DVD to x264. Painless way to convert hundreds of clips?

[spunch]

I have a couple of DVDs with hundreds of short video clips and I'm looking for the least painful solution of converting and encoding them to x264. These video clips do not exceed 5 minutes and vary extensively in their imagery and motion, some are film and some entirely CG.

I'm having a difficult time finding a "grand unifying" way of deinterlacing the videos as some appear to be interlaced and some do not, but as far as I'm aware they all came from the same source, with the same standards.

I also have a separate machine for the encoding job. I virtually wouldn't be touching it for weeks and I was thinking what would be the best encoding settings I could go with. Should it be the 3pass "HQ-Insane" profile in MeGUI, or is it too much of an overkill and I should just stick with "HQ-Slowest"? I did my testing with this one and from what I could see the quality was amazing at 1000kbps. Or maybe even something different all together?

Please forgive my ignorance as I just recently discovered the complexity behind all this. Otherwise please inform me of any good or bad practices I might take. Thanks.

Mods: concerning rule #3, I would highly prefer this thread be moved to Newbies forum rather than locked or deleted. I'm not really sure about the scope of either.

[bond]

mencoder?

[berrinam]

I'm having a difficult time finding a "grand unifying" way of deinterlacing the videos as some appear to be interlaced and some do not, but as far as I'm aware they all came from the same source, with the same standards.MeGUI's automatic deinterlacing? Accessible by either the one click encoder (automatic deinterlacing checkbox), or the AviSynth Window (analyse source button -- after analysis, it selects the recommended deinterlacer, if any).

Should it be the 3pass "HQ-Insane" profile in MeGUI, or is it too much of an overkill and I should just stick with "HQ-Slowest"? I did my testing with this one and from what I could see the quality was amazing at 1000kbps. Or maybe even something different all together?It's really your choice. In every codec, at the high quality end (which all of the HQ profiles are), the increase in quality is very small while the decrease in speed is very large. Basically, there won't be TOO much difference between Slowest and Insane. The HQ profiles are IMO very good profiles, though, so there shouldn't be much need to change to other ones.