Hello icudoc-ga
Thank-you for your question.
I have researched your question for you and there are a number of
commercial and freeware solutions available. As the freeware example
is perfectly adequate for what you require I see no reason to pay for
it, although you may wish to consider donating a small sum to the
author if you find the program very useful.
The simplest and the one that appears to be the most widely used
whilst doing my research seemed to be DVDx. This can be downloaded
from:
http://www.labdv.com/dvdx/
http://dvdx.sourceforge.net/
This site also has a page with freqently asked questions on it here:
http://www.labdv.com/dvdx/faq.php
http://dvdx.sourceforge.net/DVDx-faq21.htm
To get you started on your conversion to MPG and help you get familiar
with DVDx I have also found a few tutorials for you to read and help
you through you through your first attempt.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdx.htm
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=162
http://www.dvd-guides.com/content/view/56/59/
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/dvdx-main.htm
http://www.dvdhelp.us/index.html?html/tutdvdx.html~mainFrame
There are numerous ways of achieving what you have requested but DVDx
is by far the simplest option and hopefully these tutorials will get
you started. Once you become experienced in this area you may wish to
experiment with some of the other pieces of software (such as
virtualdub, tmpgenc, flaskmpeg).
A fairly complete list of conversion software can be found on the
excellent DVD Digest site:
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/showcategory.php?cid=2&scid=6&detail=high
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/showcategory.php?cid=2&scid=7&detail=high
If you have any further questions or queries on this subject please do
not hesitate to ask for clarification and I will do my best to respond
swiftly. |
Request for Answer Clarification by
icudoc-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 01:50 PDT
The test of the adequacy of your answer will lie in the solution. I
have been trying this for quite sometime and have used DVDDeCrypt,
DVDShrink, DVDFabDecrypter and VOBMerge with minimal success. I am not
sure from your answer whether you are actually adept/experienced at
this or merely did web research and pointed me to info you feel will
work. BIG DIFFERENCE. The former will be very helpful, the latter not.
I will do as you suggest and get back to you with the success of the
attempt. Thank you.
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Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 02:02 PDT
I can assure you that I have experience in this subject, it was
unclear from your question whether or not you had so I had to try to
cover all bases and chose an option I had used successfully in the
past. If you wish to test my knowledge further please ask for
clarification and I will do my best to help you out.
I have used a few of the programs you mentioned in your response.
What was your problem with DVDShrink? I use this extensively and have
never encountered any problems before. DVDShrink is of course just a
way of copying (and shrinking) your DVD onto your hard drive, it will
not convert the files to an MPEG file.
Does the file have to be an MPEG file or is an AVI (eg DivX or Xvid)
an acceptable solution? If you have the Xvid or DivX codec installed
on your computers another excellent tool would be
http://www.autogk.me.uk
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Request for Answer Clarification by
icudoc-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 08:45 PDT
Thank you for your reply. The program worked as you described. I was
able to generate a 2GB mpg file which, while better than I was able to
do before, still is obviously not of DVD quality with noticeable
compression artifacts. The file took 3 hours to encode using the
highest quality settings the program was capable of. I have not
previously tried AutoGordian Knot which is your last suggestion and
will try this. Why can't a merged vob file (which I believe is just
MPEG-2) do the job if the extension is renamed. I tried this with
great video quality but it just seemed to randomly stop implying a
time code problem. Which provides the best quality, MPEG-2, MPEG-4,
DivX, or XVid? Thanks for your help thus far.
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Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 11:16 PDT
I am glad you had some success with DVDx. The problems you are having
with the compression is common and something you have to tinker with;
it is unlikely you will ever find a satisfactory general setting and
you have to alter things for each DVD you encode if you demand a
completely artifact-free picture. Think of compressing a BMP picture
to a JPEG picture, even on the highest quality setting some pictures
will have blocky elements whilst others will be appear "perfect".
Unfortunately any conversion from one file format to another causes
defects in the picture, these can be minimised by minimising the
amount of processing the computer needs to do on each frame. In
general for the best picture quality you want to use the highest
bitrate setting you can and try to not alter the size (or format of
the picture). The bitrate setting is analogous to settings used when
encoding an MP3 file (which you are probably familiar with so I will
not explain that here unless you require me to).
The quality of the final image is also highly dependent on the codec
that is used to encode the file. Some are more suitable for some
tasks than others.
Blocky artifacts are normally achieved in high action scenes and can
be minimised by altering the codec settings.
The time you mentioned seems about correct (in fact it is quite
impressive, faster than my home PC has ever done!).
It would be helpful for me to know the settings and codec you tried in
your conversion, I may be able to give a few additional tweaks for
you.
You are correct that a VOB file is basically an MPEG-file but it is
not quite as simple as this as it also includes other information such
as embedded navigation and search data. This information is often
referenced in the other files you see on DVD's (such as .ifo and
.bup).
I am unsure why you tried to rename the file from a .VOB to a .MPG.
If you use a media player such as gabest.org's Media Player Classic or
VLC Media Player you can play the .vob directly without the need of
converting them.
Media Player Classic:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358
VLC Media Player:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
You may wish to investigate VideoLan more as it can be used as a
freeware media server and depending on your requirements may provide
you with what you want without the need to undertake the
time-intensive reprocessing step. This would also ensure that the
final video is as near to DVD quality as possible.
I tend to use VLC as my default DVD movie player on my laptop while I
use Media Player Classic for all other video formats.
Your last question is difficult to answer as it is a bit like asking
which is the best car or which is the best cheese? There are lots of
different varieties and each has it uses in different scenarios.
MPEG-4 has better compression algorithms thus enabling smaller
filesizes whilst still retaining picture quality but MPEG-2 is more
compatible with older DVD players on the market. As MPEG-4 is the
more recent development of the two, DVD players will start to become
more compatible and there will be less reason to use MPEG-2
compression.
DivX and XviD are more or less identical in comparison. XviD was
developed as a freeware version of DivX (notice the subtle way they
changed the name!). Both DivX and Xvid are based on the MPEG-4 codec.
Personally I encode everything using the XviD codec as this, for me,
produces the best balance between picture quality and filesize. I
also find that the AutoGK program allows me to easily set various
settings and allow batch processing to be run overnight.
Let me know how you are getting on with the various tasks. If you
require further help or instructions please ask again and I will do my
best to respond swiftly. It would also be helpful to include any
setting values and the codec you are using with any clarification
requests you make.
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Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 11:42 PDT
As a further aside, please take the time to read the AutoGK tutorials
and FAQ on the AutoGK site. I thought they were excellent and covered
every question I had when I began the use the program.
If you haven't already found them they are located here:
http://www.autogk.me.uk/modules.php?name=TutorialEN
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72679
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Request for Answer Clarification by
icudoc-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 14:02 PDT
"I am unsure why you tried to rename the file from a .VOB to a .MPG."
You are correct, the D-Link software recognizes the vob files and will
play them directly through my server. However, it has a size limit of
2 GB. The Microsoft Media Connect software will take up to 10 GB files
but will only recognize .mpg. I renamed the suffix and they played but
would stop erratically, I assume because other info needed (.bup,
.ifo) was not present. Do you know a work around this. I would love to
be able to string the .vob's together and have them play direct from
the media server without encoding.
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Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
20 Aug 2005 14:56 PDT
Unfortunately I do not know a way around this. Most DVD rippers (such
as SmartRipper, DVD Decryptor and DVD Shrink) usually convert the .bup
and .ifo files when the DVD is copied to your hard drive. From memory
I believe all of these rippers can also rip the vob file into one
large file rather than splitting at 1Gb.
I have not any experience with Windows Media Connect so unfortunately
I cannot provide you with any support in this area.
Did you have the chance to look at VLC player and its streaming capabilities?
http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/streaming-howto-en.html
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Request for Answer Clarification by
icudoc-ga
on
28 Aug 2005 05:34 PDT
Palitoy-ga,
Thanks again for your help with this question. I've been spending a
lot of time looking into it after doing all you reccommended. At the
end of the day, what I wanted to do was fairly simple. Perhaps, I
wasn't making myself clear. What I wanted was as pure a single
video/audio file as a DVD. Size was irrelevant and I did not wish to
re-encode if I could avoid it. After ripping the DVD files to my Hard
Drive using DVD De-crypter, what I needed was a way to get them into a
two elementary streams (video and audio) using demultiplexing
(demuxing) and then into a single MPEG stream via multiplexing
(muxing). I found a program called Rejig
(http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_tools/rejig.cfm)that
lets you demultiplex DVD files into two elementary streams. A program
called ImagoMPEG-Muxer
(http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=ImagoMPEG-Muxer)that does nothing
but multiplex two elementary streams. It is so simple even I couldn't
screw it up. :) In the end, I was left with a very large (>6 GB) .mpg
file of a movie that was perfect DVD-quality. The best news is that
all of these tools are free. The site www.videohelp.com is absolutely
awesome in the diversity of guides and tools it has available as is
www.afterdawn.com. I thought I would pass the info on for your future
reference and thank you for your help.
Dr. Andrew Egol
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Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
28 Aug 2005 05:58 PDT
Thanks for the extra information. I have not used either of those two
programs myself in the past but I will check them out.
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