Ok, so I have messed around with just about every different kind of extension and codec, and I cant find a good balance of quality vs space. I have a media server at the house I built with 2TB on a RAID 5. I have over 800 dvds I am going to be putting on the server so I can watch them from any room. My issue is I want the files to be under 1.5gb a piece, and have close to DVD quality as possible. if anything, as long as I dont see blocking on the screen. Has anyone messed with this before if so what do you recommend doing. I can encode just about anything with the software I have.
one thing we've done is strip any/all extra features or extra languages. That can take up quite a bit of space.
I am only converting the movie, not the subtitles and everything else, which is usually the first video file "01" on the dvd. I am going a little beyond what handbrake can do, I am working with multiple different extensions, different codecs, and adjusting resolution. Handbrake will only let you mess with resolution and extension.
Thanks that helped a lot, I finally figured out everything. I went with MKV extension with H264 encoding, at 720x480 a 2 hour movie takes up about 1.6 GB. Which is perfect! That forum was very informational about codecs and encoding your media.
OK, new problem same story..... After I got a few DVD's converted, I started to watch some which had awesome quality. Then after about the second day, I was going to watch a new one I just rip. It came up really weird, the best was to describe it to you is, I had a mirror image seperated by a diagional line from the top left of the screen to the bottom right. The audio came across as fine, but video was messed up. I uninstalled all the codecs and software I put on the server. Then reinstalled, and now I cant get any video to play even ones that worked before. I have searched high and low on the net, and cant find much. My setup looks like this Windows Vista 64 Ultimate Tversity Media Server FFDshow Codecs Divix Codecs AC3 Filter (for audio) Files are MKV format with H264 encoding.
have you tried the klite codec pac? last time i looked it had every codec you will ever need. http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
I had it installed, it was just corrupted. very strange. I was copying the dvds on one machine, and they were being decoded on another. The machine that was copying them I hadnt done anything with thinking it was the media server causing the issue. I removed all the codecs and software on the copying machine and reloaded them, and it worked. I ended up going away from mkv files, due to the fact that it just took to much power to encode them and decode them. When encoding it used 100% of a phenom quad core 3.0ghz Black series processor I know that machine will handle it but I dont want to put it threw that kind of strain, cause I cant afford to replace it. I decided to give up the space and go with MP4 with H264 encoding, with a little over 2gb file sizes.