foremannz wrote:Really, people are still encoding MPEG's! Matroska, plain and simple, NO LOSS of quality, subtitles can be included and turned off it not required while playing.
http://www.makemkv.com/

mkv is merely a container - whilst it's commonly used with h.264 encoded content there's nothing to stop it being used with mpeg (or indeed hevc)

danose wrote:mkv is merely a container - whilst it's commonly used with h.264 encoded content there's nothing to stop it being used with mpeg (or indeed hevc)

I think that is the point. "Disk is cheap", so why bother with re-encoding when you can just take the video, audio and subtitles off a DVD and slap them into an MKV container with no risk of quality loss.

It is not entirely flawless however. I used makemkv to rip all my DVDs and at least one of the resulting files has an audio sync problem. I'll have to try a rerip.

Kev wrote:

danose wrote:mkv is merely a container - whilst it's commonly used with h.264 encoded content there's nothing to stop it being used with mpeg (or indeed hevc)

I think that is the point. "Disk is cheap", so why bother with re-encoding when you can just take the video, audio and subtitles off a DVD and slap them into an MKV container with no risk of quality loss.

It is not entirely flawless however. I used makemkv to rip all my DVDs and at least one of the resulting files has an audio sync problem. I'll have to try a rerip.

agree totally - ripped all my dvds to a NAS and kept them in 'native' vob format, space is cheap and it means I get exactly the same experience as the physical dvd

Cheers for the mkv info - I'd noticed loads of the stuff I'd downloaded was in that format but never looked into what it actually is.

Danose that vob into mkv sounds like a good approach, gives the same quality as putting the dvd into the player.

Cheers team.

foremannz wrote:Really, people are still encoding MPEG's! Matroska, plain and simple, NO LOSS of quality, subtitles can be included and turned off it not required while playing.
http://www.makemkv.com/

Not strictly correct. As others have said MKV is just the container, not the codec (lossy or otherwise), captions (burnt-in or overlaid) etc.

danose wrote: ...agree totally - ripped all my dvds to a NAS and kept them in 'native' vob format, space is cheap and it means I get exactly the same experience as the physical dvd

VOB files are hellishly inefficient (MPEG2) and don't play well on mobile devices. It is easy to make them smaller with few artifacts.

With blu-ray the problem is worse (40GB/movie and they wont stream well as native files even with a fast NAS and 1GB/s network). MPEG4/H.264 transcoding (eg Handbrake, Vidcoder etc) is great to overcome this.

It will be interesting to see how H.265 and HEVC are taken up/supported.

mark2c wrote:It will be interesting to see how H.265 and HEVC are taken up/supported.

given that they're looking to be officially used as the codec for bluray-4K I'm picking support will be driven by that (and by things like apple using h.265 for facetime over 4g).

Like h.264 before it though issue on smaller/low powered devices will be having sufficienct horsepower to run the codec, fine if your gpu supports h/w decode but that's only the very latest chips

Agreed, hardware CODEC support is key.

danose wrote:

mark2c wrote:It will be interesting to see how H.265 and HEVC are taken up/supported.

given that they're looking to be officially used as the codec for bluray-4K I'm picking support will be driven by that (and by things like apple using h.265 for facetime over 4g).

Like h.264 before it though issue on smaller/low powered devices will be having sufficienct horsepower to run the codec, fine if your gpu supports h/w decode but that's only the very latest chips

Excellent: Rockchip RK3288 and Amlogic S802 chips with hardware 4k HEVC/H.265 decoding available now in media players for <US$100. These can be used with XBMC/Kodi and Android.

This type of thing: http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_odkw= ... 2&_sacat=0

I have just started this process, pulling my kids DVD's down for tablet travel winnage! I used DVD shrink to pull the VOD files, then converted to mp4 via handbrake (mp4 needed for older tv). Seemed to pull the protected films across fine, when handbrake wasn't able to do so directly.

I am not a visualphile or audiophile, so the quality loss is ok for my tastes when upscale to our (albeit 34") tv. Plus handbrake has a deinterlacer which has been handy for some shows!

All legal, as they are our own legit DVDs and just making backups

Its a slow process, but will be worth it when we can box up the DVDs and store them somewhere else!

znomit wrote:

danose wrote:

rustic wrote:https://handbrake.fr/ if wanting to put them on an iPad or Tablet. Super Simple

trouble is whilst handbrake is a great at re-encoding, it has NO decss functionality (so will read only UN-protected dvds). For free de-css I used to swear by the free version of DVDfab, and it's still quite a good option except some of the newest/funkiest dvd protection schemes are too much for it - I've gone to pavtube's DVDaid as a result (but it's not free)

I've only found a few new releases that won't rip with handbrake.

I've started using ripit to get around the stupid region encoding which rendered many of my DVDs unplayable.
Now I can copy a bunch of DVDs and then queue them in handbrake to rip overnight.
http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/