Easiest DVD to X264 MP4 Solution?

[consultant]

Since I'm gettin no love in the Newbie forum....

I finally setup Tversity and am having fun playing with it through my PS3. I've got all my MP3s showing up and playlists. I want to add all my music videos from my DVDs and eventually I'll have some Blu-Ray Music Video Discs.

What's a good tool/process to rip music video dvds to my hard drive for streaming to my PS3 via Tversity? I assume MP4 format is the way to go.

Seems ideally something where I can stick the DVD in, it will recognize the resolution and audio track format of the videos and the album and track titles and just go through and rip each song (chapter) to a separate mp4 file with the correct title, artist info etc. Then I assume I can treat them just like my MP3 collection accept I get video along with the music!

Thanks in advance for any advice. I prefer a freeware but I'll spring for say up to $40 in tools if they are worth it!

Is DVDFab -> MEGui the way to go or is there a one-step solution I can use that will decrupt/rip and encode?

[consultant]

Well either my question is stupid, or to complex?

I discovered DVDFab will rip straight from DVD to MP4. I also installed Staxrip - it looks like you need to rip the DVD first. Staxrip of course has WAY more settings. I used the PS3 profile which used a res of around 600x350 and bitrate of around 1,200. It looked and sounded terrible and it paused all the time on the PS3 playback as if I were trying to stream HD!

The quest continues for a high-quality all-in-on ripper/encoder.

Also still wondering if anyone knows if any music video DVD's store the artist name and chapter title somewhere that can be read by the ripper/encoder, or is it something you always have to manually update the mp4 tags with?

[Dark Shikari]

Handbrake?

[consultant]

Handbrake won't automatically brake chapters into separate files. I think MeGui doesn't either does it? Wow, this is more difficult than I thought.

[consultant]

Well it appears I can get around the problem of separating the chapters to files by adding each chapter individually to the queue. A small pain but not that bad.

Now the problem is Handbrake doesn't decrupt the DVDs! So I still have to decrypt in separate step anyway?

[stax76]

DVD Decrypter can split chapters.

[Adub]

Yes, getting a GUI that will rip chapter by chapter automatically for you is probably not going to happen, considering it is needed so rarely, there is little point in spending the extra development time coding that feature in.

I recommend you do as stax76 says and rip chapter by chapter, and then do your processing from there. There are a plethora of tools on these forums that support batch encoding, so once you have your files ripped your mostly done.

[stax76]

DVD Decrypter > Settings > IFO Mode > Options > File Splitting > Chapters

You would do batch encoding, StaxRip does that much better than ffmpeg or mencoder GUIs. You mentioned you used the PS3 template in StaxRip and it didn't work well, at the same time it is easy to tell you had no idea what you were doing, it don't even has a resize filter and thus encodes anamorphic resulting in a different image size depending on the source nor does it use a video bitrate but rather constant quality mode that will end up again with a different bitrate depending on the complexity of the source, image size etc.

considering it is needed so rarely

It's most commonly used to rip porn.