Generally I download my copies from rapidshare (which I hold original ones - beileve or not 
) instead of encoding. For me bandwidth is less important then my CPU and hassle, and most of the professional movie rippers doing their jobs so much better than me.
A lot of people in the USA still believe in the old copyright lawās notion of āfair useā that allowed you to make backup copies of things. With the DMCA āfair useā has been effectively removed.
Super is another great encoder that can actually handle more formats then Handbrake can: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
What do you think of the Parallel Extensions to the .Net framework Microsoft is working on?
āI think the minute you touch the database or do any kind of significant I/O, the performance benefits will be miniscule. It is a small step in the right direction, of course.ā
Not everyone is touching a database. And if you can fit your dataset in RAM then parallelization will be more relevant. It isnāt possible to solve what is fundamentally a hardware issue (I/O bottlenecks) in software. Parallel .NET is trying to address the software bottleneck that multicore CPUs have exposed. There are some problems that just arenāt amenable to parallelization but for those that are (raytracing, codecs, medical imaging, etc) there will be very scalable performance gains.
I have re-encoded my huge collection of DVDs (500+) to mpeg4/ac3 and love it. There is very little quality loss if you do it right. I picked up a 52" DLP TV and I had to re-do some becuase of encoding at too low of a quality.
I started doing this on a AMD X2 3800+ and it would take upwards of 4-6 hours to complete one movie. I moved to a Intel e6400 and it knocked 1-2 hours off the encoding time. I then moved up to a q6600 and now I can do most movies in 2 hours or less.
It is great having my collection of movies and TV series at the touch of my fingers.
Iāve experimented with Handbrake and CloneCDMobile.
At the moment I am resorting to ripping two copies of every DVDā¦one for viewing on PS3 via HPMediaVault NAS, and another for viewing on iPod touch.
Has anyone found a good codec combination that will allow ripping of one file that looks good on iPod and 40inch home theatre?
Thereās A LOT of color differentiation between the two video clips you show. In particular, I immediately noticed that thereās a pink border around the adverts on the screen in the first clip, and all of that is replaced with blue in the second.
I noticed that before i noticed the hand being raised in the second, and change of wording in one of the advertisements in the second picture definitely show that these are two seperate clips taken at two different points in the film.
I only bring this up because you canāt REALLY tell the difference between these two if they arenāt from more exactly matched frames in the movie, and I would have dismissed your encoding evaluation as being pretty screwyā¦
Idiocracy is a great movie!
I also see a lot more degradation in the reencoded still than youāve mentioned, even in the text on the tv screen and especially in the black levels. Also, Iād disagree that pulling 8GB over the network is the headache. Itās the 8Gb of storage per DVD that bothers me.
What do you do with all the bonus DVD content? Rip it as well or forget it ever existed?
Itās hard to compare the relative quality of the two frames, as theyāre both encoded with JPEG ā which happens to be notoriously bad with red-on-black (Ow! My Balls!).
Having said that, the second image is definitely of significantly lower quality, but not enough to stop one from enjoying the movie, I would think.
Looks like the transcoded video has a pretty gigantic artifact right in the middle - in the shape of a human arm. Does that happen to all your movies, Jeff?
Youāre crazy. With storage and bandwidth becoming cheaper all the time, youāre really going to regret this loss of quality. Look at all the people who ripped their CD collections to MP3 at mediocre bitrates and are now lamenting the fact that they didnāt go FLAC to begin with. Video is going to go the same way. And as the fidelity of display devices also goes up, the quality loss is going to become more and more evident to you over time.
I think the one place where this is truly useful is to transcode to some low-resolution device - an iPhone or whatever. Youāre not going to notice the quality loss there. (Audio is the same - you wonāt notice the difference listening to your iPod on cheap earbuds while you ride the subway, but it would be obvious at home with a decent set of speakers.) If I had to watch a movie with compression artifacts on top of other compression artifacts like your example it would drive me batty.
You should really check out the HandBrakeCLI tool. Especially on windows, itās far more powerful than the UI and almost as easy to use (given the fact that youāre already comfortable in the command line). I have a few scripts which wrap around HandBrakeCLI and allow me to dispatch encoding processes a season at a time once the VOBs themselves have been ripped using MacTheRipper or DVDShrink. These scripts also allow me to devote multiple computers to the same rip, providing a truly linear speed boost.
I love that movie.
^^ SQL injection thwarted!
I can feel your mentioned concerns in DVD encoding and decoding.
Once I had to encode an already decoded film to make a present for my uncle. The film was decoded with a slower frame-rate, so the uncle had to watch the good film with a lot of patience.
I think it is easier to implement the formats into each existing player than re-encoding each existing film.
Has anyone found a good codec combination that will allow ripping of one file that looks good on iPod and 40inch home theatre?
I donāt think there is such a setting ā at some level, quality always means larger file size for video. Plus what is good for a 40-inch display would be MASSIVE overkill for a 3 inch screen.
With the proliferation of fast quad (and eventually octa) cores, you can rapidly re-encode from the original DVD to an appropriate size and quality for the target platform.
I started doing this on a AMD X2 3800+ and it would take upwards of 4-6 hours to complete one movie. I moved to a Intel e6400 and it knocked 1-2 hours off the encoding time. I then moved up to a q6600 and now I can do most movies in 2 hours or less.
Thatās what Iām talking about ā the quiet revolution in halving your encode times opens up new possibilities.
Look at all the people who ripped their CD collections to MP3 at mediocre bitrates and are now lamenting the fact that they didnāt go FLAC to begin with
I still have the original DVDs so I can re-encode any time I want. That said, the entire goal of this exercise is to keep 99% of DVD video quality, which I think is achievable, while reducing file size by 1/4 or 1/8. DVD quality (720x480, MPEG-2) is a constant; if a DVD doesnāt look good upscaled on a large TV, re-encoding it isnāt going to change that fact.
Also, I found a few additional helpful links that I updated the article with:
Friendly Description of Handbrake Settings
http://www.modmini.com/theatre/howto/dvdjukebox/conversion.php
Handbrake Surround Sound Guide
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/SurroundSoundGuide
@Dennis Forbes: I have a dual core. When I open task manager, I see 100%. It has been at 100% since I bought it. No, itās not being used by hackers. Right now itās solving the NQueens problem. Although Iāll go back to protein folding in a few days.
I recently have gone through the process of trans-coding my Scrubs and Family Guy DVDs into H.264 to playback on my iPod. While I found it was quite easy to get settings of for a good quality RIP of Scrubs, Iāve yet to find some to get the same quality with Family Guy. I would have thought when this process started that the opposite was going to be true. I guess all the codecs really donāt like doing Cell-shading.
As for Handbrake, I actually had to use DVD Decrypter to first remove the CSS from the DVDs before re-encoding them.
About a month ago I switch to using my Xbox 360 as a media center and Iāll never go back.
Itās so much more convenient to have my library on a server than on a shelf. My only beef is I donāt know how to set up thumbnails/description text for the movies to make browsing through the Xbox360 interface better.
@engtch - put your preview .jpg in the same folder, with the same filename. (i.e. trainspotting.avi trainspotting.jpg). The 360 will do the rest.