DVD ripping - best file size and quality

[Voorhees51]

What is a good file size for ripping a DVD movie?
ex. 1G file for the movie or 2G file or ??

I am using ac3 audio, and xvid to rip to currently.

Is there a better video codec that I could use, I want to keep the ac3 for audio.

I'm looking for a decent size that will still maintain good picture quality but not fill up my hard drive with only a few movies ... aka not too big size.

Any ideas / suggestions would be much appreciated

Thanks

[Telemin]

I would head over to the doom9 forums to ask this question.

The only codec that pops into my head as an equivalent would be the x264 codec, but the OSS version of that is still very much in beta.

On the doom9 site they have a review of a whole string of different codecs.

Also and purely out of interest what advantage is there in keeping ac3 audio? if you don't mind my asking.

[Voorhees51]

Ok, I'll check out doom9 and see what they have to say there.

I'm keeping ac3 because I'm ripping from DVDs and using SPDIF out, so I can get the 5.1 surround sound on my reciever.

Using ac3 pass through, I can just rip the DVDs, keep ac3 and have them all on a media server, so I can just watch them that way. ... aka an excuse to be lazy and not have to get up to change the DVD.

[yngwin]

Around 1 GB is reasonable. I would recommend x264, it's being used a lot in the HD ripping scene.

[~L~]

I agree.
Using x264 with crf=22 my encodes are between 700 and 1300 MB with ac3. This is with mod4 cropping and no rezising.

[Sachankara]

For the purists: Use Ogg Theora with Ogg Vorbis in a Ogg container. Thoggen can encode to those two formats.

[yngwin]

For the purists: Use Ogg Theora with Ogg Vorbis in a Ogg container. Thoggen can encode to those two formats.

Why would you do that? You'd better use x264 with ogg vorbis in a matroska container.

[Sachankara]

For the purists: Use Ogg Theora with Ogg Vorbis in a Ogg container. Thoggen can encode to those two formats.

Why would you do that? You'd better use x264 with ogg vorbis in a matroska container.

Because Ogg Theora is a patent free* format, unlike MPEG-4. Also, Ogg containers are simply more elegantly designed than Matroska.

* There are some patents on Ogg Theora technology, but they have been given to Xiph.org.

[nihues]

I use xvid and raw ac3 for compatibility with hardware dvd player here, the best settings u can get from xvid is showed on this forum:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... post791227

Just get use a settings that u find best and use all the settings they said, and don't forget the custom matrixes u can find 3 post below on a signature!

I'm using "good quality,strong compression" movies are 1-1.5gb with ac3 and can't see much difference from a dvd. the movie mantains sharpness and no blocking artifacts.
Btw, I find better encode with avidemux because it show the xvid options on a gui (almos same as windows gui) and u can crop&resize more easily, i'm trying to do the same with mencoder but is a little hard and time consuming

[ppurka]

Btw, I find better encode with avidemux because it show the xvid options on a gui (almos same as windows gui) and u can crop&resize more easily, i'm trying to do the same with mencoder but is a little hard and time consuming

I suggest you try acidrip, which is a very nice frontend to mencoder. It also lets you know when your output file will be of a good quality.

[~L~]

I suggest you try mplayer --> make a script --> dump all the dvds to a directory and go do something else.

Yes. I don't like clicking around with a mouse.

[nihues]

Btw, I find better encode with avidemux because it show the xvid options on a gui (almos same as windows gui) and u can crop&resize more easily, i'm trying to do the same with mencoder but is a little hard and time consuming

I suggest you try acidrip, which is a very nice frontend to mencoder. It also lets you know when your output file will be of a good quality.

Hi, just tryed, but it's not very good too, it's the same as a comand line, u need to know exacly the parameters to pass to the comand line, with avidemux it's a graphical front end, so u don't need to know the comand line parameters. And other thing... It only encode from dvd? can't find a way to encode from a file... many of my encodes are from tv tuner not from dvd
but thx for the tip

[ppurka]

Hi, just tryed, but it's not very good too, it's the same as a comand line, u need to know exacly the parameters to pass to the comand line, with avidemux it's a graphical front end, so u don't need to know the comand line parameters. And other thing... It only encode from dvd? can't find a way to encode from a file... many of my encodes are from tv tuner not from dvd
but thx for the tip

Yes, that is true you need to know a little bit about encoding. In fact, there are some default parameters in mencoder documents for very high quality output, moderately high quality output and low quality output. You can simply dump those settings in the field present in acidrip. The html file you need to look into (if you have mplayer docs installed) is
file:///usr/share/doc/mplayer-1.0.20070427/
DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-libavcodec.html#menc-feat-mpeg4-lavc-example-settings

acidrip has the possibility (according to its manpage) of loading a file or a directory,- you need to give the pathname instead of /dev/dvd in the "Video source" of acidrip.

EDIT: broke up the long url

[Voorhees51]

I suggest you try mplayer --> make a script --> dump all the dvds to a directory and go do something else.

Yes. I don't like clicking around with a mouse.

Do you have a good script for this that you could post?

[madisonicus]

I've had very good luck with the following settings/steps. Obviously, you'll have to adapt them into a script to suit your own needs. The two-pass thing is key. It does increase the encode time substantially, but the quality will be virtually indistinguishable from the originals.

First, dump the video from the dvd into a .vob:

Code: Select all

mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile video.vob

Then use this command to get a recommended cropping value:

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mplayer video.vob -vf cropdetect

Test the crop:

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mplayer video.vob -vf rectangle=YOUR_CROP_VALUE

Then the next steps are pretty automated:

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mencoder -really-quiet -vf YOUR_CROP_VALUE -oac pcm -ovc x264 -x264encopts threads=2:subq=7:frameref=15:me=umh:bframes=2:b_pyramid:weight_b:bitrate=1500:pass=1:turbo=1:threads=2:\
partitions=all:8x8dct:direct_pred=auto -of avi -ofps 24000/1001 video.vob -o /dev/null

mencoder -really-quiet -vf YOUR_CROP_VALUE -oac pcm -ovc x264 -x264encopts threads=2:subq=7:frameref=15:me=umh:bframes=2:b_pyramid:weight_b:bitrate=1500:pass=2:threads=2:\
partitions=all:8x8dct:direct_pred=auto -of avi -ofps 24000/1001 video.vob -o "video.h264"

I prefer ogg/vorbis for the audio and matroska for the wrapper:

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mplayer -really-quiet video.h264 -ao pcm:waveheader:file=audio.wav -vc dummy -vo null

normalize audio.wav

oggenc --quiet -q 6 audio.wav -o audio.ogg

mkvmerge  -q --default-language en -o video.mkv -A video.h264 -D audio.ogg

The only complication is with some particularly poorly encoded animation or interlaced videos. In those cases, dumping the files into raw video and deinterlacing them before doing the encode makes excellent copies (N.B., experiment with the deinterlace until you find one that works, and I always set the audio via aid not alang because alang is often incorrectly labeled):

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mencoder dvd:// -o video.raw -really-quiet -oac pcm -aid 128 -ovc raw -of avi -vf pp=fd

Then use video.raw instead of video.vob in your encoding steps. Be forewarned though: raw video is enormous, often 40-60Gb/hour.

HTH,
m

[Voorhees51]

First, dump the video from the dvd into a .vob:

Code: Select all

Code:
mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile video.vob

Thats not working correctly for me. I do it and when it gets done, the movie in the vob file is shorter than the original that was on the disc. Like 20min or so, it varies as I've tried different DVDs.

vobcopy and dvdbackup do the same thing. the movie in the vob file are shorter than the original off of the disc.

I've tried k3b to rip the video, but it doesn't have x264 as an option for encoding to, and it's not as customizable as far as file size and rates and such.

Any ideas of what to do??

[bi3l]

Try OGMRip.

[pdr]

I just finished writing a script that takes some TV episodes I have on disk and creates a menu and transcodes the videos so that all will fill a single DVD with 2-pass transcoding (this is for archiving what I have on disk). Not what you are after, but the steps I perform to make things fit a certain size:

1. Get the ac3 size. For me, this involves transcoding the current videos' sound channel to ac3, but you could do this with mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile xxx.ac3 and checking out xxx.ac3's file size. I do NOT know if you could just set the -dumpfile to stdout and pipe it into "wc -c" to get the byte length without an intermediate file..

2. Calculate the video bit rate needed; it will be ((TARGET_SIZE_IN_KB * 0.98 - AC3_SIZE_IN_KB * 8 bits/byte) / NUMBER_OF_SECONDS_IN_THE_VIDEO.

The reason I multiply the target size by 0.98 is to allow 2% overhead for the container multiplexing. So ((TARGET_SIZE_IN_KB...) evaluates to the (rough) total kilobits of space available for the video part of the movie; divided by the total seconds for the movie and you've got the kbps for the video - ie the video bit rate.

Now if you do a 2-pass transcode of the movie with that video bit rate (and just copy the audio stream), you should get very close to that total bitrate with variable bit encoding (more bits for the "busy" frames, less bits for the "slow" frames) and your output file should be very close to the target size.

I haven't done it, but I suppose you could use the calculated vbr and, say, do a 2-pass video-only transcode of the first minute of the movie and visually check if it looks good enough for you (if you are not sure whether you are trying to shrink the video too much or not).. However I took some episodes from Season 1 of Buffy and x264 transcoded them to 1/4 the mpeg2 size and to my eye they had identical quality as the original.. (I do spdif passthrough also, so did not change the audio stream)

To get a number of pieces of information for the movie I use midentify, but that is just a simple bash script wrapper around an mplayer call. I supposed you could estimate the ac3 size using the audio bitrate * total seconds, but I haven't tried that..

[madisonicus]

First, dump the video from the dvd into a .vob:

Code: Select all

Code:
mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile video.vob

Thats not working correctly for me. I do it and when it gets done, the movie in the vob file is shorter than the original that was on the disc. Like 20min or so, it varies as I've tried different DVDs.

vobcopy and dvdbackup do the same thing. the movie in the vob file are shorter than the original off of the disc.

I've tried k3b to rip the video, but it doesn't have x264 as an option for encoding to, and it's not as customizable as far as file size and rates and such.

Any ideas of what to do??

For ripping to fail consistently in such an odd way across multiple software implies, to me, that you're running out of disk space. What does df show?

[Voorhees51]

So the

Code: Select all

mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile out.vob

is actually working correctly I was trying to play the vob file after ripping it and that was shorter. I decided to just go ahead and 1 pass encode it with mencoder to see what would happen. It encoded fine and the movie was the full length like it should be. So that part is fixed.

New problem though ... well part of old problem but discovered after trying encoding:
mplayer itself is not recognizing the correct aspect ratio of the encoded files or DVDs.
It can play a widescreen DVD fine in standard mode, but when I try to go fullscreen it stays the same size and the black border fills in all around it. When I try to play the encoded file it doesn't even look widescreen, it looks like 4:3 standard size.
I've tried 3 different versions of mplayer all with the same problem.
Everything works fine when I try to play it in xine, it all shows the correct ratio and everything is correct.
Also everything works fine with mplayer on my Ubuntu box even the movie I encoded then copied over, it plays just fine.

Anyone have any ideas at all??? thanks for the help in advance.

[~L~]

Anyone have any ideas at all??? thanks for the help in advance.

try -vo xv ?

[pdr]

Also make sure you set DisplaySize option in xorg so that mplayer knows the pixel aspect ratio.

[coolsnowmen]

this mplayer stuff would make my head hurt, I'ld be happy to send you my xvid.xfg file for use with dvd::rip

I pulled the settings off of a walk through, it is a gui so it will take a couple clicks (10 or so after the initial setup) to rip a dvd
but that is only because I have it rip the vobs to my HD first, so I know if there is a problem if it has to do with a scratched dvd, versus the dvdrip/xvid codec I use. (it supports ac3) and you can specify filesize or bit/pixel with twopass encoding.

Encoding on my 4year old athlon tool long enough that I would have to let it go during work / at night for one dvd, but I guess that won't differ between methods, just codecs/settings/hardware

http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=dvdrip

It looks hard at first but after doing it once it takes me 10 seconds to start the new dvd rip, and another 10 to start the new dvd encode.

I will walk you through the process if you can find one already online

[~L~]

I suggest you try mplayer --> make a script --> dump all the dvds to a directory and go do something else.

Yes. I don't like clicking around with a mouse.

Do you have a good script for this that you could post?

Sorry that it took so long. The scripts are here.
They are still a bit messy as I wrote/copied them only for myself, but they work for me. Hopefully I didn't do any mistakes when cleaning them up. You could automate it more, but when it works - do not fix it.