Converting DVDs to MP4

Gerry

Regular
I'm likely to be embarking down the road to ripping my (meagre) DVD collection to MP4 and placing them onto a NAS on my home network. Does anyone have any advice about the best software to accomplish this? Tried out something called Handbrake, which failed on my first DVD (and seemed pretty slow) and AutoGN (since I'd used Gordian Knot with some success in the past) but that also failed on the same DVD. A commercial package (4Easy summat summat) succeeded in converting it.

Not adverse to paying some money for a package if it's worth it, but obviously free is better. ;)

And is MP4 the right way to go? Needs to play on an Xbox and/or PC and saving a bit of hard disk space is always useful.
 
wouldnt you need to circumvent the drm first ? (although I hear its easy)

the only transcoding ive done (apart from bink) has been with ConvertXtoDVD which i thought was good
 
I use Handbrake (linux version usually, but also Win) with no issues, though I'll give Megui a try now. Granted you have to manually set a lot of things and it will not handle any DRM stuff on the windows version. To back up your DVDs with protections DVD Decrypter is still out there...then handbrake, megui, whatever...
 
On the WinOS side I utilize AnyDVD HD to remove any and all copy protections which restrict my fair-use rights. Then I utilize handbrake (linux version) to do the conversion.

For DVDs, I prefer to keep soft subtitles, the AC3 DTS/DD audio tracks, and use X264 codec inside the MKV container, but other container formats would work. I utilize the High Profile setting. Here's one of my typical Handbrake DVD conversion scripts:

find /mnt/user/Media -name "*.ISO" -print | while read filename
do
echo converting $filename
f=`basename "$filename" .ISO`
d=`dirname "$filename"`
HandBrakeCLI -f mkv -e x264 -q 20.0 -E ac3 --detelecine --decomb --loose-anamorphic -m -x b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50 -C 2 -i "$filename" -o "$d/$f.mkv" -a 1 -s 1 -t 1
echo $filename completed
done
 
BRiT: do you find the win version of Handbrake to be...uh...a bit unstable? I do.
 
When I tried it last year it didn't seem as stable as the Linux version. Maybe I caught a bad build or my WinOS machine was overly tempermental then. Even though my Win machine has the higher spec CPU, I don't mind my fileserver chugging away on the encodes, since it's idle otherwise. In the end the times might end up being on par since all the ISOs are on the fileserver so that could cut down on the network traffic overhead of round-tripping.

I haven't spent enough time to figure out the best way to script automated encoding from TV Series. In the meantime I manually scan the DVD, then add the needed lines to an encode queue script. Once I have 2-4 TV dvds fully added (12 - 24 episodes) to the script, I let it run nohupped. It keeps the Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz fileserver busy for a day or two. I wish I had i3/i5 for encoding.
 
Encoding on an i7 is even sweeter. x264 is a bad-ass piece of code.
 
Haha, a total coincidence that they updated that article today. :D
 
It's a great chart there Bludd. I'm actually surprised at how well AMD is doing with the 4 and 6 core Phenom IIs (OC'd of course). Basically a user of a reasonably overclocked (air) C2Q is going to see about a 50% bump going to a reasonably OC'd i7. Impressive.
 
for quick and dirty DVD to MP4, AnyDVD + Handbrake works fine, however for (impe) truly ultimate in control and best results (on Win) you can't beat MeGui. It's not really a "one-button" encoder however I like the ability to have various profiles, different containers, codecs etc.. unless I need multiple audio tracks, I avoid mkv and simply mux into mp4 (.264+ac3+subs, or .aac/.m4a)
 
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