which movieformat should i use? what is the best format? (1 Viewer)

[montecristo]

hi,

what kind of videoformat should i use?

H264, MKV, etc..?

i don't have much experience converting videoformats.

i want to convert my DVD's to another format with no quality loss.

i already ripped my dvd's to HDD in original format.
but it takes a lot of my space and i have a lot of movies with different resolutions (vertical black borders on the sides).
the only way to get rid of the small black borders is to convert to another format because then i'm able to crop the movies.

which format is the best?
what software do you recommend?
what is the fastest way to convert?
and i do want to keep more than 1 audiotrack (dd and dts) an more than 1 subtitle.

i'm currently trying now to convert a dvd to AVI H264 with dvdfab.
but it takes a very long time to convert. i'm already busy for 1,5 hours and will take aproximately 2 hours.
and that is way too long for a single movie.


any recommendations are welcome


Montecristo

 

[SMa]

There is no faster way to convert dvd's.
As far as I know only .mkv supports multiple audiotracks and subtitles. But remember: mkv, avi, ... are containers while H264, divx, ... are codecs.

 

[revs]

The easiets way I know of is to use Handbreak: HandBrake

It's simple and does the job.

As for which format? upt o you - I sould suggest h.264 and maybe AAC (or leave the original 5.1 sound) sound as they are going to generally give you the best picture/sound for the file size. (h264 is whats used on Blu-Ray)

 

[Maedhros]

Hi,

I am not sure that H.264 will be much better than XviD in PAL/NTSC resolution. You have to remember that H.264 really starts to stand out when you reach HD-resolutions of 720p and up.

As for container, I can only recommend MKV. It is a much more up-to-date container than eg. AVI and as SMa told you this container has support for multiple audio as well as multiple subtitles.

The audio channels may be encoded using MP3, OGG, WMA, and AAC. As far as I remember ;-)

The video format may be H.264, XviD, and others.

I would recommend that you test out some settings. Try to search the web and find some settings for XviD and H.264 encoding that is quality-wise the same and also close to the quality that you would like. Then compare them on filesize and so on to check which one did the better job.
Apparently according to this thread H.264 might become your choice: MPEG4 H.264 encoding tests (vs Xvid) - AppleInsider
But maybe do some more research on your own. From what I know AAC would be your choice, since the difference to OGG is minimal in most cases AND you have better compatibility with players out-of-the-box.

SO... An MKV container using H.264 video with AAC audio... You'll be able to put that into any newer Bluray player and have it play it I'm sure. If not, then give it a year. But if you care about compatibility and want to avoid days or weeks search all articles on the web and making countless tests yourself to find out which codec comes out on top with a negligable margin, I think you found your winner here ;-)

BTW.... if you also need to have multiple audio tracks and multiple subtitles it becomes a bit complicated. Apparently that isn't as popular as I thought. You have to rip the video with eg. english to an MKV. Then rip additional audio tracks and subtitles to separate files and in the end merge them into the MKV-file.

Best source after a 10-minute search: DVD to h.264 -- with multiple audio and subtitle tracks