Encoding/Ripping DVDs - Quality Settings

[djoy]

I thought I'd ask this here as I suspect the answer will be interesting to more than just me.

I've bought myself a little media box for watching video files on the TV (since DVDs have gone the way of the dodo), I bought the Popcorn Hour A-110 and can thoroughly recommend it, very very impressive little piece of equipment, it plays back the HD LLVJ downloads perfectly.

Now I'm looking at getting the DVDs I have ( 1-16 ) onto it, so I can have the full set on hand to peruse at will. I've checked the FAQ and there seems to be some advice there on how to rip the DVDs for things like AppleTV and iPods, so I'm guessing that doing this is permitted.

I've tried using Handbrake, which works well, only the files are coming out very large.

For example, LLVJ18 has a 35 minute interview with Jack Dykinga in High Def (1280x720), which is 486mb, using H.264 encoding at 29.xx fps, and looks excellent.
My test rip of the 23 minute D30 review from LLVJ01 in Low Def (720x480) at 15fps (de-interlaced) using the SAME codecs (H.264) comes out at 832mb! Clearly, if I'm using the same codecs then I'm using some outlandish settings to get such huge files for lower quality video...

Now, I have the tools, what I lack is the experience to know where the sweet spots in the settings are, and so I was hoping Chris would share his sage-like wisdom and let us in on the secret. I'd be interested to know what software Chris favours for encoding the LLVJ downloads, and what quality settings are used. Do we go for a constant quality rate, or an average bit-rate?

Can you shed any light on this for us Chris?

[Christopher Sanderson]

I also use HandBrake for the basic DVD rip. Then for the actual videos, I use MPEG StreamClip set to these encode 'Export to MPEG-4' settings:

My recipes assuming a 16:9 aspect ratio:

For the Web and so-called SD:
Codec: H264
Single Pass for low motion interviews etc. Multipass for my wobblycam location sequences; B-Frames
Data Rate: 1.1Mbps
640 x 360 px
Deinterlace where needed; 29.97 fps
Sound: MPEG-4 AAC Stereo when music is used, otherwise Mono; 44.1 kHz 128 kbs

For Apple TV and other so-called HD devices:
Codec: H264
Single Pass for low motion interviews etc. Multipass for my wobblycam location sequences; B-Frames
Data Rate: 2.1 to 2.5 Mbps (occasionally I will up this as far as 3.5Mbs if I see pixellation or banding - iterative process)
1280 x 720 px
Deinterlace where needed; 29.97 fps
Sound: MPEG-4 AAC Stereo when music is used, otherwise Mono; 44.1 kHz 128 kbs

Have fun!

Chris

[samirkharusi]

Nice to learn what your latest compression method is, but here's my quick and dirty "ripping" from any DVD to a hard drive using a PC while maintaining the quality as the original author intended. I just "Explore" the DVD, select all the files in the VIDEO_TS folder and copy them onto the hard drive. Rename all the .VOB files to .mpg and that's it! Now I can view the whole shebang on my TV using a WD-TV media player (under $100). Menus are not functional but the quality is as per original. One day somebody will write some trivial software that can play a DVD image on a hard-drive straight onto a TV. I will then rename all the .mpg back to .VOB. Takes around 8 minutes to copy all the video files and another 3 to 4 minutes to rename. No re-encoding involved. By the way, this seems also to work with editing, i.e. the renamed .mpg files are acceptable to Sony Vegas and I can do whatever I wish with them, e.g. join them up onto one file or whatever. So far I heve not needed any fancy demuxing or whatever. Any editing, of course, involves re-encoding and hours, as opposed to minutes.

If one knows how to play a hard-drive DVD image straight onto a TV, without re-encoding, complete with functional menus, please speak up... Seems that there is a market for it, and the software can hardly be very difficult to write. Every consumer DVD player already has it.

[Christopher Sanderson]

Check this out for more info