Need Help Convert DVD Collection To H.264

[frentjay]

Hello, about a year ago I began ripping all my DVDs to ISO images to keep on a media server I built for my house so that I can watch any movie on any TV without having to worry about finding disks. This however requires a lot of space and I am quickly running out and would like to now convert the main movie from each disk to H.264 using Nero Digital. From what I have read thus far it seems that Nero's H.264 will give me the best results during this process but I still have a few questions. Mainly my questions revolve around how to get the best quality when using Nero and how to guarantee that my movies will be playable on monitors and screens of the future. I want my movies to be future friendly and by this I mean that they will play on my computer monitor and TV today the same way that a DVD would but also that they will play on any HDTV or projector that I may buy in the future the same as a DVD would. This may not be an issue and may be taken care of automatically but I was unable to find information on this. Also I would like to get my DVDs down to about 1-2 GB per movie which I have been more than able to do using the installed profiles that come with Nero Digital, mainly I used the HDTV profile because it had the highest bit rate, is this the correct route to go or are there better custom profiles or settings. Any advice is more than welcome on both profiles and things like the crop and resize options in Nero Recode as I have been reading this forum for quite a while but am still very new to video encoding. If anyone can let me know how they go about doing it or just give feedback in general it would be very helpful.

Thank you.

[dvd_maniac]

I use the HDTV profile for some Sci-Fi, Action and my favorite movies, however I use Standard AVC at 400kbps for movies I might never watch again or have very little motion(average movie size is 350MB). I have over 800 movies in Nero Digital format now and still have a couple hundred to go so I could not go the HDTV route for all of them as I only have 1.5TB of space and also have most of my favorite TV shows on Hard drive as well. Just a recommendation to save space...

I view these on my 57" Hitachi HDTV now and even the Standard AVC looks fine. However I could definitely tell the difference when I tried to convert some movies like the Star Wars Series, Matrix etc... into Standard AVC.

[frentjay]

I am much more conserned with quality than space as I plan on getting bigger drives in the future when I run out of space with compressed movies. Are you saying that if I encoded with the preset HDTV profile and use all the other defaults that is as good as I can get with Nero Digital or are there still further tweeks I can do? Also does Nero have any official fix for the volume on encoded movies being so quiet?

Thanks

[dvd_maniac]

about Low audio, look here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=93749&highlight=nero+low+volume

and here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=83941&highlight=nero+low+volume

and here(Look for the reg file or get it here (http://www.webalice.it/f.corriga/misc/Recode_volume_patch.reg) :

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=93749&highlight=low+volume

[frentjay]

I've read those but before doing the regedit I just wanted to know if nero had an official stance on it, didn't realize JohnV worked for nero. Thanks.

[frentjay]

Alright I figured it would be easier if I told you guys how I have been doing my test runs on DVDs so you could let me know what I am doing right and what could be done different for better results. My main goal is the absolute best quality I can get for between 1 and 1.5 GB per normal length DVD movie. I have been using 1Mbps because that seems to generally be just over a 1GB per movie and seemed like a nice round number. So here is what I have been doing.


After I Import the DVD I unclick "Fit To Target" and the Select "More>>" in order to get More options. In the "More" section I select "High Definition TV" profile because by default that had the highest bit rate, I then move the Video Quality slider to 1.00Mbps. For Audio #1 I select 5.1-Channel surround (with the automatic settings) and then click next.

If I click "Video" before clicking next I get the "Nero Digital Video Settings" popup box and I leave Deinterlace as Recommended, Crop as "Automatic (recommended)" and Resize as "Automatic (recommended)." These are the settings I am most unsure of.

In the next section under Burn Settings I just click on "Nero Digital Settings" and then Encode and change it to "High quality encoding (2-pass)". I do not check the box for Expert Mode but would be willing to if it would give me better results.

Then I click Burn.

I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions or recommendations on these settings or if I am going about this all wrong. The DVDs I have done so far look very good but I want to be sure that they were going to play the same way on all my future screens in MP4 that the original DVD would have on those same screens. If I need to change any of these settings or tweak them for this to be the case please let me know especially if there are things I should do in expert mode or in the "Nero Digital Video Settings" section. Also if I would get a noticeably better picture at a higher bit rate please let me know about that to, once I get all my settings down I plan to encode at many bit rates and compare but I first wanted to make sure I was getting my other settings correct.

Lastly, once I have the way I want to encode down is there a way for me to save those in Nero so that I do not have to make the changes every time to things like 5.1 audio.

Thank you.