[I noticed that a few of the regular contributors are unfortunatly unemployed and it reminded me of a stat that I heard the other day that as unemployment rises affairs and downloads of porn increase - presumably as the unemployed try to find something to 'do' with their time .... well they must have forgotten the third thing that rises (NO! NOT THAT) and that is people like us CLEARLY take the opportunity to rip their DVD collection - and BOY! does this chew up CHUNKS of time allowing me to 'put off' the job hunting / CV completing / form filling etc :-) ]
So, back to the question ....
I would like to convert my DVD collection to MPEG4 AVC/H.264 (as of the many formats my Network Media Player understands this is 'best') ... but I cant find a quick way of doing it ... please help.
I can 'easily' convert to AVI (in 45mins) using DVDFab to rip the DVD files and then using AutoGK to turn these into an MPEG4 Part2 ASP (Xvid).
Afterdawn member 'KajNrig' has been helping me convert to MPEG4 H.264 through a process of DVDFab to rip the DVD files, DVDShrink to pack them into a single VOB file, MEGUI to convert the VIDEO (only) to H.264 and then we were getting to stitching the AUDIO into the newly created H.264 video file when I waved the white flag as this process is too long for ripping my whole DVD collection (I have to look for a job at some point!) [[thanks for your help though KajNrig]]
........ anyone got a solution that takes about an hour a DVD ?
My kids have been using the program AVS Video Converter 6.22 to convert their DVD videos to watch on their Ipods, but it takes about 2 hours to complete one movie. They have a PIV 2.5 processor with 1.5 Gbytes RAM. If you have a faster system, I'm sure your time would be less but I'm not sure about the hour benchmark you mention. Most of their movies are 2 hours or less. I don't know the running time of those "training Films" you mentioned earlier, but if they are around 90 minutes, they can be transcoded in about 90 minutes or so.
I hope this helps some.
I see you want to do H.264 but due to crappy diallup it's too frustrating to page thru threads to check if i pointed you towards this thread previously ~ http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/751068 If it wasn't that thread there's another one (i think it's entitled 'AutoGK problems') where cyprusrom mentioned H.264
As i say i can see you want better quality than XviD but personally i only convert DVD's to AVI for convenience ie i've been swathing thru my DVD collection for the last few weeks and converting something like a couple hundred in that time. I've settled on 1400MB Xvid's as it's a good compromise between size and quality. Quality isn't actually that important to me as the reason i convert to AVI is to make available (via XBMC on old xboxes) loads of my and my kids' favourite movies on my main PC which at the moment has 2 500GB drives purely for AVI's; there's nothing i hate worse than thinking of a movie to watch and having to fight thru loads of heavy dvd binders, it sort of kills the mood. So i've been ripping (using 7 optical drives at once as it's soooo monotonous trying to rip so many discs and not go stir crazy!) and one of the main things i like about AutoGK is that i can batch queue shedloads of movies and it just works. AutoGK on my 2 main machines (Quad Q6600 and a Dual Core E6400) takes an hour per conversion on the Quad and about 1.5 hours on the Dual.
Prove me wrong, but so far, everything i've read about formats such as H.264 is that they require a lot of messing about (as opposed to simple stuff like XviD) or converting DVD's to ISO mode first (i've always used FILE mode ie VIDEO_TS folders).
