Archiving my DVD Collection (Need some advice)

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D4rkside

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
165
So, I know there is the official Video encoding thread, and I read that, but I'm still a little clear on a few things...

First things to note; I'm mainly working on a Mac (running OS X Leopard) so help for doing the following tasks on OS X would be preferred, but I do have access to a Windowx XP box, and should be getting a new Desktop running Vista this summer, so Windows solutions are fine as well.

First, I have been making hard backups of my DVD's (Ripping the whole disc with MacTheRipper) then going into Toast Titanium (build 8) and writing them to a blank DVD-/+R using the VIDEO_TS option. I've got that part down pat, been working on it for a while.

However, now I'm getting tight for space (and will be moving into an even smaller place later this year) so I plan on leaving my hard DVD backups (and some of my original DVD's as well) at my parents house. I want to bring all my Television and movies with me, however, so here's where my dilema comes in...I've bought a few external hard drives, and plan on throwing a RAID into my Desktop when I get it, so disk space isn't too much of a concern...anyhow, I want to take the videos (be it the TV episodes or movies) from my DVD collection and encode them into AVI's so that I can watch them on my computer, or wherever without having to have access to the hard copies. I don't want the menus, extras or anything like that...just the actual main content. Also, I would like to encode them to DivX for video...and I'm not really sure how to go about the audio front (suggestions for codecs to use here and how to do that end of it are appreciated). Basically, I'm looking for good clean quality rips, but still compressed (down to maybe an average of 500MB for an hour of video or something like that).

Basically, I'm a complete noob when it comes to this...no idea how to do it, or where to start. I can rip the whole DVD, but how would I get just an AVI file of the video? Any guides, step by steps you can point me too would be great! Thanks in advance for any help :D
 
I've been ripping my DVDs and converting to h.264 using Nero Recode 2 that came with Nero 7 Ultimate. It works great and is fast. The quality is pretty decent at 1.6Mbps.

No guide is really necessary for Nero Recode 2. You just select import DVD, it picks out the main movie and audio track automatically and all you do is select the output format and whether you want one or two pass encoding. There are many advanced options but you don't need to mess with them.
 
I think I found a way to do this with Toast...will be testing it out to see how it works and get back to this after. Hopefully it works and produces good quality :p
 
Update: I couldn't find a way to do this in Toast, but what I have done is ripped the entire DVD with MacTheRipper, then used that VIDEO_TS folder as the Source in HandBrake and plan on encoding the VIDEO_TS folder into an AVI.

As for settings I'm going with H.264 for video (I wanted DivX but I guess HandBrake doesn't support it...) and for audio AC-3. I've decided to go with 2mbps as the rate, so we'll see how that goes...I might shrink it down to 1.5mbps to conserve disk space.

Obviously because of how long it takes to encode, I'll be waiting and doing it tonight while I sleep, so we'll have to wait for tomorrow to see the results ;)
 
I've been looking at doing this myself, and I've spent the past few nights going through various tutorials and different tools.

I had my first real success last night using meGui. It puts all the tools you need (except the ripper) into one wizard style program. And when I say success, I mean I ended up with a watchable video using a tool that I felt comfortable using in a reasonable amount of time.

These are all windows tools, but they're all free and very easy to use. I ripped and converted to a 2.5 hour DVD to H.264. It took about 3 hours to do the whole thing, maybe a bit longer.

After using a few different tools every night, I think I'll probably be sticking with meGui and DVD Decrypter.
 
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