DVD to Avi Programs?

Darkforce

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Right I'm off to Uni in September and I don't have room to take all of my DVDs with me so I want to back them upto my PC before I go. I have 250+ DVDs... some are movies some are TV series, they are in various regions and some are PAL format and some NTSC. Some are fairly recent like Click so I guess they may have more recent copy protection measures on them?

So basically I'm after a program which can backup these discs in avi or even h.264 format, pretty quickly, in excellent quality and most importantly without much hassle. Any ideas or suggestions?

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lagman

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Well, last weekend I needed to do something similar with some of the family vacation's DVDs
First I used DVD Decrypter to copy the dvd content to my PC then I used Auto Gordian Knot to convert the VOB files to AVI files it worked flawlessly and was really easy to set up, but man.... it was SLOW.

Maybe someone have a better option.
 

Darkforce

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lol, to "AVI".
Yes I am fully aware avi is merely a container format but due to limited space in the title it seemed more appropriate putting that in the title than putting 'dvd to *insert several dozen video and audio codecs here* programs?'

Now that you've made me think about it though I suppose since I have a fair few DVDs with subtitles and/or multiple audio streams the mkv container would be a better choice along with h.264 video and AAC audio. So any programs that could pull this off without too much hassle?

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qusai

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If you're only worried about the subtitles, you can always grab them from sites online. Sometimes i download foreign movies and they don't come with subs so i just download them, open the movie and the subtitles with VLC and it works flawlessly. I don't know if there is VLC for windows but I'm using a mac. Here are some of the sub websites i use

http://www.moviesubtitles.net/
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en
http://www.mysubtitles.com/
http://divxstation.com/subtitles.asp
http://www.subtitlesbox.com/
 

FAST6191

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First may I suggest a spindle and a copy of DVDshrink or DVD rebuilder, it is far less hassle this way (not to mention quicker and you are able to take stuff to friends easily).

Alas making high quality encodes H264, AAC, text based subs..... will take some effort but it is doable, once you have an idea of what is going on it is practically all automated as well (if damn slow).
I use megui but I tend to use it more in the capacity of a x264 frontend than the encoding tool it really is.

Still the following method is actually what most automated tools do.
Rip the DVD: due to DVD being a standard protection has not changed save the introduction of disc corruption (your player "should" get pointed to the correct place while the ripper encounters errors.

DVD Decrypter should do most except for some of the newest DVDs that use structure protection, for those I suggest either riptit4me or DVDfab.
The first two got taken down but are still readily available over at http://www.doom9.org/ and the forums there (or you can tap me for them). DVDfab can be grabbed over at http://www.free-codecs.com/ , you will want the freeware version.

Shiny VOBs:
Get them out of vob, analyse them and go for the next step. Theoretically you could skip this but would likely take a quality hit.
DGindex:
http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html
You will get a dv2 file to open with AVIsynth (megui and several encoders can also read them as well).
If you need to deinterlace I prefer DGbob as it is good quality:
http://neuron2.net/index.html

Encode stage:
Megui I already mentioned, grab at the bottom of the page:
http://x264.nl/
It does SNOW, Xvid, x264 as standard for video. Choose options and get bitrates set via the inbuilt calculator.
Audio:
I suggest eithe mp3, ac3 (leaving it as it is on DVD unless you want to downmix to 2 channels for space) or AAC.
LAME, aften (both included) and neros encoder (grab it here and stick it in the directory: http://www.nero.com/nerodigital/eng/Nero_Digital_Audio.html ) are my choices. For 2 channel highest quality I suggest a minimum of 128, 96 and 64 kbits/s.

An MKV muxer comes included but I use MKVtoolnix:
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html

Subtitles:
DVD subs are pictures which can be several megabytes in size, text however is but a few kilobytes so you will want to OCR them:
Subrip
http://zuggy.wz.cz/
Subtitle workshop to fix the errors (ll will often become ii and such), inbuilt error detection for that and a spell checker do wonders for me:
http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?cat=sw
 

Darkforce

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Awesome, cheers FAST6191, got a couple of questions though.

1. Is it possible to join VOB files?

2. Got any recommended video settings for x264 in megui? I want to have the output video as close to the source as possible.

3. Video encodes okay but won't megui won't encode the audio - I copied over the Nero Digital Audio files to the megui directory but I get the following error:
Code:
Error:
MeGUI.AviSynthException: Script error: there is no function named "NicAc3Source"
 at MeGUI.AviSynthClip..ctor(String func, String arg, AviSynthColorspace forceColorspace, AviSynthScriptEnvironment env)
 at MeGUI.AviSynthAudioEncoder.encode()
Any ideas?

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jimmy j

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Xilisoft DVD Ripper rips DVDs to AVI, MP4, DivX, MPEG, WMV, RM, MOV, 3GP, 3G2 and ASF.
I've not had any problems cracking copyright protection, but any problem discs can be ripped to hdd using dvd decrypter and then re-ripped with xilisoft.

**edit** it can rip to h264 (up to 720p)
 

FAST6191

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1. It is possible although when DGMPEGdec demuxes them the film should appear as one file.
Still vobedit: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VobEdit

2. Depends what res you are at, how much action there is (most films I do have lots), how big you want it and how good your playback machine is, these days I tend to leave it at full res and use constant quant (maybe with a bitrate limit). Failing that H264 around 1600kbps does fantastic (near transparent, 900 is good xvid encode quality), AAC can be put to 128kbps and sound as good as any DVD audio.
Personally I suggest adding a trim(10000,11000) line to any avisynth script to get a small clip (you might want to change the numbers to get a better selection: at present those numbers will give you about 40 seconds nearly 7 minutes in) and encoding that.
2 pass is a must for this if you are doing bitrate setting and dropping quality (the options are there when you get the preview window up) for credits (if you leave them) can get a nice boost.
B frames and the like can also help, head on into the advanced options, start small and only add 2 or 3.
The pre render option is not half bad either although it can add some time onto the encode.

In short, play around with your encode (the trim and encode concept is invaluable in my experience/opinion).

Oh and disable FFDshow postprocessing, it works wonders for xvid/divx encodes but not for h264. If using coreavc then you might want to mess around still.

3. Personally I use the options at the bottom, it can take just about any input (certainly any the directshow can do) and redo it.
NicAC3source is part of the nic (same guy that does some of the xvid builds, quality Windows media encoders and QuEnc) audio plugins: http://nic.dnsalias.com/nixaudiostuff.html
Download and add to the plugins directory of avisynth or use directshowsource instead.
 

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