Ripping TV episodes

[enchant]

It appears that this has been discussed here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28454

...but the example images are no longer available.

I've got some TV series dvds. Each disc is made up of 6 episodes, each approximately 25 minutes long. From what I gather, dvd2svcd isn't really the right tool for the job here, but it does such a good job at movies.

When I rip a 2-hour movie, dvd2svcd is able to fit it onto two discs, and still keep near-dvd quality. I'd like to be able to put two episodes onto a disc and get something approaching that quality, but I haven't been able to get close. Either it's heavily compress and it shows it, or each 25-minute episode is half a gig in size.

I'm currently using DVDshrink to extract the vobs, then I run dvd2avi and then TMPGEnc. Is there a better way that I should be doing this, or do I just need to get the right TMPGEnc settings?

[ralphthedog]

Does DVD2SVCD show the total length of the 6 episodes on one DVD in the conversion tab?

If it does you can often just "rip only" each episode (or 2 episodes for 1 SVCD in your case)with DVD2SVCD to different folders by selecting chapters, or checking frame selection and selecting what you want to put on 1 SVCD that way. This is all done from the "conversion tab"

Then you can do 3 seperate DVD2SVCD encodes from the folders.

4:3 can need more bitrate than letterboxed films. Might need to help compression with bilinear resize,undot,unfilter,temporalsoften etc. in your avisynth script.

[enchant]

Originally posted by ralphthedog
Does DVD2SVCD show the total length of the 6 episodes on one DVD in the conversion tab?

Sadly, no. It picks the longest episode from the bunch. From the "Movie length" pop-up box, I can select which chapter I want, but it only allows me to pick one.

[GreenDrazi]

When "Movie Length" tab is open, select the tab "Track Length" which will show you the individual titles or episodes.
There are some (not typical) DVD's where each episode has it's own seperate set of VOB's.
If that is the case, use the open folder method of ripping and browse to the disc to rip the vob's.

[r6d2]

Hello enchant,

I have been trying to do the same with Friends Season 1 episodes. I have done extensive testing to fit the 6 episodes in 1 KVCD, 2 VCDs, 2/3 CVDs and finally 3 SVCDs.

Please don't ask the hours spent on this (I would be embarrased) :), but I am about to get close to my desired final preferred method. My findings may be of use to you.

There are multiple non-automated ways to do this. For instance, reduce the CD size to, lets say, 400-MB, encode one episode at a time and do the authoring yourself. But DVD2SVCD is such a great program... Let's try to use it to do the whole job!

0. Rip to get 1 VOB per chapter (episode) on the DVD. DVD Decrypter IFO mode may be of use for this (settings: split by chapter).

1. The episodes are probably telecined (please verify with the method detailed in http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm). Choose IVTC in DVD2AVI tab. Choose Edit AVIsynth script when DVD2AVI is done in the Frameserver tab. When editing, insert guide=1 as the first Telecide parameter (may reduce encoding time significantly).

2. Apparently, IVTC is incompatible with "Use frame selection", so you won't be able to encode 2 episodes on each CD automatically (one episode may pass to the next CD, or worse, the first part of the next one may begin on the previous CD). So, you have to do it in 3 stages.

3. In the conversion tab load the IFO and select the first 2 files. Delete the rest if D2S selects them.

4. Encode as you usually do any movie.

5. Then burn the image, go to conversion tab and select the next 2 episodes. Then repeat from 3.

6. If you want chapters, you may want to try "every 300 secs". (for 2 episodes per CD it is of no use to have just 2 chapters).

The quality I get in SVCD is quite satisfactory, but as @ralphthedog said, you may need to do some filtering or block noise reduction.

Hope this helps.