Questions and Confused

[bluffmaster]

I know you guys heard this so many times and I bet you guys are really annoyed answering these questions, so I tried myself by looking through the forum and by looking at other guides all weekend and I thought I got it but I know man I am so confused. So here are the questions.

1. What do I need to start encoding anime and dvds?

2. How do I make them to h.264? (I am not sure if I need to use MeGUI or need to use commanding?

3. Other is that I am going to buy a camcorder a Canon HG10 Hard Drive HD Camcorder (HG10) or the Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 Hard Disk HD Camcorder (HDR-SR7) and the Sony Handycam HDR-SR5 Hard Disk HD Camcorder (HDR-SR5).

- But the Canon you could only use HD and I don't have a HD Player but the Sony could do HD or Standard but the Canon is a lot better the specs so I am wondering is there a way to convert a HD to Standard, so need help on that too.

4. Do I need these programs to encode anime from dvds?
Avisynth to 2.57
AviSynth plugins--too much effort to list.
Premiere AVS Import Plugin 1.6 alpha
DVDdecrypter 3.5.4.0
DGMPEGDec 1.4.9 beta 9
VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2
VirtualDub
MeGUI
SubRip
AegiSubsb
MKVToolNix

* These what I got from guides*

and anything else I need to know.

[Atak_Snajpera]

If I were you I would buy HV20 instead of HG10. MPEG2 compresion used in HV20 is a lot easier to edit/convert

[bluffmaster]

anymore suggestions and ya i was thinking of the HV20but you need firewire and I dont have it. I don't like the part that it uses a miniDV. SO anyone want to answer these questions

[Skelsgard]

Answering 1 and 4 at once, for standard DVDs (not HD) you need:
1) To rip the DVD to your HD: depending on the copy-protection system of the DVD, you may use DVDecrypter (old system) or FixVTS + RipIt4U + DVD Decrypter(newer system).

2) To read the ripped VOB/MPG stream: DGMPGDec (aka DGIndex)

3) To process the video for better compressibility: AviSynth + filters (temporal/spactial smoothers, denoisers, etc), some of them are even dedicated to anime encoding.

4) To transcode audio: if wanted. Usually when encoding to 1 CD (700Mb). For 2CD rips, the audio is most commonly left untouched (AC3 6ch 448kbps).
You can use DirectShow filters/BeHappy/etc to decode/transcode to MP3 (lame) or AAC (neroaacenc or CT's encoder.

5) To encode the video: MeGUI + CLI encoder: XviD (ASP) or x264 (AVC).
At high bitrates, there's no difference in a practical way, at lower bitrates AVC has smaller size at similar perceptual quality (which is absolutely subjective) than ASP.

6) Extras: SubRip if you want to rip subtitles. In anime, this is basically essential unless you speak japanese :D.

So basically:
RipIt4Me
FixVTS
DVD Decrypter
DGindex
AviSynth + filters
MeGUI
x264.exe/xvid_encraw.exe
BeHappy
neroaacenc.exe/enc_aacplus(CT)/lame.exe
SubRip

To create DVDs:
-Avisynth: for editing + filters if needed to gain compressibility (you can load the .avs file in VirtualDubMod and check it out to see how it will looks like)
-HC_Enc + HC_GUI: MPEG-2 encoder, takes .avs files as input
Audacity/Wavewizard: to edit and/or multichannel audio WAV muxing if necessary
-Aften + GUI: AC3 encoder
-DVD authoring software.

Later