Ripping a DVD library

[JonnyCam]

Checkout AirVideo for that iPad, providing you're in range of Wireless. Awesome $3 app.

Thanks for that.
Love the avatar too! I have him + Darth Tater / R2Potatoo in my lounge.

[McBainUK]

Is there any benefit in using Handbrake or similar to create a video file from a DVDFab rip when DVDFab can do that all on it's own?

[ShiningDragon]

Are you sure with .avi? I can't see .avi as supported container on handbrake: http://handbrake.fr/details.php

@topic
Like most of us, i am using DVDfab to rip an dvd to harddisk. In this first step i remove all unneccessary stuff like menu, bonus, not spoken languages and subtitles.
If there's a copy protection which couldn't be solved with DVDfab, then i'll enable AnyDVD.

The ripped material no goes to StaxRip, another frontend for different encoders like x264. I transcode all my stuff to a mkv container with x264 as videocodec. In every case 1-pass quality based, because size doesn't matter; it's the quality what counts. On movies i am using a nearly lossless setting, while i lower the quality on tv series. Audio will be transcoded to ac3 for movies and aac lc sbr for tv series.

For movies this is a fast and comfortable way (i love the batchencoding of staxrip and the ability to play around with avisynth scripts there), but episodes of series aren't funny if you rip them from dvd. It's really a load of work to rip every single episode, rename the folder to the correct name and sort them.

[McBainUK]

Is there any benefit in using Handbrake or similar to create a video file from a DVDFab rip when DVDFab can do that all on it's own?

Hmm, what's a good Handbrake format for me? I want a small size (approx 1gb per DVD) and compatible with NextPVR (no extenders). Playback on a Android mobile phone would be a bonus.

[soccerdad]

For now, I am using DVDFab to rip them to disk. I rip them to video and audio_ts folders. I found a way to get them to play as-is on the xbox so it works for my needs without any additional rework. You can change the compression when you rip it. I am using the dvd5 setting so it ends up at about 4.3 gb/movie (full rip)

I tried handbrake and it seemed really slow for me but I only tried it once without playing too much with it.

[psycik]

Is there any benefit in using Handbrake or similar to create a video file from a DVDFab rip when DVDFab can do that all on it's own?

Hmm, what's a good Handbrake format for me? I want a small size (approx 1gb per DVD) and compatible with NextPVR (no extenders). Playback on a Android mobile phone would be a bonus.

Handbrake doesn't do avi format (anymore). Just mkv or mp4.

I'd assume you'd want mp4 for all your devices, and set up a two pass encode with a 1gb file.

[JonnyCam]

Playback on a Android mobile phone would be a bonus.

Both my MKV's & MP4 play back with HW acceleration on my Galaxy S.
(I use BS player lite for LAN based video, and the stock videos app for locally stored)

Handbrake can be slow, but usually only when dealing with HD stuff.
I was doing 2 pass encoding of 50min TV episodes to 400 MB each, and that took just under 30 mins per ep.
(these are from the 80's, so quality was not super to start with)

HD movies on the other hand are a struggle for my little old quad core.

[McBainUK]

I've done a trial run with DVDFab and handbreak.

DVDFab rip was "main title only", resulting in a 3gb VIDEO_TS folder structure.
Handbrake's conversion was "high profile", resulting in a 1.2gb .m4v file.

It's .m4v result was half the size, does that mean half the quality or is it doing something clever?

[whurlston]

Video_TS would be MPEG2 compression, .m4v is MPEG4. MPEG4 is much more efficient, resulting in smaller filesize, but the downside is that it means the video was decompressed from the original MPEG2 and then recompressed with MPEG4. DVDFab's VIDEO_TS would have just remuxed the original compressed video so no recompression.

Pick your poison...

[ga_mueller]

It's .m4v result was half the size, does that mean half the quality or is it doing something clever?

Well, how does it look... (in a direct comparison)? I'm doing exactly the same as you (~300 rips, only difference is mkv container) and see very little quality degradation. Only difference is a slight "blockiness" during very dark scenes.