Newbie question re: converting from older DVD's

[rinkstr]

Hi - I am relatively new to the converting and encoding process but have been using AutoGK for about a year for movies without any problems. Recently started to convert some VOB file of a TV episodes and movies puled from older DVD's. My questions are related to the output options:
1. Should I leave it see to auto or set to max of 640 or 720? I tried the max set to 640 and 720 but the files were huge.
2. Should I leave audio set to auto, VBR, or CBR? I have tried all three options and most of the times the audio has been out of sync and not sure if I am selecting the correct option.

Thanks for your hrlp.

[CWR03]

1. Should I leave it see to auto or set to max of 640 or 720? I tried the max set to 640 and 720 but the files were huge.
Use whichever fits your needs. Quality is dependent on the video frame and bitrate, and only you can determine which will satify your perception.

2. Should I leave audio set to auto, VBR, or CBR? I have tried all three options and most of the times the audio has been out of sync and not sure if I am selecting the correct option.
If all three options result in out-of-synch files, the problem is not with AutoGK. You may need to pre-rip the disks to your hard drive with a tool such as DVDFab HD Decrypter.

[manono]

If they're older DVDs, then they may not have newer copy protections. I'm not sure I've ever seen an episodic TV series DVD with newer protections (although I could easily be wrong that there aren't any), so I'd say the main thing to be concerned about is decrypting the episodes separately, and not the entire DVD. As CWR03 says, the choice of audio has nothing to do with whether or not it's in synch. It's all about a proper decrypt.

And welcome to the forum.

[yetanotherid]

Hi - I am relatively new to the converting and encoding process but have been using AutoGK for about a year for movies without any problems. Recently started to convert some VOB file of a TV episodes and movies puled from older DVD's. My questions are related to the output options:
1. Should I leave it see to auto or set to max of 640 or 720? I tried the max set to 640 and 720 but the files were huge.
2. Should I leave audio set to auto, VBR, or CBR? I have tried all three options and most of the times the audio has been out of sync and not sure if I am selecting the correct option.

When you say the files were huge, were you doing single pass encoding and if so at what quality percentage?

Some things to keep in mind when converting older video. If it's in 4:3 aspect ratio it's going to result in a larger file, on average, than a wider screen format set to the same with. Simply because there's more "screen area". Also if the quality is not that great to begin with it's probably going to be harder to compress, meaning it'll need a larger file size again. Combine 4:3 with a poor quality source and you can end up with some large AVIs.

For old 4:3 video of average quality I usually stick with a width of 640. You can probably reduce it even a little more and not see a difference between a width of 720, even if you increase the size of the 640 encode to 720 on playback. In fact I've increased both 720 encodes and 640 encodes (and even some 576 encodes) to my monitor's full resolution and paused them both on the same frames to look for differences. There's usually very little, and nothing you'd see when playing them back on a SD TV.

Personally to get the file size down I prefer to keep the quality at around 70% (65% minimum) and reduce the width to 640 or a little less (rather than keep a width of 720 and reduce the quality) and I've converted the audio to CBR 96 kbps MP3 for old stuff that's not exactly hi-fi, without hearing any quality loss. If the resulting files are still a little on the large side I just live with it, especially if it's video I'm converting for long term backup. But each to their own as they say....

When converting really old video I always check and double check that AutoGK is getting the cropping right as the DVDs often have black bars and "noisy" areas on each side which don't get cropped properly (but probably effect the compressibility). And often different scenes in the same DVD episode will need cropping differently to get rid of it, so I tend to go for the maximum cropping needed in order to crop it all. Likewise there's often a few pixels top and bottom which should be cropped, but aren't. If I've chopped so much off the sides that AutoGK won't automatically keep cropping until the converted AVI is exactly 4:3 (if the DVD was 4:3), then I crop some extra off the top and bottom until it does.
So I tend to do a lot of previewing before converting really old DVDs.