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Building my Library of movies

S

scott2206

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 8, 2010
15
0
Warrington, UK
Hey,

I have just started to rip all my dvd's on to the computer using handbrake (sometimes with a mtr copy so that I can queue multiple copies encoding whilst at work/sleep). I'm just about finishing my TV boxsets and using TVDB have an iTunes TV Shows Library that I'm pretty happy with. I'm still not 100% happy with the rip quality though, not sure if I'm just being paranoid.

The TV shows have been mostly ripped on the following settings
FORMAT: MP4
Codec: MP-4 Video / AAC Audio
Framerate: Same as Source
Encoder: FFMPeG
Average Bit rate: 3,000
with 2 pass encode.

Each hour episode is coming out at about 1gb average. Can I get better quality than this?

I'm not to fussed about the TV shows but I'm going to start my movies soon and with iTunes not importing DVD images/full Video TS copies I'd like to get the best I can.

Space is not an issue as my last 1TB HDD cost me just £60 (external) and I eventually want to get me a Drobo.

My eventual aim is to play everything through Plex as I'm not really a fan of Front Row so is there any need to encode to put into iTunes do you think? Are there any advantages to having them in iTunes?

Sorry if this is a bit garbled as I have lots of questions but not to sure how to ask and what order to ask them :)

Thanks for any help.

Scott

p.s I have no intention of ever buying an :apple:TV it would be a mac mini running plex again if I wanted to expand my media network.
 
Can I ask why you used FFMpeg and not H.264 ? Also constant quality will give you better and faster results, 3000kbps is also far to high for SD video.

I use the AppleTV preset with a CQ value of between 60-62% which gives me a TV Show encode with a bitrate between 1600-2000kbps and a size of between 600-800Mb. And it's hard to tell the difference between the encoded version and the DVD.

I would definitely change from FFMpeg to H.264.
 
Yeah, not quite sure what is with the 3000 kbit/s. OTT for an SD DVD rip, and way OTT for a TV series DVD rip.

I spent about 3-4 months encoding (nearly) all my DVDs, about 420 movies and just over 1,000 TV episodes. Having a Mac Pro helped, but it was still hard work.

Check the resolution provided by the DVD for the TV show. Nearly all are pitifully awful, ie. 600x350 and sometimes as low as 400x240.

For a slow paced TV show, ie. Columbo, that I may only ever watch once, I'd use maybe 1200kbit/s.
 
spice weasel - Cheers I'll see what "universal" spits out for me.

roidy & BertyBoy: I used the FFMeg because I had absolutley no idea what it was and that was the setting handbrake gave me :)

I used the 3,000 just to make sure I got the quality seeing as 100% CQ kept on crashing the encode for some reason.

So about 1,200 would be adquate? BertyBoy, what would you recommend for (what I would imagine being) a high quality TV show like 24, The Sopranos and Lost? These are things that I am likely to watch a few times and would like the best quality I can get.

Cheers for the pointers great help. Especially before I start ripping the movies that I definately want the best quality I can get.

Plex, iTunes or both?
 
scott2206 said:
I used the 3,000 just to make sure I got the quality seeing as 100% CQ kept on crashing the encode for some reason.
Click to expand...

You shouldn't be using 100% CQ. Get the latest Handbrake version. I use RF 21.75 (CQ 57.35%) for HD movies. I haven't encoded an SD movie in a while but I would probably bump it up to RF 19 (CQ 62.75%). I also use the x264 encoder. The resulting file size for my HD videos are around 2 gigs for a 2 hour movie and the quality is excellent.
 
BertyBoy said:
Check the resolution provided by the DVD for the TV show. Nearly all are pitifully awful, ie. 600x350 and sometimes as low as 400x240.
Click to expand...

As far as I know all commercial DVD's are encoded at the same standard resolution of 720x576 for PAL and 720x480 for NTSC. I don't know where your getting DVD's from with resolutions like 600x350 or 400x240. I've encoded numerous TV show DVD's and have yet to find one that doesn't adhere to the standard DVD resolution.
 
Thanks for all the help.

I cant download the latest HB it does not open up I think its because I'm still on Tiger. But things on the version I have seem to br working fine.

One more question. Is there a way to stop HB cropping the image automatically as a standard setting as for each show I am needing to go in and set the crop to custom "0"'s. I set the aspect ratio to anamorthic as this results in the 720x576 ratio of the source which is what the source has been for all of my DVD's so far. Could I do all this stanardisation by saving a preset?

Thanks all.
 
Why wouldn't you want to use Autocrop? A lot of DVD's especially older ones contain a lot of image noise or black areas at the borders which is not seen on a DVD player because of overscan. If you don't crop that noise out then your going to see it in your encoded file.
 
roidy said:
Why wouldn't you want to use Autocrop? A lot of DVD's especially older ones contain a lot of image noise or black areas at the borders which is not seen on a DVD player because of overscan. If you don't crop that noise out then your going to see it in your encoded file.
Click to expand...

Awesome! Auto crop it is then.
 
Update:

Thanks for all you help on the last questions.

Over the last couple of weeks I have ripped the majority of my DVD's using Mac the Ripper but a few have been a bit troublesome

The following would not rip
  • The Dark Night
  • Gone in 60 seconds
  • Quantum of Solace
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At worlds end
  • Layer cake
  • Eastern Promises
  • The Simpsons Movie

These would come up with "bad sectors" and not open once finished.

I imported all of my ripped .TS files into xbmc (as I'm running tiger at the moment) and came up with a few issues in there. The following dvd's seemed to rip fine but then caused xbmc to close when trying to open the files to play.

  • 28 Weeks later
  • Apocalypse now
  • City of Gods
  • The day after tomorrow
  • The incredibles
  • Quantum of Solace
  • Madagascar
  • Pirates of the Caribbea: The curse of the black pearl
  • saw
  • scarface
  • seabuscuit
  • serpico
  • shrek 2

And then the godfather III and Pirates of the caribbean: dead mans chest just froze xbmc.

Any ideas on why this is? Are they all protected or is it something to do with how they have been ripped with mtr.

Also when I do a feature only extraction it plays back subtitles. is there anyway of getting rid of these whilst keeping the needed subs when people are talking chinese and what not?
 
You didn't state what size tv you have, because you can get away with a lot more with the smaller tv's.

If you have a decent size tv, I.E 42" and larger I would find the right encoding specs your happy with.

If you encode a DVD rip/ a full length movie down to 1.5gig or so the quality loss is going to be pretty noticeable on a larger tv.

Thats just my .2 cents..
 
how does your audio fair?

playing in quicktime or itunes vs the MTR DVD rip?

the only issue ive been ahving is getting good audio quality, even having used the AAC core audio with 48 320Kbps.

and the sound significantly softer than the dvd rip or dvd version, and id excpet alittle audio loss, but this is just a huge amount.
 
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