Suggest a new video format for me?

[Roscoe62]

I've created a "TV on DVD" database for use in XLobby. I have a whole bunch of TV DVD's - like Family Guy, Father Ted, Blackadder, Friends etc. and I've set up the database so that XLobby will show all the different series. Pick a series and it'll show what seasons are available - pick a season and it'll show all the different shows. It works really well!

I've always ripped all the DVD's into individual episodes - keeping them in video_ts.ifo & .vob format. Now my collection is starting to grow I'm finding that I'm running out of space! I note that many of the TV-based DVD episodes aren't stellar quality so I thought I might experiment with converting some episodes into another more efficient format to save space. If it works out well, I'll convert all of them.

I need a format that produces smaller files WITHOUT sacrificing video quality. It would also be nice if it supports dolby digital soundtracks if required (although it isn't required at this stage). It also must be supported by Theatertek 2 (my player of choice) and not require massive amounts of time to recode.

Can anyone offer any suggestions, and point me in the right direction?

I'm grateful for any and all input!

[alaricljs]

Well, it looks to me like TheaterTek doesn't support anything but DVDs.

So if that's really the deciding factor, it's time to invest in some new HD space.

[Roscoe62]

Thanks alaricljs,

I've a feeling Theatertek does support a lot more than DVDs. There is constant talk on their boards on supporting the HD format .ts but that's no good to me. I also heard it supports .avi and others, but what makes it difficult is there is nowhere I've found to see what formats it supports and what it doesn't.

I guess I'm trying to get an idea about what formats are popular, what formats do a good job etc. I'm interested in what formats like divX and Xvid can do, but I don't know whether TT2 supports them or not.

[jowaldo]

I've been interested in doing the same thing too, but every solution I've found to convert to xvid, or divx ends up being way too many steps to convert.

Does anyone know of a good app that keeps the process to a small amount of steps?

[chadwolcott]

theatertek does support formats other than DVDs. I can successfully play all standard media formats (avi - divx/xvid), mpg, wmv)

[Roscoe62]

Thanks for chiming in Chad. It's good to know these formats are available to us as options. Ideally it should be straightforward to use, but I'm more interested in the quality and options available.

Chad, have you put any DVD rips through the conversion process?

Also Jowaldo, do you remember which formats you looked at & what their merits were?

[chadwolcott]

I haven't done any conversions, all my dvds are ripped using dvdshrink into IFO format. I have a number os TV series' ripped, but have never converted them. I have found, IMHO, that xvid seems to have a good balance of quality vs file size. Although many people have said that WMV does an equally good job of the compression. I have a few movies that were compressed into xvid and have decent visual quality on my 57" HDTV at about 800MB-1.3GB per 1.5-2 hour movie.

I fortunately have almost 3TB (~2TB RAID-5/~600GB RAID-0/300GB RAID-1) of space in my media server so it'll be a bit before I need to think about compression. I have 206 DVD movies ripped and about 300GB of TV Series (24 Season 1, Battlestar Galactica, all the sex and the city seasons and 5 seasons of SG-1) and I still have nearly 1.2TB free.

I'm on hour 4 of a defrag at the moment and it's only on 8%...ugh

[Roscoe62]

Aah, the agony and the ecstacy of having soo much space at your disposal! I have 1.75 Terrabytes currently - I've got just over 140 movies ripped (still going....I've another 40-odd to go before I'm finished what we currently have). TV series on DVD I have Black Books - 3 seasons, Black Adder - 4 seasons, Family Guy - 3 seasons, Friends - 2 seasons (more coming - my wife is a huge fan), Futurama - 1 season so far the other 3 are coming, The Simpsons - 3 seasons so far. I'm also thinking about starting Frasier. I'm still putting these onto the server, but only have 1 250Gb disc allocated for TV. I could invest in a larger one, but I'm quite keen on re-coding the TV stuff now, and going for a larger HD later.

From the small amount of research I've done I see that XVid is highly regarded, and is favored above DivX in all categories except user-friendliness!

I don't own any video editing packages yet, so there may be a cost involved in going down this path, not to mention the time involved in the re-coding effort. I'm still investigating.

[jowaldo]

yeah thats what I've found too, xvid seems better quality for the space at least, but there are more easy to use divx tools. I'm not against figuring out how to do it (doesn't seem that hard) but when I got a ton of dvds to convert, I'd like to have something quick and easy if possible.

[dgemily]

Badubo gave me a link to a software that you can execute via xlobby by command lines, maybe it's can interrest you..

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/hgrip.html

Official site :
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/jbgenov/ (last release Oct./2004)

I didn't try it yet, but it should be very easy to use it

Features:
Just one click!
mp3 or ac3 sound
Dual Audio mode
XVID codec for best quality (0.7 supports XVID1.0Final)
Start&pause option to pause or stop rip after the avs file generation if you want to use other encoding softwares
Autocrop
AutoResize
Automatic Compressibility test for best resolution

Later