I have teh P0\/\/3r
I have finally figured out how to effectively and consistently convert VOB’s to AVI’s. To some of you haxxors, this is old news, but to me it’s good news. See, I used to use a nifty little utility called Dr. Divx to encode my DVD’s to AVI, but they trashed the old version and the new one will only convert to DIVX file format. I don’t want my file in DIVX format, I want AVI format with DIVX compression. Yes, there is a difference.
For those of you who have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, lemme ’splain. The DVD’s you own are nothing more than a big ol’ disc of files that hold all of the frames of a movie and the synchronized audio stream(s). There are a couple of different types of files on each disc, but the important ones are the Video Object (VOB), and it’s cooresponding IFO. Now, you could just pull down the VOB file to your hard drive and watch the movie by loading it up into a supported player. Most software DVD Players, VLC player, and Windows Media Player Classic all have capabilities to play VOB files. Unfortunately, since VOB’s are a raw format, they are freakin huge. One episode of Firefly was over 2.0 GB in size, and larger movies might be around +3.5GB. Which means if we have a large series with many episodes, like say House, we would need around 2.0GB x 20 episodes = 40.0GB of space to hold one season. Granted, space on computers these days reach the Terabyte (1000GB) range, but 2GB per episode is a huge waste of space.
So to fix this, we have a wonderful mechanism called compression. The two big compression codecs out there are DIVX and XVID. Codec is just an abbreviation for compressor decompressor, which means that DIVX and XVID are ways to communicate with a compressed file so we can get the information we want (like frames and audio streams). Using one of these codecs, we can usually deflate a 2.0GB episode of House to around 350MB, and lose almost no quality. That puts the total space for all of season 1 to around 7.0GB; which is over a 570% decrease in size! You can go even smaller than that, but at any less than 170MB per file the AVI’s start looking boxy–which is called artifacting.
The biggest thing that I have noticed from my ripping experience is a degradation in the quality of the audio stream. I’m not sure if this is caused by the software I am using, or if it is simply a limitation of the compression itself, but the audio sounds flat. It doesn’t make much sense because when I pulled the VOB I made sure to get the high quality audio channels as well. No matter. As I learn the nuances of the software I am using I’m sure I will get better rips.
Hopefully you learned something about how DVD’s work. If you too wish to learn how to copy DVD’s to your HDD, do some googling. I also suggest Doom9. That’s where I learned most of what I know, and they can point you in the right direction. If you kinda know what you are doing, check out Gordian Knot. And for the n00bies, check out Auto Gordian Knot. The hardest part is getting the VOB file from the DVD.
[note: When learning to use AutoGK, make sure you cruise the forums. There is one particular problem where you have to run a registry file included in the AutoGK directory to fix a problem with the conversion process. Basically if your conversions are dieing because VobSubMod cannot open a particular AVI file, then run the registry merge proxyoff.reg located in a subfolder of the AutoGK directory.]
Eric said,
June 27, 2006 @ 10:26 am
When in doubt, count on Jeremy to show us all how the Nerdular Nerd Dance is done.
e's wife said,
June 27, 2006 @ 12:07 pm
Wow, I think I have a vague idea of what you just said, but that still wasn’t plain English.
This is plain English:
“I wanted to watch a movie, but I didn’t like how much memory/space it took up on my computer, so I found/created a way to make it take up less space! I reduced the amount of space without reducing the quality!”
See, now was that so difficult?
Eric said,
June 27, 2006 @ 12:13 pm
You got owned jeremy, 1 v user.
jduv said,
June 27, 2006 @ 12:14 pm
Whats with the tag team. Did you plan that? Aweee how cute. =P
Dave said,
June 28, 2006 @ 8:14 am
I still like my Pocket Divx Encoder(or the $5 version I just bought, called Lathe), so easy to use, even a untrained ape can make a movie. I just ripped Jaynestown with DVD Decrypter(which makes a 1.8 GB .VOB file), and then made it into a 720×404 AVI, which is about 423 MB, and that’s with about 1200 kbps on the video, and 192 kbps on the audio. A really good quality copy.
Then I shrunk the video down to 320×180, and put the video to 338 kbps with 128 kbps audio, and the file 126 MB and I put it on my MiniSD card for use in my phone. 
So I have a full episode of Firefly on my phone! Wootness. One thing I noticed, that converting the VOB to the 720×404 AVI takes for ever. It took about 30 minutes or so, and thats with a 3.2 Ghz HyperThreading P4 with a 2mb L2 Cache and a gig of ram!
jduv said,
June 28, 2006 @ 8:41 am
Did the same episode with AutoGK, took it to 300MB and ended up with a 70% compression ration. Pocket Divx is a cool little program, but it doesn’t give you much feedback on the quality of your rip. You should probably rerip it to around 300 MB with 192kbps mp3 audio. You’ll save 123MB of wasted space. And, AutoGK can rip AC3 audio, which is the native DVD support. I know that’s useless for a phone (no phones have 5.1 surround), but if you want your rips to retain 5.1 then its a good idea to rip AC3 audio. It’s huge though, so the video quality might suffer.
Dave said,
June 28, 2006 @ 9:28 am
What was your video bitrate? I could of dropped that and saved a lot of space. I just wanted it higher so it didn’t make dust and smoke look grainy. They video quality is high enough to make put it on a DVD-R and play it in a player and you most likely couldn’t even tell I compressed it. Like most of the anime I get is around 5-600kbps, which makes a 22 min ep be around 170 MB.
jduv said,
June 28, 2006 @ 9:37 am
My current rip weights in at 357MB and it is near DVD quality, so I am going to rerun the conversion tonight and tweak it until it looks good at around 300MB. I’ll check the video bitrate when I get home. It’s ripped to 720 x 404 resolution with 192kbps audio. Firefly only has 2 channel audio.
Dave said,
June 28, 2006 @ 9:38 am
Well I made it 300MB, but the Video quality went to barely acceptable on full screen, but it looks good windowed at 720×404. I’m sure there’s little tricks one can do to make it look better, but for the extra 123mb I’d rather have a DVD(well just a hair under, but particles and lighting looks right, even on full screen on a 1280×1024 monitor) quality video.
jduv said,
June 28, 2006 @ 9:30 pm
Yeah I just checked out my 360MB rips of firefly that I ran while I was at work today. The audio sounds wonderful (192kbps mp3), but the video still has noticable artifacts on things that are out of focus. Since AutoGK (and pocket DiVX decoder) both use intraframe compression this is to be expected. That means the compression algorithm finds similar objects and pixel data across frames and copies those those frames, and then compressing the pixel data. Those static frames will be have artifacts in them when viewed at higher resolutions. It isn’t so horrible that I can’t stand it, and I think I can go down to around 300MB and it won’t get any worse. You have to go into the 500MB range to get a perfect picture on the resolutions we are ripping to, and then it’s still a wee bit boxy. The price you pay for compression. I figure if I want to watch Firefly on a big screen I will use the actual DVD’s. The AVI’s are just background for my coding sessions or streaming across the network to machines on Tech campus using VLC player =).
jduv said,
June 28, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
Ack I’m an idiot. I forgot the first episode of firefly is a double! So my first episode is significally worse than rips of the regular episodes due to lots more video to compress. The regular rips look really good!
I’m going to re-encode the first episode to around 600mb.
Dave said,
June 29, 2006 @ 8:27 am
Yeah, making the first be 300mb would make it look horriffic! That’s about the size it’d be on my Cell Phone, at 320×180ish! Speaking of which, I showed it off to all the guys when we ate at the Mexican last night. They thought it was pretty dang cool.
My phone does video really well, unless there’s some heavy graidents, because it’s only 16-bit(65k) color. These newer(technology wise, not date of production) 262k phones would probably show it perfect. Except they all use stupid Transflash MicroSD, which has a maximum capicity of only 1GB, at least my MiniSD(which is massively huge in Japan, and nearly every mid-range and above phone has it) can be up to 2GB, though I only have a 1GB card. Got about 800mb of music on it, one ep of Firefly, and a couple of odds and ends like a ClearView Document Viewer program, so I can actually read Word Docs, and Excell Spreadsheets, and PDF’s(which would take a century to load on a 200k connection…). Oh, and if any of you guys who don’t know me(or my Cell Phone Whorism), my phone is this baby: http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=800