heyo, been pondering moving my DVD collection to a media PC (soon to aquire from bros old PC: E2160 with 2GB of RAM) whats the best method of playback for my DVDs ? and also whats the best format and codec to use i would like to keep DVD quality but obvisouly i dont want 4.5GB DVDs sat on my HDD so was thinking of maybe converting them to .mkv H264 ? not fussed about menus and all that jazz just 2-channel/5.1 channel audio and the film.
i use dvdshrink to break the encryption and copy to hdd, then handbrake to make my .m4v files, mkv is available as well. i set video bitrate at 1100 h.264 with aac audio at 192 gives me file size around 1.5gb per 2/hr film. keeps it pretty much the same quality as the original source.
I used to use fairuse wizard lite (freeware) to do this, as the name suggests it has a wizard style interface that is quite straightforward. However the limitation on the freeware version was a maximum file size of 700-800mb.
handbrakes looks the way guess its just gunna be trail and error until i get what i want lol what about playback for mkv ? VLC still the choice today ? or media centre ? it will have windows 7 on it
I've just done this as well actually. I used AnyDVD and Handbrake to convert to H.264 MKVs with AC3 pass-through for audio. If you want quality that is indistinguishable from DVD quality then I would recommend a constant bitrate of 2500kbps rather than using the RF quality settings. It's probably more than is required but I couldn't be bothered to mess around with the settings over and over again to find the optimum value since each DVD took around 40 mins to an hour to render, and I had more than enough storage available (I had a spare 640GB drive lying around and just bought a 2TB drive to back them up on to). However, it may depend on the amount of space you have available and how many DVDs you have. Using the above settings I currently have 158 films which take up around 360GB of space (they average 2-3GB each). Another thing you will want to consider is subtitles. You may not want to include subtitle tracks with every film (I didn't as I rarely use them), however some films will have subtitles for foreign audio sections which aren't burned in to the actual frame, so you will need to use the foreign audio search function within Handbrake to find these, then you can either include them as a separate subtitle track which you can turn on and off in a supported media player, or burn them into the video itself. I couldn't be bothered to do this for every DVD so I just used this document for reference: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t8Xb85eyNFtZ3vaNK8gqkbQ&single=true&gid=0&output=html As for media players, it was my original intention to use XBMC as I love the interface and its library features, however the picture quality when using it is noticeably inferior to VLC. I tried fiddling around with the settings as well as trying a few other media players like Media Player Classic Home Cinema, but nothing looked as good as when using VLC.
cool thanks might give it a go at home and see what the crack is ill buy a 2x2TB HDD i think and raid them so i dont lose films
raiding them will not be the best way of making sure you dont lose movies , a once a week (or Over Night) backup to seperate location would be far superior in terms of an interface, XBMC is fantastic but could be better in some areas but is under active development I was toying with writing my own in SilverLight at one point using VLC to play at the front end, but quickly considered that a Bad Idea
hows that ? since im interested in not losing films due to an HDD failure how is a backup to another HDD any different surely raid is ideal as im looking for redundancy and it is just as likely that the backup HDD fails as my 1 of my RAID HDD
