Ripping HDDVD to H264 to save space

[the_corona]

Well, I just read through the entire thread with a big, fat smile on my face. Big congratulations and an even bigger thank you to everyone involved.

That being said, I'm interested in having HDDVD titles ripped on my hdd for my htpc. But 20+ GB per Title seems a bit big even on today's huge hdds. Somebody mentioned it would be hard to get them down to a more managable size without massive quality loss.

Wouldn't it be possible to make 720p rips in H264? Seeing how 40 min shows can can be encoded in this format with a resulting filesize of about 1.15 GB with...let's say acceptable quality, if we extract that to double the bitrate for higher quality and multiply by the longer lenght of a movie (let's say 120 mins) we would end up with files no bigger than about 6 GB? For comfort bitrates could be adjusted for a DL-DVD. Or if the quality remains the same it would even fit on a SL DVD.

Granted this is only 720p then, 1080p though could probably also achieved on a DL-DVD. Call me blindly optimistic. I would be much more comfortable with that, because a) you can cheaply burn them and b) they don't take up anymore space then current DVDRs and c) (selfishly) I only have a 720p capable display anyways.

Any thoughts?

[zeroprobe]

Well, I just read through the entire thread with a big, fat smile on my face. Big congratulations and an even bigger thank you to everyone involved.

That being said, I'm interested in having HDDVD titles ripped on my hdd for my htpc. But 20+ GB per Title seems a bit big even on today's huge hdds. Somebody mentioned it would be hard to get them down to a more managable size without massive quality loss.

Wouldn't it be possible to make 720p rips in H264? Seeing how 40 min shows can can be encoded in this format with a resulting filesize of about 1.15 GB with...let's say acceptable quality, if we extract that to double the bitrate for higher quality and multiply by the longer lenght of a movie (let's say 120 mins) we would end up with files no bigger than about 6 GB? For comfort bitrates could be adjusted for a DL-DVD.

Granted this is only 720p then, but I would be much more comfortable with that, because a) you can cheaply burn them and b) they don't take up anymore space then current DVDRs and c) (selfishly) I only have a 720p capable display anyways.

Any thoughts?


they have 750gig drives now, thats 37 odd films. Space is so not an issue.

[arfster]

Any thoughts?

You can get terrific quality 720p h264 in about 5mbit or so.

[VistaVick]

You can get terrific quality 720p h264 in about 5mbit or so.

Yes, but how to convert these backups to a format like that is the important next step. I have a feeling those who like to spread these files around (if you know what I mean) already have found a way.

[the_corona]

You can get terrific quality 720p h264 in about 5mbit or so.

So a 720p rip would fit comfortably on a SL DVD. Double that and you get 1080p...I'm thinking 10mbit should be enough for that too?

Any comparisons out there?

[blutach]

Posts moved to new thread.

Regards

[Janvitos]

What's the point of downgrading quality of an HD DVD movie ?
Simply buy a regular DVD if space is an issue.

HD DVD is all about 1080p !

[Warren]

Janvitos: Some people have no way of displaying 1080P so it would be a waste for them to download it/store it. You can hardly compare a DVD to a 720P rip. I'm not sure of the benefits of transcoding to 1080P x264 but there is some for transcoding to 720P x264 - espically for device compatibility.

[noclip]

You can comfortably fit an extremely high quality 1080p H.264 file on a dual-layer DVD. Why bother with 720p?

[dukey]

not ever pc can play 1080p files :p
You can get awesome quality video with like divx + quant 3.
You'll be able to fit a film on a single layer DVD no problem with 720p.

[Albion]

Janvitos: Some people have no way of displaying 1080P so it would be a waste for them to download it/store it. You can hardly compare a DVD to a 720P rip. I'm not sure of the benefits of transcoding to 1080P x264 but there is some for transcoding to 720P x264 - espically for device compatibility.

Well I agree with that.Never seen a 1080p movie yet (at 1080p I mean).

So for example,(although still having problems with major stutter copying King Kong with BackupHDDVD) when it begins to work,how many single sided DVD's would you need for 720p King Kong.

More to the point,any resorces to link to,to find out how to do it.A good stop gap until HD-DVD-R disks and writers become available at reasonable cost.
Nothing better I'd like to do than transcode a few blue-ribbon
Blu-ray titles and copy them to DVD at 720p and later to HD-DVD-R.

[arfster]

You can comfortably fit an extremely high quality 1080p H.264 file on a dual-layer DVD. Why bother with 720p?

Problem is, you sacrifice quality by trying to squeeze a 1080p HD-DVD into 9GB. For a two hour film, that leaves you with 9.5mbit video bitrate (assuming DD5.1, no menus/extras), which is a considerable drop from a typical 13-15mbit title - and they're already extremely heavily compressed by professionals, with the best possible kit. By contrast, for 720p 9.5mbit is miles more than enough.

Also, a lot of people only have 720p sets to start with. If that's the case, a 720p re-encode will look just the same as playing the original 1080p HD-DVD on that screen - and if done properly, it'll look better as the avisynth based processing will be higher quality than the set's internal, realtime scaler. Similarly, a lot of 1080p sets are far too small to properly show off the resolution. You really need 50" minimum at 7 feet seating distance to see any benefit from 1080p over 720p, and that's assuming you have 20/20 vision (which a lot of viewers don't). Again, a 720p re-encode for those sitting further away (or with smaller 1080p sets) will look just as good.

[bond]

decoding the video stream on hddvd (might be already h264) and reencoding to h264 will take a long time (depending on how fast your system is)

i am not sure whether current hddvd drives are already good enough to survive such daylong reading from the disc :D

[the_corona]

Well obviously you would first rip to hdd and then start transcoding.

I really don't think 90% of the people will be able to tell the difference (or care that much about it) between a 1080p movie at 13mbit (as stated is the original) and a 9.5 mbit one that would fit on dl dvd.

And as stated if a 1080p one fits on a dl-dvd then a 720p one should fit on a sl dvd. That means cheap backups. It means small enough to transfer over the net for most people. And I would still argue that 90% of the people don't see that big a difference.

[arfster]

I really don't think 90% of the people will be able to tell the difference (or care that much about it) between a 1080p movie at 13mbit (as stated is the original) and a 9.5 mbit one that would fit on dl dvd.


If both were encoded from the same source, that would be true. But re-encoding 1080p from 13 > 9.5mbit will be pretty visible.

[magnusr]

Im interested in getting the backups converted into 1080p WMVHD for storage on my media center. A 9GB WMWHD file would be nice (possible to burn to DL DVD aswell).

Can we use microsofts media encoder for that?

But i would like to keep either the dolby digital plus or DTS-HD audio track. Usind SPDIF out I seem to get way better quality on my yamaha reciver with dts-hd than dolby digital plus. The dolby digital plus is only accepted at 640 kb by my receiver, but dts-hd is accepted at 1500. So DTS-HD should be the way to go for exsiting receivers if this is the case for all current receivers...

[noisehole]

correct me if i'm wrong, but neither dd+ nor dts-hd can be sent over spdif. the bandwidth those formats need is just too high. in contrast to dd and dts (which can be sent over spdif), these are lossless formats.

you need hdmi to use these new formats (for +2 channels at least) in digital form. if you want to pass the direct stream to your receiver, you need hdmi 1.3. all (?) players can be set to decode to pcm using all hdmi versions.

i guess your player just transcodes from the new lossless formats to the older lossy ones if you use spdif.

regards

[wakebrder]

Are there programs out there that will accept a .EVO file for input?

[Mc Onyx]

You would first have to demux the files! I heard it can be done with bbmpeg!

[magnusr]

correct me if i'm wrong, but neither dd+ nor dts-hd can be sent over spdif. the bandwidth those formats need is just too high. in contrast to dd and dts (which can be sent over spdif), these are lossless formats.

you need hdmi to use these new formats (for +2 channels at least) in digital form. if you want to pass the direct stream to your receiver, you need hdmi 1.3. all (?) players can be set to decode to pcm using all hdmi versions.

i guess your player just transcodes from the new lossless formats to the older lossy ones if you use spdif.

regards

All i know is that i can put my yamaha amplifter/receiver into straight mode and it shows what i receives from my computer throught spdif. I have an x-fi platinum. My amplifter shows a little above 1500 for DTS-HD and 640 from Dolby Digital Plus. Normaly it shows 384/448 from DVD with dolby digital/ac3.

I also noticed way better audio using DTS-HD than i ever noticed before from my sound system.

[blutach]

While this thread was born out of the work on decrypting HD-DVDs, I am beginning to think it is more suited to the X-264 forum.

Thread moved.

Regards

[Morte66]

You can make very good 1080p h264 high profile unrestricted encodes on DVD9 (see the "is bluray necessary" thread). If the disc had any foibles that can be cleaned up in Avisynth (e.g. overblown edge sharpening), you might make backups that look better than the originals.

But:

- For best quality you need to use higher features of h264 and a current AAC/OGG audio encoder, which won't play in a HD DVD player. You're getting a mp4/mkv file to play on a PC here.

- You need a dual core or very fast single core PC with CoreAVC Pro to play it.

- The two-pass encode takes 3-4 days on my A64 X2 3800+.

I sometimes make encodes like this from MPEG2 HDTV so that I can clean it up during the encode. But I don't think I'd bother with a good HD disc. If I had an HD DVD, I'd back it up by just splitting over multiple DVDR5's and burning it in a couple of hours. Then I reassemble the backup on my hard drive if I ever needed it. It's an awful lot less trouble than encoding.

If I had an HD DVD and wanted a smaller encode to play on sub-1080p systems, then I'd do a "reference backup" as above and encode the "low res dub" as well.

[Morte66]

they have 750gig drives now, thats 37 odd films. Space is so not an issue.

Hmm, a 750GB drive is about GBP250 including tax, thats around GBP20 per film. It might be cheaper to buy the disc twice... Even on more sensible 500GB drives it's almost 10 quid per film.

And when you've filled that, what next? I watched 232 films in cinemas in 1999. I watched more than 37 films in one London Film Festival. Man, you can tell this is an encoding forum rather than a film lovers' forum.

Once you fill your PC case, you start getting into external enclosures and file servers and stiff PSUs and so on, and thinking about RAID, and it all costs more than just the drive price.

You can just about make a go of magnetic storage for efficient h264 encodes of a DVD collection (I have), but space is so an issue for 1080p.

[Sagittaire]

- For best quality you need to use higher features of h264 and a current AAC/OGG audio encoder, which won't play in a HD DVD player. You're getting a mp4/mkv file to play on a PC here.

1) You can use all the advanced features for H264 HP@4.1.

2) DD 5.1 at 640 Kbps done high quality audio: you can find some BD titles with these audio stream type.

[Morte66]

You can get awesome quality video with like divx + quant 3.
You'll be able to fit a film on a single layer DVD no problem with 720p.

I've seen a couple of encodes like that. While they were a lot better than DVD, they are clearly inferior to a 1080p h264 DVD5 encode with my normal viewing conditions (Dell 2405 viewed at about 1.5x diagonal).

But yes, downsized DivX encodes are a lot easier to make and they will be plenty for many users.

[Morte66]

1) You can use all the advanced features for H264 HP@4.1.

I just tried setting level 4.1 on top of my usual settings in MeGUI and it complained about me wanting P4x4 macroblocks. But I concede, you wouldn't lose much by making the encode HD DVD compliant. My mistake.

[Sagittaire]

I just tried setting level 4.1 on top of my usual settings in MeGUI and it complained about me wanting P4x4 macroblocks. But I concede, you wouldn't lose much by making the encode HD DVD compliant. My mistake.

Well the MeGui profil is outdated ... you can use all the partition with x264 for HDDVD profil.

[superx]

would be great if we can get the HDDVD backup to play on the PS3

[Albion]

Originally posted by Morte66:

>I sometimes make encodes like this from MPEG2 HDTV so >that I can clean it up during the encode. But I don't think >I'd bother with a good HD disc. If I had an HD DVD, I'd back >it up by just splitting over multiple DVDR5's and burning it in >a couple of hours. Then I reassemble the backup on my hard >drive if I ever needed it. It's an awful lot less trouble than >encoding.

Well..when I can get BackupHDDVD to do a decent decrypt (problems with rather significant stuttering at present) I thought Multiple single layer DVD-R would suffice for backup purposes until HD-DVD-R became a cost viable option.

Can you provide some initial indications as to how to do this.
Is it possible using existing copy software,for example.
Some clues would be helpful.Many thanks.

[Morte66]

Originally posted by Morte66:

Well..when I can get BackupHDDVD to do a decent decrypt (problems with rather significant stuttering at present) I thought Multiple single layer DVD-R would suffice for backup purposes until HD-DVD-R became a cost viable option.

Can you provide some initial indications as to how to do this.
Is it possible using existing copy software,for example.
Some clues would be helpful.Many thanks.

Rip the files from your HD DVD. Use WinRar or similar in zero compression mode, and have it break them into a multipart archive of 4484MB chunks. Burn them. If you ever need that backup, which hopefully won't happen, copy them back to your PC and decompress them in WinRar then play them from the hard drive. There are probably neater ways, but that gets you a backup.

It would be nice if they were playable from the discs, but that would need a reauthoring tool. I don't think anything like that is available for free yet.

[Albion]

Rip the files from your HD DVD. Use WinRar or similar in zero compression mode, and have it break them into a multipart archive of 4484MB chunks. Burn them. If you ever need that backup, which hopefully won't happen, copy them back to your PC and decompress them in WinRar then play them from the hard drive. There are probably neater ways, but that gets you a backup.

It would be nice if they were playable from the discs, but that would need a reauthoring tool. I don't think anything like that is available for free yet.

Ah yes I see what you are saying.A far better option than leaving them on your hard drive.Thats very clear.:thanks:

You say there is'nt a free reauthoring tool.Is there one,at a price that would allow someone to play the segments from disk.

[Morte66]

You say there is'nt a free reauthoring tool.Is there one,at a price that would allow someone to play the segments from disk.

I'm afraid I don't know. But I've a feeling there'll be a lot of tools coming along in the next few months. The biggies will be:

- Something to split an HD DVD rip into several smaller HD DVDs at various sizes
- Something to demux them to audio and video streams
- Matroska support for whatever audio it doesn't handle already
- Avisynth import filters for the demuxed streams

[foxyshadis]

I just tried setting level 4.1 on top of my usual settings in MeGUI and it complained about me wanting P4x4 macroblocks. But I concede, you wouldn't lose much by making the encode HD DVD compliant. My mistake.

I think it's still a real issue, because long gops are one of the most powerful tools you have for reducing the bitrate. Seeking will take you back to the days when DivX 3.11 was new, in ways you'd prefer not to, but by using 10-12 seconds instead of 3/5 second you get a large quality boost without overfiltering.

p4x4 isn't terribly useful in 1080, unless it's a very crisp movie. That's probably why it was originally disallowed.

[Morte66]

I think it's still a real issue, because long gops are one of the most powerful tools you have for reducing the bitrate. Seeking will take you back to the days when DivX 3.11 was new, in ways you'd prefer not to, but by using 10-12 seconds instead of 3/5 second you get a large quality boost without overfiltering.

I can see I'm going to have to get those test samples back off the DVDs and try this again...

[akupenguin]

Well the MeGui profil is outdated ... you can use all the partition with x264 for HDDVD profil.
HDDVD doesn't specifically restrict partitions, but Level 4.1 does.
Level >=3.1 allows only limited use of 4x4 partitions, and x264 doesn't check for that limitation, so the only way to ensure an encode is compliant to Level >=3.1 is to disable p4x4.
(Note: I used to say Level >=3 when using B-frames. That part is now directly supported by x264, so it's now ok to encode Level 3 with p4x4.)

[BigBoss]

So I have started some experiments with this. First off, bbmpeg does not seem to be capable of demuxing any of the movies I've tried.

I was able to load mainintro.evo into AVS using this the sonic filters. My script was simply:

DirectShowSource("mainintro.evo", fps=23.976, audio=false)
Trim(0, 1534)
# resize here if you want

The sonic filters do not seem to return the correct frame count to AVS. For the mainintro.evo sample, I used trim to correct this. However, I loaded some of the movie EVO files from superman returns HDDVD. These all report 1 frame to AVS making conversion impossible.

Has anyone managed to load any of these into AVS?

Updated, I managed to get this to load and work with this script:
DirectShowSource("mainintro.evo", fps=23.976, audio=false, convertfps=true)
ConvertToYv12()

I'll try converting this to x264 @ 720p and see how it turns out. I'll have to mux in the DVD AC3 track, though :(

[Morte66]

The sonic filters do not seem to return the correct frame count to AVS. [..] I'll have to mux in the DVD AC3 track, though

I have endless troubles with DirectShowSource and audio. It seems to be a mug's game.

[BigBoss]

Updated, I managed to get this to load and work with this script:
DirectShowSource("mainintro.evo", fps=23.976, audio=false, convertfps=true)
ConvertToYv12()


Still working on this. The above script resulted in a choppy video when doing superman returns. Here is the script that resulted in perfect video:

DirectShowSource("U:\supermanhddvd\SupermanReturns1.evo", framecount=111265, audio=false, fps=23.976) + DirectShowSource("U:\supermanhddvd\SupermanReturns2.evo", framecount=110723, audio=false, fps=23.976)
ConvertToYv12()

I first used the script on each segment without framecount= and used convertfps=true instead. I loaded this into virtual dub and seeked to the end. This gave me the framecount value I used for the framecount parameter in each segment.

This yields perfect looking video. Unfortunately, the audio muxed from the DVD is gradually out of sync. It seems that the video plays faster than the audio by some small amount. It starts in sync and moves out of sync the further the video plays. So I redid the encode using fps=24 instead of fps=23.976. After doing this, the audio plays faster than the video. So I'm somewhat at a loss.

For kicks, I'm going to try fps=25 and use the audio track from the PAL DVD. I'll give an update on the results.

[foxyshadis]

You should keep convertfps=true anyway. There's no requirement that it must be exclusively 24fps, and if it's not (like a few 30fps segments) audio will go out of sync because they're treated as 24. Forcing everything to 24 wih convertfps may cause slight jumping on those rare 30 parts, but it'll keep the audio in sync.

(Numbers rounded for sanity only.)

On the other hand, the other major reason for audio desync is lack of horsepower. You're sure your system is capable of playing it back at full speed?

[Isochroma]

@BigBoss: Using DirectShowSource() on a VC-1 .evo file will always return a 29.970fps video stream, with duplicate video frames. Unfortunately, the duplicate frames are inserted at irregular intervals (using the Sonic VC-1 decoder). Neither decimate() nor tdecimate() have been able, in my tests and others', to properly decimate this to 23.976 or 24 fps.

To properly decode VC-1 EVOBs, see my post Tutorial: Perfect VC-1 EVOB to .AVS Conversion (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=939698#post939698) on the EVOB De/Multiplexers thread for a frame-accurate method to demux, decode and serve VC-1 EVOBs into Avisynth.

The method works flawlessly and has already been tested on two sample VC-1 EVOBs.

Perhaps most importantly, it always returns a purely progressive frameset; no IVTC, deinterlacing, or decimation is required.

AVC EVOBs are more easily extracted, see my Tutorial: Perfect AVC EVOB to MKV Remuxing (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=935396#post935396) post on the EVOB De/Multiplexers thread for the method.

MPEG-2 EVOBs can apparently be demuxed/decoded using DGDecode/Index, and should also work by directshowsource() but problems with decimation may appear.

The real problem up until today was getting VC-1 remuxed, and properly decoded. That has now been solved.

Audio is best taken from regular DVD; nobody will hear any difference between 448kbps AC3 and xmbps DD+.

[chros]

You should keep convertfps=true anyway. There's no requirement that it must be exclusively 24fps, and if it's not (like a few 30fps segments) audio will go out of sync because they're treated as 24. Forcing everything to 24 wih convertfps may cause slight jumping on those rare 30 parts, but it'll keep the audio in sync.
So is this possible that vc-1 video on HD-DVD can be vfr ?
If is this the case (like in wmv), we need another util to extract the timecodes from evo ... :(

[Isochroma]

Nope, it is not vfr. Read my previous post: the problem is the decoding method. The video stream is true progressive at 23.976 or 24fps.

[foxyshadis]

Well, it's possible, nothing in what we've seen of the specs forbids it. Presumably it's like DVD this way. But it apparently isn't the case (and hopefully won't be) as Isochroma found the real reason.

[Shinjite]

I did a h264 encode with 5000kbps 1080p 24fps on an anime preview not to long ago and it nearly chokes on my P4 3ghz HT proc with avg 90% usage. Then I decided to encode another 1 which is 10K kbps than the latter and I found out that it uses less CPU usage and it plays back better, how come?

And now when I retest back the old 1, it plays back nicely already albeit lower CPU usages >.>"