Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[rjm]

Wondering if anyone out there has an opinion on the best app for ripping dvds to h264?

Key features I want include:
- good quality results at low bit rates (e.g. 700 kbps)
- visual cropping tool
- friendly adjustment of bitrate vs. resolution
- multiple audio tracks
- multiple subtitles
- chapter name editor
- queued jobs

Nero Recode has all of the above and I have for a long time used it to produce h264 MP4s but I would prefer to produce MKVs which Recode does not support. So about once a year I survey ripping tools to see if is time to switch to something better. I just finished testing MeGUI, Handbrake, Xilisoft DVD Ripper, DVDFab 8, and TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. I concluded that Nero Recode is still the best which I find strange and hard to believe given that Recode has not been improved for about 2 years. Perhaps I missed some new app?

In this 2007 thread http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=43621.0 Glynor (our resident guru) recommended AutoMKV. As far as I can tell development on AutoMKV has died. I am hoping that Glynor and others might share their thoughts on what is best today.

Thanks in advance,

Rob

[glynor]

I tend to use either Handbrake or HDConvertToX (which is the new application by the AutoMKV developer) here at home.

Handbrake can output very high quality, but you need to tweak it to obtain good results at very low bitrates.  I generally encode to relatively high variable bitrates (2.5-4mbps) for my recordings, and it works very well at those bitrates.

For my professional work, I use Telestream's Episode.  I'm very happy with it, though it doesn't do MKV and it is quite expensive (especially if you want the Pro Audio extension).

I'm curious to see what others are using too, though...

EDIT: I really can only say relatively high in relation to the standard you gave, considering that Bluray movies are often AVC compressed at around 30mbps.

[Jaguu]

Handbrake, very easy to use, produces m4v and mkv. Only negative point: You must rip the complete file set of a DVD. Otherwise a DVD ist not properly recognized. But my quality requirements are very ordinary. Still using DVDdecrypter for ripping.

[rjm]

Thanks to both of you.

Handbrake seems nice if you want to encode a clean movie to a high bit rate/quality rip. I tend to rip less clean documentaries so need visual cropping which Handbrake does not have. I also like to tweak resolution and bit rate to give good results at the minimum file size. I find adjusting resolution/bit rate in Handbrake very unfriendly.

I did a quick test on ConvertToX. It does not handle multi-title dvds very well and provides no advice on best resolution for given bit rate. I will keep my eye on it because it appears to have excellent potential.

Anyone else have an opinion on h264 apps?

[glynor]

I actually picked up DVDFab BluRay Ripper (with the BluRay Copy and 3D ripper pack) this weekend, since they have a 25% off sale for Thanksgiving.  I have an old never-expiring license for the DVD version of DVDFab, and it works great.  I've been using the BluRay version all weekend to rip a set of all of the Harry Potter movies.

It has been fantastic.  Very easy to use, and very easy to get high-quality rips.  You can set it to passthrough, which just rips the BluRay as-is and wraps it in a MKV file, or you can transcode easily.  I've been transcoding them using 2-pass H264 set to a high bitrate (13GB target size for the discs).  The transcoding is running around 30-35fps on my HTPC, which means it has been finishing the 2.5 hour Harry Potter movies in a little under 4 hours each.

It easily handles including HD audio in the rip, which works well, and MC plays back fine on my system.  It does seem mainly focused on preserving the native audio, and doesn't seem to include a BUNCH of options for transcoding the audio, but that's fine with me.  I'd always rather have the original source audio.  Since I'm ripping these BluRay discs to around 13-14GB files, the source audio is small comparatively anyhow.  And, honestly, I haven't looked much.  The default was to preserve original, and I left it alone.

It also seamlessly handles the Chapters.  They transfer over to the MKV without issue and work perfectly.

The functionality is pretty much identical for the DVD part of the application.  So, it isn't free, but there does happen to be a good discount right now through the end of this weekend!

[rjm]

Thanks for update. Can you edit the chapters to give them meaningful names? If not, do you know of an editor that will take an exiting mkv and add or edit chapter info? I searched a while ago and could not find such an animal (nor for mp4 h264).