I am currently ripping my personal DVDs to my computer so that I can eventually stream them to a Laptop running XBMC connected to my TV.

Current TV is Std Def and laptop to TV connection would be SVideo.
Eventually TV will be HD and connection will be via Monitor cable.

I am currently Shrinking the DVDs to just the main movie as a .VOB file at ~3-4GB each.

I am looking for suggestions for the "Best" video quality with the "Smallest" file size.

Also, what would you suggest for a file type?

TIA
Matt

I prefer to store DVDs as entire ISOs. No quality loss. The main downside is serious file size.

If I wanted to generate smaller, but still HQ, files, I'd:

1. Rip the movie to the hard drive
2. Write an AviSynth script to deinterlace/inverse telecine/denoise the video
3. Use x264 to encode the video (@ 1-2Mbps)
4. Use mkvmerge to combine the video generated by x264 with the original AC3 audio stream from the DVD in a .mkv file

If I just want a quick and dirty encode, I'll let mencoder do all the work by itself (ripping/deinterlacing/encoding/muxing). But mencoder's filters are much lower quality than AviSynth's, and mkvmerge enables many fancy options (like multiple audio streams and soft subtitles).

when encoding for N800, I scale the video to 320x240 or 400x240 for widescreen, reduce the frame rate to 15fps, set video bit rate to 960kb/s, halve the audio sampling to 24kHz with mp3 codec bit rate at 96kb/s.

this makes for quite a decent quality video, and when we go on a long journey my son watches movies in the back of the car with headphones on and is quite happy!

the script is here:
http://www.zaurus.org.uk/download/sc...ecode-2pass.sh

invoke thus:
avi-recode-2pass.sh w-n800 dvd://1

and wait... and wait...


if I am encoding for xbox media center playback, the target "paldvdhi" or "paldvdlo" is sufficient, i.e.

avi-recode-2pass.sh paldvdhi dvd://1

use "lsdvd" to find the tracks on the dvd.

When I first started ripping my DVDs I compressed a little - I tried Munich compressed 25% in DVD Shrink. That's a long *** movie. The final quality was crap on my neighbors big screen. Since then, I rip everything full quality video/audio, but I still use DVD Shrink to eliminate non-English audio tracks and subtitles, as well as the menus. This keeps most movies below 5 GBs.

I save anywhere from 200 - 700 MB a movie just by removing extra audio and features. Occasionally I'll rip the entire DVD, if I want to hang on to the special features of a particular movie, as well. I keep everything in .vob/.ifo format. I have two 750 GB hard drives (1 for travel, one for home/backup) filled from this, I'm afraid to go any larger just because of the volume of data I'd lose if it failed.

Even when I encode this in .avi for my N800 though, most full movies end up being 500 MB. I can't stand losing noticeable quality.

Sorry, I know that doesn't really answer your question. I spent a long time looking through information on different compression formats and nobody can really tell you what the best combo is for quality/size. In my case, I had to put my satisfaction before disk space.

I rip my DVDs in Linux with DVD:Rip.
Widescreen movies I crop and resize if not already anamorphic. (Very straightforward with this software.) I deinterlace/inverse telecine as needed, but have never found a need to denoise.

It uses the ffmpeg encoder to do MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD). I encode with two pass @ a constant quality setting of ~0.30 bits per pixel. I do not reencode the audio, but pass the AC3 stream (if there) straight through. Simple stereo I encode with LAME mp3 @ 192 CBR. This produces .avi files of damn-near DVD quality which are playable on my Philips DivX capable DVD player or (streamed to) my ShowCenter.
File size for 'The Dark Night' (A longer than average movie) was under 2GB.

I also encode them as x.264 2Mbps. This is the copy I use to transcode from for my iPod, DVD-Rs, or other portable devices. The reason I make two encodings is that none of my stand-alone devices play full-res high-bitrate x.264. In an ideal world I would only do the x.264 encode.

These two copies together are less than the size of a "shrunk" DVD MPEG-2 .iso and are both of higher quality. Only downside I see is you lose the menu structure.

I do not do hard subtitles as my primary devices can do soft subtitles, and if I need hard subtitles I can OCR them and combine them (like for my iPod).


My original DVDs go into the attic for storage and protection from the scratches of kids.