Compress DVD While Keeping DVD Structure

[wrems]

It takes too much time to compress the DVD’s. I keep only the main movie, 1 audio track and a set of English subtitles just in case.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by wrems

It takes too much time to compress the DVD’s. I keep only the main movie, 1 audio track and a set of English subtitles just in case.

Eh, my servers on 24/7 and most of the time its just twiddling its thumbs. I just batch up a bunch of DVD/videos to encode at the start of the week and then let them run in the background at low priority. By default I make an mkv with compressed video, original main audio, compressed commentary tracks, closed captions, and chapters (Sage will support them some day ).

[[JiF]Mike]

Originally Posted by stanger89

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'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.

If you wanna talk numbers fine, however we are coming at this from 2 different points of view. To me getting the most out of my available space outweighs quality and time invested. You want the best quality possible for your movies and you want them converted quickly. Space doesn't really come into play..at least until you run out. Your method allows you to put ~200 DVD's per TB, my method puts ~1000 DVD's per TB. Neither of us is wrong. It's just how we do it. I love hearing how other people do things, and this has been a great thread IMHO.

[heatvent]

Just to throw my .02 in which not everyone will agree with. 3-5GB is arguably too much space for a movie. However, having a HDTV and all your movies are watchable but don't take full advantage of the resolution, also makes little sense to me. I kind of look at it as 3-5GB is the price to pay to get value out of my HDTV. I really wanted to believe I could enjoy a mkv file at 1.5 - 2GB per movie, I even had an older PC all lined up as my dedicated transcoder. Can't wait until there is a better compressed format that is crystal clear.

BTW, when that day comes, I will have a bunch of full quality DVD's ready to go.

[Fuzzy]

Y'know, the other option is to just put in the disc. Great quality, and doesn't take up ANY hard drive space. The key fact here is that, to me, ripping at all is strictly a matter of convenience. Therefore, the easiest/less personal involvement method, is what I prefer. Therefore, I use MakeMKV to grab the Main feature, with 1 Video, and 1 Audio... That's it. It shows up in Sage, plays when I tell it to, and I'm happy.

I've only ripped a couple blu-rays onto the drive, and those are the ones that get repetitively played (kids movies.. Tinkerbell is the most often)... pretty steep at like 17.5GB I think for just the main movie.. but it sure does look pretty! I, of course, COULD compress it, but I've got nowhere NEAR a limit on space right now, so it would not be worth the better part of a day or so crunching away at it.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by [JiF]Mike

If you wanna talk numbers fine, however we are coming at this from 2 different points of view. To me getting the most out of my available space outweighs quality and time invested. You want the best quality possible for your movies and you want them converted quickly. Space doesn't really come into play..at least until you run out. Your method allows you to put ~200 DVD's per TB, my method puts ~1000 DVD's per TB. Neither of us is wrong. It's just how we do it. I love hearing how other people do things, and this has been a great thread IMHO.

Absolutely true. And FWIW, I've tried encoding, over and over again. I'd love to be able th 1/5 the HDDs I need for my moves, but I've never been able to get anywhere close to 5:1 reduction in size without significant quality issues.

From my experiments I've been lucky to get a 5:3 reduction. And even then there are quality issues. I've spent hours trying to get encodes that I find accptable, but I just can't do it. Especially not if I know the DVD is sitting there on the shelf and the quality is better (and heck, even half my DVDs I don't want to watch because I know the BD exits).

If I could find a truly transparent and automatic transcoding method that resulted in a 5:1 reduction in size, heck even as low as 3:1 probably, I'd be all over it. I haven't found it. If you want transparency and minimum file size it means doing several encodes of each movie with different settings to find the ones that can handle the movie without obvious artifacts.

And it gets even harder when you start talking about TV shows, there you've got to, figure out which IVTC/Deinterlacing algorithm to use, and make sure the IVTC/Deinterlacing got done right. And heck, even after all that it probably won't have worked as well as the VP in the display.

It's great you've found a solution that gives you the huge space savings at a quality you're happy with. I wish that were something other than untranscoded DVD for me.

And then there's Blu-ray. I haven't even considered transcoding those. I just rip the movie only with the audio I want. I spent enough time failing with DVD that I've learned my lesson and I'm not going to waste my time/effort trying to encoded BDs.

Originally Posted by heatvent

Just to throw my .02 in which not everyone will agree with. 3-5GB is arguably too much space for a movie.

With current technology, H.264 and VC1 compression, I agree, 3-5GB for SD is from a master quality source would be crazy for any new content generated today.

However DVD is unfortunately a bit different. It's still using old compression that's imparted artifacts on the content, thus it's really about as small as it can get without some significant (and often user-time-consuming) processing tweaking.

However, having a HDTV and all your movies are watchable but don't take full advantage of the resolution, also makes little sense to me. I kind of look at it as 3-5GB is the price to pay to get value out of my HDTV. I really wanted to believe I could enjoy a mkv file at 1.5 - 2GB per movie, I even had an older PC all lined up as my dedicated transcoder. Can't wait until there is a better compressed format that is crystal clear.

Oh, H.264 and VC1 are more than capable of producing DVD (or better) quality SD at even probably 1GB/movie. The problem is they require a pristine, master-quality source to do that. DVD is not that source. And that's the problem. Given that DVD is a compromised format, with compression artifacts and undesired processing applied (DNR, EE, etc) there's no way to get better than (or even equal to) DVD quality after compressing it again.

Like I said, I don't like using 5.44GB/DVD on my server for my ~500 DVDs, if I could make that Even 1TB that would be great. But I've tried everything I can find, and while it might be possible with H.264 and some fancy AVISynth scripts, I'm not going to devote the time to generate those scripts, and to double check them for each movie. When it comes right down to it, it costs about $0.35 to put a full-quality DVD on an HDD, my time is worth more than that.

And heck, I'm actually sorta looking to sell most of my DVDs. Bring on BD baby.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

If I could find a truly transparent and automatic transcoding method that resulted in a 5:1 reduction in size, heck even as low as 3:1 probably, I'd be all over it. I haven't found it. If you want transparency and minimum file size it means doing several encodes of each movie with different settings to find the ones that can handle the movie without obvious artifacts.

First off, I'm not, by any means, trying to convince you that encoding things is a good idea, and I'm certainly not going to claim that there isn't a loss in quality when you transcode- obviously there's going to be. But, for anyone interested, its been my experience that the Handbrake constant quality preset with the decomb filter (using fixed settings, for some reason 0.9.3 was released with the wrong decomb setting according to at least one developer) and variable frame rate encoding, does a pretty good job on TV shows/DVDs. I'm not saying its perfect, and I'm sure it wouldn't be acceptable to a fair number of people on the forums, but it does better than any custom settings I ever came up with. And, depending on the episode/movie, it usually drops 1 hour of video down to just over 1gig.

Really, I think the main result of closely inspecting and comparing DVD rips to Handbrake encodes has been that I've gotten more disappointed with the quality of DVDs. It seems like most of the video quality issues that are visible enough to bother me are also clearly visible on the DVD rip. So, one of these days I'm going to have to get a blu-ray drive and a 2TB hard drive. The blu-ray drives are pretty cheap now, so I'm mostly dragging my feet on the hard drive. I'd like prices to come down a bit, and installing it is going to be a pain, since I have to start replacing 500GB drives instead of just throwing new drives in.

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Y'know, the other option is to just put in the disc. Great quality, and doesn't take up ANY hard drive space. The key fact here is that, to me, ripping at all is strictly a matter of convenience. Therefore, the easiest/less personal involvement method, is what I prefer. Therefore, I use MakeMKV to grab the Main feature, with 1 Video, and 1 Audio... That's it. It shows up in Sage, plays when I tell it to, and I'm happy.

I've only ripped a couple blu-rays onto the drive, and those are the ones that get repetitively played (kids movies.. Tinkerbell is the most often)... pretty steep at like 17.5GB I think for just the main movie.. but it sure does look pretty! I, of course, COULD compress it, but I've got nowhere NEAR a limit on space right now, so it would not be worth the better part of a day or so crunching away at it.

Then I would have to get off my butt

Also, I think you mean "leave" it on the disc.

[dooferlad]

The reason I am looking at MKV (currently trialing Handbrake, Film, Constant quality video with AC3 sound is looking good) is HDD space at 3Gb/movie costs less than a DVD cabinet from Ikea. I can put the DVDs in cardboard boxes under a bed and forget about them if the UI can help me find what I am looking for quickly.

I do like the search function in the default Sage UI, but I would like to experiment with what would happen if you searched by selecting metadata tags, each selection refining your selection. I think a single genre would probably be too restrictive - you probably don't want to be restricted by frilling in forms like the current metadata tends to be, but to have just a collection of free form tags. If I had any free time I would start experimenting!

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dooferlad

The reason I am looking at MKV (currently trialing Handbrake, Film, Constant quality video with AC3 sound is looking good) is HDD space at 3Gb/movie costs less than a DVD cabinet from Ikea. I can put the DVDs in cardboard boxes under a bed and forget about them if the UI can help me find what I am looking for quickly.

You realize "uncompressed", movie only DVDs average ~4-5GB?

[dooferlad]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You realize "uncompressed", movie only DVDs average ~4-5GB?

Indeed. A month ago I didn't really look at disks larger than 1TB, but now you can find 1.5TB for £70 in the UK the argument for compressing is vanishing fast. At those prices I only need to fit a movie into 4.1GB for HDD storage to cost less than Ikea shelving and since time and electricity are both costs of doing the compression I think disk images are the way to go.

[gplasky]

Well almost any DVD utility such as DVDshrink or DVDFab will make a movie fit on a single sided DVD. That would keep the size no larger than 4.4 GB. Some can be adjusted so that final size is smaller. (4.1 GB if you want) And choosing just the movie will give you a better picture than choosing all the extra features and menus. This will also put it in the recommended format you will find in the SageTV manual.

Gerry

[dooferlad]

If I am going to transcode I will do it to MKV/H264/AC3. If I am going to use MPEG2 I will just copy the whole disk.

I think since zero effort is what I am aiming for I will just start copying whole disks. It is low effort enough that I don't care about backups and storage is so low cost these days it is beginning to make sense. If I could magically cut out the bits I didn't want and retain some menu structure then that would be great, but it sounds like I would have to do more than insert disk and select copy.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by dooferlad

If I am going to transcode I will do it to MKV/H264/AC3. If I am going to use MPEG2 I will just copy the whole disk.

I think since zero effort is what I am aiming for I will just start copying whole disks. It is low effort enough that I don't care about backups and storage is so low cost these days it is beginning to make sense. If I could magically cut out the bits I didn't want and retain some menu structure then that would be great, but it sounds like I would have to do more than insert disk and select copy.

Not really, DVD Fab saves the settings. So I have mine set for Movie only. Insert disk, set directory from dropdown (it remembers the path), click start.

Gerry

[dooferlad]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Not really, DVD Fab saves the settings. So I have mine set for Movie only. Insert disk, set directory from dropdown (it remembers the path), click start.

Gerry

Ahh, good point. It is free as well :-)