Best format for my movies?

[Slammin_Salmon]

Hi. I have a Seagate 4 TB BlackArmor NAS, and just bought a WD Live TV for my bedroom. I also have a PS3 in my living room. I’m trying to figure out the best format to rip my DVD library (I legally own all the movies) to. I was using Handbrake and ripping the movies to M4v, but it appears that the Live TV does not support this format (PS3 will play them back using PS3 Media Server for Transcoding). I tried DIVX AVI (using Auto Gordian Knot), and playback is somewhat jittery (I have a gigabit network) from both the PS3 and Live TV. I then tried XVID (AVI) using Auto Gordian Knot, which seems better- but I get some serious pixelation issues during action scenes, and the movies seem alot larger and quality alot poorer than I was formerly getting from M4v.

So all in all I’ve tried M4v (Not supported by Live TV), MKV (not supported by PS3), DIVX (jittery) and XVID (big and quality is nowhere near DVD unless it’s nearly as big as DVD).

I’m almost to the point where I am going to do ISO’s and call it a day- but I’d rather not eat up the space on my NAS if theres another option. I dont mind putting sometime in for a good rip, but I’m not looking to put in 8 hours a movie.

If anyone out there has a better way, I’m listening…

[mattyjon70]

Just rip them to iso’s or vobs. I do vobs with DVDShrink. I just cut out everything but the main movie. No loss of quality.

It takes about 10-15mins to rip an average dvd and remove protection etc etc.

[Keithb]

I use dvd-cloner for iso’s and vob’s.

[bhwsyd]

I also have a PS3 and WD TV Live.

My preferred approach for the DVD collection is:

* Use DVD Decrypter to copy the files to hard disk.

* Use Handbrake to create an mkv file. H264 video and AC3 passthrough (this will retain 5.1 sound).

* Then use tsmuxer to create an m2ts file. These play well on both PS3 and WD TV Live. Just load the mkv file into tsmuxer, choose m2ts muxing and a filename.

If the DVD sound is only stereo, then using Handbrake to directly create an mp4 file will suffice.

I have some DVDs where there is a sound offset that differs between the multiple VOB files. I have not fully resolved this issue yet. Perhaps using DVD Decrypter to create a single VOB might work. Such DVDs are few and far between.

[mattyjon70]

You know i dont understand why these days people still want to compress what they have ripped.

I mean a 1TB Hard Drive is around $100.00

In years gone by yeah, storage was expensive so unless you need to compress them down for soemthing like an iPhone/iPod then why not keep the original quality ? We are all going to have full HD 1080p TV’s at some point and you dont want to have to go back and re-rip everything again (at least i dont)

Anyway just my two cents worth.

[Slammin_Salmon]

I already have a 1080p TV. And yes, I do keep my 1080 DVD’s 1080. However- most of what I’m ripping is good ol’ 480…which as it stands in a DVD is fairly bloated with ■■■■. Yeah, disk is cheap, but buying a new NAS with 4 drive bays is not. If I had unlimited disk space, there’s no question that I’d simply copy the dvd’s to NAS and call it a day…that would be the easiest rip possible.

[mattyjon70]

I am not a NAS guru but i use FreeNAS (because its free). You just need an average PC with a USB stick which holds the operating system. I have software mirrored hard drives and it works extremelly well.

Have you looked at freeNAS ?

Then again maybe a dedicated “off the shelf” NAS box is cheaper to buy rather than an old PC.

I dont really know.

As far as the “bloated with ■■■■” statement, well if you use say DVD Shrink and just extract the main movie you keep

the original quality of the movie itself. Anything else involves compression and therefore a loss in quality. I dont see how you

can avoid it.

[bhwsyd]

I agree that there is not a massive benefit in compressing your DVDs. It is definitely a matter of taste.

h.264 is a more advanced codec and captures the same video quality in around half the disk space. The main ‘loss’ is the time to encode the video, which is not insignificant (as in your time, not the PC’s).  Further, you end up with a single file well less than 4Gb (important for some systems). This is much more practical than a single VOB>4Gb or multiple VOBs.