How to make a good looking and not too huge AVI file from a DVD?

[Mihotaku]

tools? codecs? settings? please, to all the AVI seeders, tell me how you make them. many IVs i saw are about 800-900 MB big and are running about 1 hour with an exellent quality. i also want to create such good AVIs.

 

[chippy]

Sorry Mihotako for not posting an answer to your question in this reply, but strangely enough I stumbled across it while looking for old posts on the very same subject. Hopefully a thread bump will draw more attention from more experienced members in this endeavour. You do deserve it, my friend! Thanks for the CMP ISOs!!

It might help if you specify the platform on which you wish to use to make these rips, too. For myself, I've got a 2.2GHz Fedora 9 box with a working install of DVDRip and I too would very much like to take on some of the burden of answering requests for AVIs. I'm also in the process myself of converting a bunch of ISOs to AVIs (gotta conserve HDD space...can't bear to delete any Kaneko ISOs!!) and I would love to be able to bundle up my first original torrent to give back to the community that has given me so much.

I took a look at the thread (sorry for not posting a link, it seemed to be mostly a discussion of the merits of 60fps rips) about filters and scripts and such that people are using under Windows, but to be honest a lot of it was over my head. Are there any DVDRip users out there who can share a set of parameters or suggestions that produce good quality results? I've dabbled a little bit with my own collection of ISOs, but I'd really like to produce the best my HW/SW are capable of producing. I'm interested most in h.264/AC3, since that seems to be the developing standard, but tips on bpp, interlacing options, denoise filters and the like would be very helpful. I want to create rips that compare to the videophile rips I'm seeing tenured contributors releasing here on AO.

I've got the time, the horsepower, the bandwidth, and the storage space: drop me a crumb and I'll gladly put it to good use!

 

[Corkson]

The easiest way I've found

What I say applies to Mac, so I'm not really sure it'll help you. Hope it can.

I use some free software called Mac the Ripper and Handbrake Lite. I've used Mac the Ripper on all sorts of dvds with good success. Then I feed it into Handbrake and set the parameters I want--you can specify quality and final size of the file by clicking a few buttons and entering a number.

Good luck!

 

[Corkson]

There's an old thread on page 5 that may help.

http://www.akiba-online.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8808

 

[chippy]

Thanks, Corkson, for the tips on Mac platforms. It doesn't help me too much, and my best guess is that Mihotaku is on an M$ machine, but getting this info all in one spot for multiple platforms is nevertheless a Good Thing.

Mihotaku, you might want to take a peek at Gordian Knot, a suite of tools that are very popular for ripping DVDs to AVI files. You can get to their SourceForge page here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gordianknot, and you might also want to take a peek at something that claims to make GK even easier, AutoGK: http://www.autogk.me.uk/, but if you find tips on tweaking parameters, you might have to resort to the original suite of tools to utilize them.

And in that vein, if you DO find tips (that can be understood by mere mortals) please do post them here, because Linux and Mac users may indeed be able to translate them into parameters for our own platforms. Good luck!

 

[wotaku]

chippy: mencoder works well and will do as good a job as x264.exe for encoding (it's the same code really.)

But now that we all have a good video format/encoder (H.264/x264), the biggest factor by far is the deinterlacing and nothing gives as good results as TempGaussMC. If that's what you want I think you only have 2 options: run AviSynth under wine (not guaranteed it will work well/reliably with such a complex filter) or run AviSynth under Windows in virtualbox. I guess a third option would be to port TGMC and integrate it in mencoder (or beg/pay someone to do it...)

Otherwise mencoder has some decent deinterlacers too, just not quite as good. Yadif+mcdeint is an option that Sekuhara uses: see his script.

Good luck.

 

[Mihotaku]

thanks to you three. i am using a Mac with Handbrake and MacTheRipper. i am seeding a MP4 torrent. see my Ryouna Kasai thread for download. it looks pretty good. please tell me your impresions.

i used a deinterlaced method called "slow". here are some explanations from handbrake FAQ:

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HandBrake's traditional deinterlacer, "Fast", is a simple linear filter. It averages together a column of pixels above and below the current one being filtered. In this average, it weighs down the value of pixels from the "bad" field being filtered away to practically nothing, while boosting up the value of pixels from the "good" field being preserved. The end result looks little better than simply line doubling, with jagged lines along any diagonals or curves. In fact, it can look a little worse than line doubling. Because the alternate field is suppressed but not entirely eliminated, it's sometimes possible to see its ghost in the output, as it subtly changes color and brightness to reveal the outline of an object that shouldn't be on screen until the next frame.

This is why HandBrake now offers a better method of deinterlacing, developed for the MPlayer project (the yadif filter). This new method does not have the problems "Fast" has. There should be fewer issues with jagged lines and no ghosting.

"Slow" looks to frames before or after to figure out which pixels to base its guesses on. Then, when it guesses, it tries to follow edges in the current frame. This means sometimes, instead of guessing based on a vertical column of pixels the way "Fast" always does, it will follow diagonals, sampling pixels that are, say, to the lower left and upper right of the current pixel. Most of the time, this will be good enough, and it should look better than "Fast."

"Slower" goes a bit further, and looks to frames before or after again, to tweak its guesses based on what it knows of the previous and next moments in time.

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i think with "slow" i picked the right one.

EDIT: and please pay attention to my other questions:

http://www.akiba-online.com/forum/showthread.php?p=186875#post186875