Good evening.
I’ve been reading extensively through the manual pages of dvd::rip without finding an answer to my question. When viewing the VOBs of a DVD, the quality is great…
After encoding with high bitrate (BPP 0.45), video size increases rapidly up to more than 3 GB, whilst there are still awful pixels to be seen in the resulting movie - especially when the screen shows black.
The mentioned video was encoded with the following presets:
Container format: OGG
Video codec: xvid4
Keyframes: 25
Video frame rate: 25.000 fps
Deinterlacing mode: none
BPP value: 0.45
V-Rate: 2715, Video size: 2529 MB
Audio settings: AC3, 48 kHz, Samplerate 4800 hz, Quality 10, no filter, max audio: 4.069
Audio size: 463 MB
Total size: 2999 MB
Process nice value: 0
As I love the program itself, I’d like to know if my settings are correct. Please do NOT tell me to read the manual again - I did so more than 5 times. I’d like to hear your suggestions & hints.
Although it means to put a lot of effort into this, video encoding actually is a lot of fun. Especially the results.
I’ve been using Gordian Knot extensively before, but certainly I don’t want to let it run in wine - speed will not come even close to the one I reach with letting dvd::rip run directly on my core.
BPP is an extremely misleading metric and your should virtually never trust it as a low BPP may look like cr@p when using one codec but when using another one, it may be more than enough. Also a high enough bitrate is not always the most important thing for quality. It’s the compression options used what matters the most and also the content itself, eg low-motion VS high-motions content. Also, I don’t really know why you choose one of the most aweful containers ever invented, the OGG container. Better use MKV which is also open source and hell of a lot better
Since the above settings code does not tell me much which encoder options were used, no one can really help you with the “problem”. If you want high-quality encodes, either learn which options offer that or use a preset (if possible) which is quality optimized. You may also try out my scripts, xvidenc & h264enc, which are built around presets and actually very easy to use
Thanks for replying. In dvd::rip, basically three containers are available: AVI, OGG and MPEG.
As for my opinion, it seems like MPEG is the best choice here. Certainly I cannot transcode HD - at least I only have the option of choosing either SVCD, VCD, XSVCD, XVCD or CVD. Which one to choose for the BEST quality possible?
If you know of any better program for linux to rip and encode DVDs with, please let me know.
I don’t condone any illegal activities. Ripping those DVDs is solely for the purpose of entertainment on saturday nights in my private cinema.
why would you want to choose MPEG either as container or as video compressor given that you already have content in MPEG container and video format - the DVDs themself? The purpose of encoding is to compress the content and most of the time a superior compression is used to achieve both smaller size and if possible decent/comparable quality level. If you don’t care about that, then there’s little point in encoding something as you can easily just copy the main title of DVDs into one big mpeg/vob file and store that somewhere on disk
Since you are choosing Xvid compression, which honestly is one of the most inefficient compression standards in the MPEG4 family, AVI is the prefered container for it. Some choose OGG due to it being open source and all but it’s really a horrible container for video so if you want something else besides AVI, choose MKV or MP4 containers which offer many advantages too
I only know of one decent GUI, sx264, encoding frontend since I always prefer command line for such stuff due to a GUI doing nothing at all for ~95% of the encoding time and most of them either offer too little or are too cluttered with options. If you still want to stick to the old Xvid, then try my script xvidenc available from my repo, which supports as input files, DVDs, VCDs and directory batch encodings and containers like AVI, MKV, MP4 and OGM. It’s very intuitive so don’t be afraid of it just because it’s a command line tool. There is also acidrip but I haven’t used it in a long time so can’t say much about it and also Avidemux
Sounds great - I’ll definately check out your multimedia goodies. Which container would you recommend for encoding VOBS in the highest quality possible?
Let´s just do it. For the purpose of encoding the Test-VOBs, I chose AVI as container format between the other choices OGG and MPEG.
Furthermore, I´ve set video codec to be af6 and ffmpeg/af6 codec as h264. Video bitrate will be 25.000 with 25 kf/s.
If the video is transcoded with quality level 1.00, the resulting file measures 7964 MB in total. HUGE! When the VOBs are finally transcoded, I´ll let you know about the resulting quality.
**
Hints on how to reduce filesize without losing quality are much appreciated though.**
wait, what? What are you really trying to achieve in here? 25000 kbps for a simple encode of a DVD/VOB??? Are you serious? What do you really expect to gain from such a high bitrate? More detail? More quality? if more detail/quality do you really think that you can reconstruct detail/quality which isn’t there in the first place, just by upping the bitrate? And why are you using af6 for this??
the purpose of encoding a DVD is to reduce its file size and at the same time offer comparable quality I can compress a 2 hour long anamorphic DVD into a H.264 video + AAC audio MKV file where the final size is only 550 MB and you wouldn’t notice the difference between it and the original DVD. This is the art of encoding. To squeeze the content as much as possible into smaller file size while at the same time offering comparable quality. It’s not really the bitrate you choose here, though it also matters of course, it’s the compression options used that matter the most.
You want high quality & low filesize? How about this?
Honestly, I am at a loss as to what you’re really trying to do here. You want small filesize and comparable quality, yet you use some weird af6 codec and an absurd high bitrate, which in a lot of cases is even more than enough for HD content, let alone for DVD content
I absolutely agree with you. As you see, I´m a true beginner when it comes to encoding.
Anyhow, the resulting file from the above operation was 2 KB in size - perhaps the output a professional would expect in such case of missing the point of ecoding.
Let´s start over again. microchip8, thanks for mentioning the above command - I´d like to do the whole thing with DVD::RIP though.
If you´d provide me with the corresponding settings there, I´d be ready to rumble.
2KB can only result due to mencoder exiting because of an option used which may not be present yet in your x264 library due to it being too old. Usually, if an option is used in mencoder but is missing in the x264 library, at the very top mencoder will display something like “Unknown option:” followed by the option name used. The options I gave you require latest x264 from git and I’m suspecting you don’t have it, hence mencoder exits due to the “mbtree” option used. Remove mbtree from the options and try again.
As for helping you with dvdrip, I have no idea what it offers (like options, presets, etc) and how it works, so can’t really help you here. As I said before, I use commandline tools for encoding because I can easily script and batch them. My preferred encoders at the moment are mencoder and x264 and from time to time I use ffmpeg
Hi Mask. It’s been a while since I hobbied around with DVD and DVD-ripping, but I remembered well:
k9copy (k9copy for KDE3, kde4-k9copy for KDE4) can do your job. It has options for output to various file formats, amongst which mp4. Tested on one DVD (Roy Orbison’s Black and White Night), picked mpeg4 encoding, ended up with a perfect avi file, i.e. no loss of quality noticible.
These days k9copy allows you to configure codecs to you need.
@microchip8: The resulting 2KB file came from dvd::rip - not from the command you gave me. As for ripping and encoding, I prefer to use a GUI, although doing the job might be more comfortable via command for some people. I will give k9copy a try, but at first glance it seems that dvd::rip is more structured and offers more options as well.
All I´d like to know which settings to provide dvd::rip with to encode those VOBs with the highest video quality possible without pushing the filesize to the unlimited. Puh… noone really knows?
I took a look at dvd::rip and I must say that although it offers many filters (mostly those from transcode) it’s a horrible app and offers virtually no encoder customizations nor supports any presets. So I think you better find something else that offers such things if you aim for the highest possible quality. As I said, get h264enc from my repo (make sure to update your mplayer and x264 from packman), choose CRF encoding in h264enc with a value of 19 or 20 and a preset like ehq and let it encode. It outputs by default to AVI but AVI is a bad container for H.264 video so at the end you can choose to remux to MP4, MKV (which I prefer), OGM and TS.
if you’re encoding directly from a VIDEO_TS DVD directory, you can specify that directory in h264enc and it’ll encode from there
Nope, I haven’t looked into HB… as a video developer myself, I’m absolutely not aware of HB…What is this handbrake you speak of?
Duuuuhhhhh what do you think? Of course I have looked at HB and it’s a good suggestion for him to try out, as is Avidemux and sx264, the latter I build in my repo. GUIs which don’t offer customizations will inherently always fail when one aims for very high quality and low filesize. dvd::rip does not offer enough to configure to obtain very high quality rips
Thanks for your suggestions, guys. How about kdenlive? Will this be able to transcode into very high quality? As I said, I need a program to RIP and ENCODE DVDs in the highest quality possible. All of that and a GUI.
