Developers want to make money? (not spam)

[ben_franklin]

I am really tired of playing the "conversion" game. All I want to do is convert some DVD video to WMV or whatever and have the resulting file be of the same quality of the source. I don't want to play with all the ridiculous settings and slider bars. I bought TMPGEnc, which isn't half bad but it certainly is not consistent. I have converted hundreds of my DVD's to WMV and they never look as good as the source. This sucks.

If one of you developers out there would just make a "convert-o-matic" program that just did nothing but convert and maintain the image quality, I would buy it and I really wouldn't give a crap how much you want for it.....

If I am missing something and this magical program exists, please let me know.... :)

-Thanks.

[Dark Shikari]

There are plenty of automated programs... Ripbot264?

[ben_franklin]

Thanks, but "Ripbot264" has the very settings and sliders I am complaining about. If all I care about is the same quality, then there is no reason for settings and sliders, just make it work....

[Dark Shikari]

Thanks, but "Ripbot264" has the very settings and sliders I am complaining about. If all I care about is the same quality, then there is no reason for settings and sliders, just make it work....But there is no such thing as the "same quality."

It is completely, physically impossible to get the "exact same quality" by any method other than keeping the video in its original format (not transcoding), or storing it losslessly (100s of GBs per DVD).

You have to make sacrifices somewhere.

[ben_franklin]

It is completely, physically impossible to get the "exact same quality" .



Well, if this is true then the so called claim of "higher efficiency" codecs are a lie and we may as well stay with MPEG2 then? HD/BluRay clearly doesn't use MPEG2 (except for terminator bluray) so there must be some way to preserve the quality of the video while using a different codec. I think it is stupid to have human beings try and figure this out when somebody could clearly code out a image analysis program to do the heavy lifting for them...

[check]

The point shikari is trying to make is that if you want a lossless copy of the original DVD, the best way to do this is to just copy the whole DVD.

YES, h264 is far more efficient than MPEG2. The problem is not with the codec you re-encode with, it's with the fact you are converting a lossy copy of the original into a lossless copy of that lossy copy. The lossless encoder doesn't know about the original source, it just wants to transparently copy exactly what you give it!

It's possible to make a copy in a smaller filesize that looks identical, but this is where all that fiddly stuff you don't want to do comes in -- and I should also point out it's this fiddly stuff that everyone here like to do :devil:

As per my first paragraph, I'd suggest just copying the decrypted images of DVDs. It's quick, simple, painless. The only hard part is hard drive space, and you can fit well over 50 DVDs per 500gb hard drive.

[cogman]

Might I suggest DVDFab? Costs like $20, but it works very well.

You should note that there is never going to be a totally sliderless DVD ripper, the reason is that one mans garbage encode is another mans perfect encode. Similarly, for one person a .5 fps encoding speed is acceptable while others whine about anything under 60fps. A product that is one size fits all for the encoding arena will certainly fail as it will only be good for the developer that made it and 2 other people.


But again, try out DVDFab, it is one of the most configureless and hence easiest DVD converters I have seen.

[bluesk1d]

Some of you guys are missing his point and taking him too literally. He simply wants a basic tool to go from disc to wmv with a relatively imperceptible quality loss. Of course there will be some degradation in any transcode.

[ByeByeBluRay]

Some of you guys are missing his point and taking him too literally. He simply wants a basic tool to go from disc to wmv with a relatively imperceptible quality loss. Of course there will be some degradation in any transcode.

I think you're right there. After all, plenty of us use tools like DVD2One or DVDShrink to compress a movie onto a DVD-R without having to tweak a million settings, so it's not such a daft request.

BBBR

[Shakey_Jake33]

I switched over to just ripping as .vob long ago. They're rarely more than a few gig if you're just copying the main film, without the extra content and multilanguage audio tracks, and hardly a significant size considering the size of todays hard drives.

[CruNcher]

What he wan't is a GUI that imitates the behaviour of a Doom9 Compressionist, so practicly a GUI that has somekind of Artificial Inteligence based maybe on a Neural Network or in a easier implementation Comon sense :) like you click on the file and select what you want to achive and the rest it does automaticly and might start asking you some questions in the process for the harder stuff (Agent behviour). It's for sure doable and the results should be acceptable but it is also alot of work (compared to how simple other Guis nowdays work).

[Tagert]

Heres some links for ya mate:
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best/vob-to-wmv-free.html
http://www.yasasoft.com/tutorials/vobtowmv.htm
http://www.brothersoft.com/downloads/vob-to-wmv.html
http://www.downloadjunction.com/product/software/68017/index.html

I hope they will come in handy.
As a vob to wmv kinda program is the one you're looking for? :o

[JohnnyMalaria]

Get Windows Media Encoder (free and pretty damned fast in my experience), feed some VOBs into it (may need to rename), fiddle with the settings a few times until you get the quality you like. Use those settings for ever more (even on multiple files from the command line to automate the process on multiple VOBs).

It will even create multiple versions at different settings at the same time so you can compare easily.

Or just keep the VOBs. As soon as you go from a DCT-based compression to a wavelet one, you will introduce a reduction in quality. No ifs or buts. Wavelet compression schemes can be justifiably labeled more efficient when compressing the same uncompressed source material as, say, MPEG. But VOBs are already compressed...

[ben_franklin]

UPDATE:
So it looks like DVDFab platinum has heard my cries. The newest version rips DVD's and converts to a variety of target formats including Xbox 360. I have tested this out with several of my DVD's so far and it has worked flawlessly including films with subtitles. Now if they would only have a version that does conversions on HD-DVD, but I guess that doesn't matter now since all the studios are going blu-ray haha (check engadget for details).

Thanks for all of the suggestions and thank you so much to the DVDFab team for making life easier for those that dont want to spend a lot of time converting their DVD's....

P.S. The converter isnt "uber fast" but thats irrelevant because the picture quality is fully adjustable and looks good at the higher settings.

[bob0r]

Adjustable? How? :p

[airedale]

With sliders ;)

[noclip]

If you want something that's a one click solution, use Handbrake.