Supacon
25th June 2005, 19:40
Greetings everyone:
This is my first post here, and although I'm very familliar with digital audio, I'm fairly new to video transcoding, and have found it to be a fair bit more complex.
I have a big task ahead of me right now, of ripping about a hundred music video DVDs (the kind released for DJs). So far I have ripped them into individual chapters, then I wrote a perl script that combines the main video with the intro file VOBs (which are in a separate chapter, normally), renames the resulting files by chapter number(s), Artist Name, and Title. So far so good! I can play these files with Winamp using the MPlayer plugin.
But... to have almost 100 X 8GB worth of VOBs on my hard drive is going to press me for space. I've decided that I'd like to transcode to something that gives me very high quality, and reduces the filesize to somewhere between 30% to 50%. i.e., every video is currently around 200MB as a DVD VOB, but I'd like to get them down to about 100MB or less. Note that it is important for me to encode the audio (which is DVD-PCM 48KHz) to something with a high degree of fidelity, like perhaps Ogg Vorbis Q4.
I have a few questions out there for those who have more experience in transcoding this kind of stuff:
1. What would be the best codec (I'm guessing XVid) for this task, and at what bitrate (settings?) would I get the best ratio of quality to size? i.e. is there no point in transcoding to XVid at 50% of the original size, or should I just as well transcode to something smaller?
2. What software or tools would be available for Windows that allow you to specify a percentage size, or perhaps a target bitrate... or is this not even a feasible way of doing it? Is there quality level presets in XVid, like in lame MP3 or Ogg Vorbis?
Also, are there some tools in which I could specify a whole directory tree of VOBs and tell it to go and encode everything in one shot?
3. What types of container formats are available that would allow the greatest flexibility in tagging with artist names, titles, genre, BPM info, cuepoints, etc.? Matroska comes to mind, but I don't know much about it, and it doesn't yet seem widely supported. So far it seems like MPEG and AVI files just can't be tagged, other than with the filename.
and finally...
4. Perhaps a little off topic, but does anyone know of software that allows you to play and mix video realtime (like, for DJs) and supports VOBs and a wide variety of codecs and container formats?
I know I'm asking a lot of questions, and probably many of them are obvious to those who are quite familliar with this stuff, but I very much appreciate any responses that help me acheive my goals! And for the record, if anyone is interested in my perl script that combines and names VOBs, I'm certainly willing to share it!
This is my first post here, and although I'm very familliar with digital audio, I'm fairly new to video transcoding, and have found it to be a fair bit more complex.
I have a big task ahead of me right now, of ripping about a hundred music video DVDs (the kind released for DJs). So far I have ripped them into individual chapters, then I wrote a perl script that combines the main video with the intro file VOBs (which are in a separate chapter, normally), renames the resulting files by chapter number(s), Artist Name, and Title. So far so good! I can play these files with Winamp using the MPlayer plugin.
But... to have almost 100 X 8GB worth of VOBs on my hard drive is going to press me for space. I've decided that I'd like to transcode to something that gives me very high quality, and reduces the filesize to somewhere between 30% to 50%. i.e., every video is currently around 200MB as a DVD VOB, but I'd like to get them down to about 100MB or less. Note that it is important for me to encode the audio (which is DVD-PCM 48KHz) to something with a high degree of fidelity, like perhaps Ogg Vorbis Q4.
I have a few questions out there for those who have more experience in transcoding this kind of stuff:
1. What would be the best codec (I'm guessing XVid) for this task, and at what bitrate (settings?) would I get the best ratio of quality to size? i.e. is there no point in transcoding to XVid at 50% of the original size, or should I just as well transcode to something smaller?
2. What software or tools would be available for Windows that allow you to specify a percentage size, or perhaps a target bitrate... or is this not even a feasible way of doing it? Is there quality level presets in XVid, like in lame MP3 or Ogg Vorbis?
Also, are there some tools in which I could specify a whole directory tree of VOBs and tell it to go and encode everything in one shot?
3. What types of container formats are available that would allow the greatest flexibility in tagging with artist names, titles, genre, BPM info, cuepoints, etc.? Matroska comes to mind, but I don't know much about it, and it doesn't yet seem widely supported. So far it seems like MPEG and AVI files just can't be tagged, other than with the filename.
and finally...
4. Perhaps a little off topic, but does anyone know of software that allows you to play and mix video realtime (like, for DJs) and supports VOBs and a wide variety of codecs and container formats?
I know I'm asking a lot of questions, and probably many of them are obvious to those who are quite familliar with this stuff, but I very much appreciate any responses that help me acheive my goals! And for the record, if anyone is interested in my perl script that combines and names VOBs, I'm certainly willing to share it!