My apologies for underestimating, I never know how to play it around here.
Back on topic, I usually rip to whatever I need (xvid for the xbox for example) and I am not sure where ipods exist these days (back when that had rather pitiful AAC support). I usually go about 1.5 bitrate and whatever of the "scene" as it is my opinion that their xvid policies are right on the limits of the standards and implementations of it.
With regards to X264 and DVDS, DVDs I work with are usually quite well done but I do not count upon it.
Resolution: rarely will I shrink it as I figure space is cheap and X264 has enough bells and whistles to manage. Sometimes you need to correct aspect ratio (and I have seen some odd ones).
I will however clip borders leaving a mod16 resolution, no half borders or anything so I will actually go for the overcrop if necessary. Scaling is usually done by my players but I will change it if necessary and I also sometimes upscale a bit using filters that struggle to work in real time (some on the inpainting algorithms make for awesome upscaling but realtime in addition to general decoding and operating system stuff on anything sub 4GHz is probably not going to happen).
Bitrate: I tend to use a quantizer although I will cap the bitrate at just over a meg a second (what depends on action in the source).
Should I use bitrate then two pass at least at around 900 kbps limit 1300.
Quantization (sp?) matrices, will sometimes give them a go but usually stock or something from sharktooth at doom9 forums. My custom ones tends to be designed for a source.
Pulldown: pal region stuff is usually OK for such things and I tend to go with whatever DGmpegdec (
http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html ) says about %film and for the most part I seem to get lucky and pulldown flags get used instead. I have seen some atrocious pulldown methods though which sometimes need a serious load of work. For the truly awful then my messing with mvtools usually happens:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=84770
Deinterlacing, after pulldown is sorted I will usually start with DGBob (frames set back to "half"; remember it takes each field and bobs that effectively doubling framerate), if I need to I will go to the most complex (slower) stuff I find in the doom9 forums and if I need speed (which I rarely do) I will go lower. I have been known to selectively use different filters on different sections as the situation demands, same with pulldown.
Frame quality: a tough one, later (and even better some of the custom) builds of H264 handles grain pretty well but I will fix noise and other faults as the situation demands.
Audio is AAC from nero (HE AAC + PS) or LAME MP3 as the situation demands.
http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nerodigi...o-aac-codec.php
Depending on how lazy I feel or what I have I will either merge channels or just go with 2 channel from the start.
My main toolkit (after killing encryption which is usually dvd decrypter with whatever else waiting in the wings for the few times that will fail) is
avisynth:
http://avisynth.org/ In the unlikely event you app does not support avisynth scripts
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=133313
DGmpegdec
http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html
Megui (frontend for most good video tools and has decent multicore support).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui
And MKVmerge (part of mkvtoolnix) or whatver muxer works for me.
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/
You could substitute YAMB as required if you want MP4 container stuff instead:
http://yamb.unite-video.com/
Note you will need to find a binary of mp4box somewhere, I usually pull mine from megui.
Subs I tend to go with handfixed SRT from subrip and subtitle workshop. I have been know to do vobsub when feeling lazy and ass/ssa when feeling bored.
For plain DVDs then vobblanker, pcgedit, ifoedit, rejig, dvdshrink, vobedit. If making them then FAVC.