I am in the process of ripping all my dvd's to my hard drive. I'm almost 100 in, and things are working fine thus far. Been reading some on .mkv and H.264compression though; and I'm wondering if I'm wasting more space then I need to.
My requirements: highest image quality and audio quality possible for main movie. Chapters preserved. Special Features preserved (don't need them at 100% quality if it's not convenient). Disk menu's preserved.
I would like to be able to remove unnecessary foreign lang. audio tracks and subs, FBI warnings and any other unnecessary 'preview' things. This is not so much a requirement, more of a "would be nice".
One of the things I was looking at is "SUPER". It seems to me that, if I was willing to take the time, I could rip the disk to folder structure, then open the .vob file, encode to h.264, encode back to .vob, and replace the original with the much reduced file (saving 50ish percent storage space?). Wondering if anyone here has gone to the trouble of doing this, if my logic is flawed, if this would break other things in the disk menu (scene selection comes to mind...)etc? How much would the quality suffer with all that back-and-forth encoding? Anything else I need to learn before I try this?
Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer!
You won't save any space by compressing to a new format and encoding back to DVD movie format.
The MPEG-2 format takes up more space than the others, so all you would have is a movie that has lost quality by being encoded repeatedly.
DVD Shrink can be used to trandscode the DVD to smaller size (typically 8GB to 4GB);removing subtitles doesn't save much, but the likes of DTS audio can be dispensed with to make a real saving.