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Do you have any good simple guides on the best way to rip DVDs onto an HTPC… I’ve read lots of posts using a myriad of tools converting DVD to VOB and then another tool to H.264 (or equiv). Are there any all in one solutions? I am currently using 7MC and MediaBrowser Firestorm – since I trust the recommendations from this website I was hoping for some guidance before I start downloading crap. Thanks-Jonathan
Well, I suppose the answer lies in how you prefer to rip. Do you want to keep the full disc intact (menus and all)? Do you want just the film? Do you want compressed or uncompressed? Do you want to retain all audio streams, or only the primary (or secondary, if smaller)? How about subtitles? Sorry for all the questions, but this is why you come across guides that have a seemingly endless list of software required for something that appears to be quite simple.
If you can give me an idea of the type of end result you want, I’m sure I can find you a good guide. If not, I’ll write one up.
I don’t mean to take you away from this site but here is a recent discussion of this here: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/91293.aspx
IMO, for movie backups to play on WMC: standard dvds need to look their best on a hdtv, so I don’t recommend any compression. It comes at the price of storage though. If you can live with just the main movie, 5.1 audio, and subtitles, you will have rips of around 4gb each movie, fitting around 450 movies per 2tb drive.
You can use free programs to do this, very quick and easily. The almighty dvd shrink, and dvdfab hd decrypter (free version)are the only tools you will need. Each movie will take anywhere from 5-15 minutes to rip.
my 2c if you have the storage and don’t want to spend time compressing/remux/trancoding/etc.
Always like links to good guides!
I continue to encode, however, to save space. I’ve had the opportunity to watch hundreds of encoded movies and straight DVDs and I rarely can tell the difference in my resulting encodes and original DVD.
I do agree though…to each their own :)
I’d love to see a guide on how to use AviSynth to process the vast amounts of SD content (ripped movies, downloaded, …) to optimise it for Full HD displays – have you played around with this at all?
Most media players will upscale with algorythms like bilinear, bicubic, lanczos, etc because they are fast (but bilinear scaling looks horrendously “blurry”) …
The full power of a HTPC can be seen when running upscaling (via Avisynth) that 1) deblocks AVI/MPEG-2 (Deblock_QED) 2) smooths gradients (Gradfun2dmod, GRadfunkmirror, etc) 3) Resizes with interpolation (Blackman/SPline64) 4) Sharpen (LSFMod or LimitedSharpenFaster) and/or 5) Sharpen + Remove Noise (SeeSaw + Esspresso/RemoveGrain) …
Those filters will be far more than what any standalone DVD/BD/media player would be able to process (and makes the upscale bearable to watch if your used to HD!!) ..