I have decided to start ripping all of my DVD's so i can put them into storage (parents house ) but still be able to watch them... I was hoping someone here has gone through this process already. What video codec should i use? I want to save as much space as possible but i want them at a nice quality!
If you're looking for the standard ripped movie size (700mb) then an MPEG 4 Part 2 codec will do, the most popular are xvid and divx. xvid is open source, and also now superior to divx. If you want to have higher quality, even though 700mb xvid movies are fine for normal resolution, then an MPEG 4 Part 10 codec like x264 will let you have better quality up to HD, with file size increasing progressively. On Linux, there are a lot of tools available, but I've heard that running Gordian Knot is possible under wine. If so, then for ease of use I would suggest it. Try this: AutoGK Homepage - THE tool for XviD / DivX conversion
I use DVD::Rip and the Xvid codec to make legal backups of my DVD's for my daughter to watch. They work perfectly on our cheap DVD/DivX player, and the quality on a CRT TV looks perfect for even ~700mb rips. That means I can put around a half-dozen of her cartoons on a singe-layer DVD-R, so I don't have to change the DVD as often and scratches are not a problem. If you use Debian, DVD::RIP and all of its dependencies can be found over at the Debian Multimedia Packages::Home repository.
DVD::Rip is definitely feature rich! I was impressed/surprised that it included features such as controlling a cluster of machines, It seems to be perfect for ripping hundreds of DVD's like i need to do! The only thing that i noticed that it doesn't do is get the DVD title and use it as the default project name, but its only a few seconds work to type it yourself Ripping and encoding this lot is going to take quite awhile though!
From Personal experience I never manage to tell the difference between the two formats. But if you are planning on playing on a standard stand-alone video player, stick to the more conventional formats Divx/Xvid. If you are playing from a media centre or a PC, anything goes and also you can have bigger size files. An idea - shrink the movie to a 1.4GB so it can fit on a mini DVD (8cm). This way the quality should be higher and the disk is tiny! Lovem!!! Can you use the Divx codec on linux? I never ever managed to rip a movie with Debian and DVD::Rip. Why? How the hell should I know? :chk: Hehe..... 150 disks? Hope you have another PC standing by while this one is busy.... this is gonna be one long night.....
