MB or so. I watch these movies on a 61" DLP TV and while they aren't HD they are easily watchable. I currently have over 400 movies on my 1TB drive and still, there's plenty of room left for more.

DVDShrink will however keep the DVD structure if you want too. You can even change the settings so no compression takes place, preserving full quality and all features. You can even choose which features to keep and which to omit.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by [JiF]Mike

I'm sorry but I have to disagree that storage is cheap enough that you should simply drop a whole DVD worth of data onto your hard drive. Sure 1TB drives are around $100 and that is cheaper than it use to be...but it's still $100! I don't have cash to just throw around, and I doubt I am the only one. Plus many of the bonus features I never even watch, or watch once, so why waste the space? I use DVDShrink to create an ISO of my DVD and then use Fair Use Wizard to compress the movie using xvid. I usually set my file size depending on how much action there is, action movies with surround sound clock in around 1.5GB but comedy movies I go with stereo sound and make them around 800MB or so. I watch these movies on a 61" DLP TV and while they aren't HD they are easily watchable. I currently have over 400 movies on my 1TB drive and still, there's plenty of room left for more.

DVDShrink will however keep the DVD structure if you want too. You can even change the settings so no compression takes place, preserving full quality and all features. You can even choose which features to keep and which to omit.

I gotta be picky. WD 1TB Green drives are currently going for $85 on Newegg. I've seen them go for as low as $70-$75 when they're on special. Storage is cheap, but that doesn't mean everyone can afford it.

IMHO, H.264(AVC) is a better compression technique than xvid/divx. I'm not even sure how xvid/divx became an MPEG4 standard. Why should their be two completely different compression techniques defined as "MPEG4"? Anyway...

3-7GB per movie at full quality isn't horrible. BD rips are much worse. They really aren't yet worth storing at full quality at 15-25GB per movie.

After I got my HDTV I just saw how absolutely horrible my movies looked after they were converted. And now that I have 2TB of storage it doesn't really make any sense to spend the CPU time to transcode one lossy format to another. The compression artifacts generated in the process were no longer acceptable.

As a side note, the latest version of MakeMKV has corrected all the problems I was having with it. All the resulting mkv's that weren't able to be played before are now playable.

[[JiF]Mike]

I suppose I should mention the one big drawback to my method, it's friggin slow! lol Easily takes 2-3 hours per movie, but I have a pc that I've dedicated to converting the DVD's so it doesn't impact me at all. My keyboard time is about 10 minutes, then it just runs so it's not like I'm sitting there for hours.

As for xvid/divx/mpeg4 standard and all that, I gave up trying to figure out all the differences a while ago. I can't be of any use there, I just know that Xvid provides me with quality I am happy with. Fair Use Wizard can also compress to h.264, and i have used that a few times but I don't notice any difference. For all I know it's the same thing.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

After I got my HDTV I just saw how absolutely horrible my movies looked after they were converted. And now that I have 2TB of storage it doesn't really make any sense to spend the CPU time to transcode one lossy format to another. The compression artifacts generated in the process were no longer acceptable.

To be fair, weren't you encoding at a pretty low bitrate? Constant quality 50, or something like that? I have mine set at 62, which creates significant larger files, but significantly better video quality too.


[JiF]Mike-
If you think xvid encoding is slow then you really wouldn't like H.264. My quad core Q6600 can just barely do real-time encoding for DVDs.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by reggie14

To be fair, weren't you encoding at a pretty low bitrate? Constant quality 50, or something like that? I have mine set at 62, which creates significant larger files, but significantly better video quality too.

Yes, I was actually setting it at 52% which resulted in a CRF of 24.5. I also discovered after upgrading to the pre-release version of Handbrake that my custom profile might not be what I thought it was. But that doesn't really change the low bitrate quality that much. My average bitrate was around 600-700kbps. That gives decent quality on an SDTV. Looks poor on an HDTV.

I may still transcode some movies but use a significantly higher bitrate. Particularly those movies that are 4:3 letterboxed. They're a bit annoying on a wide TV as the aspect mode has to be adjusted to watch them "full screen." Transcoding them gives me the chance to crop the letterboxing out so that the movie will fit better on a 16:9 screen without needing to click a button on the remote.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by [JiF]Mike

I'm sorry but I have to disagree that storage is cheap enough that you should simply drop a whole DVD worth of data onto your hard drive. Sure 1TB drives are around $100 and that is cheaper than it use to be...but it's still $100!

And it holds 200 DVDs. At least approximately. That's about the average for a movie-only, no recompression rip.

Let's look at it another way, that's between $2000-4000 worth of movies.

You can get 1.5TB for ~$120 these days. Two, 1.5TB drives ~= 600 DVDs...

I don't have cash to just throw around, and I doubt I am the only one. Plus many of the bonus features I never even watch, or watch once, so why waste the space?

I'd guess if you took a poll, you'd find that most of the "don't bother recompressing" crowd strips out the main movie and audio tracks. That alone saves about 40% off the average disc size.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I'd guess if you took a poll, you'd find that most of the "don't bother recompressing" crowd strips out the main movie and audio tracks. That alone saves about 40% off the average disc size.

I only keep the main movie which includes one video stream, one audio stream and if it's a foreign film one subtitle stream along with the chapters.