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I have a 90 minute DVD movie that I am trying to rip and encode into xvid with the avi container. I am using the instructions in this gentoo wiki:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DVD-Ripping

And I have some questions about how friggin' long this is supposed to take. The first step of ripping the DVD didn't take very long at all. Maybe 30 minutes or something, I don't really recall.

Then, I did the transcode. It did a first pass which took like 3-4 hours. Once that was done, it started doing a second pass and it's been going for 6 hours and it says it has 14 hours more to go for a total of 20 hours!

Is this right? I have never done this before so I have no idea about the length of time. I have a 2.4gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1 gig of ram.

Edit: I am using dvd::rip to do this.

Thanks!

That does not sound right. A couple of hours tops. Have you ever tried drip or tovid? Drip rips and encodes directly to divx. Tovid is pretty good for converting different video files.

Thanks, Pat, I'll try those. I've also got acidrip and I'll try that too.

It might be because I had set this to encode at regular size, i.e. 720x480 rather than something like 480x320, plus it was set to do 2 passes. What do you usually do with these two settings?

Thanks!

there is also thoggen, that will rip them into Theora. I havn't gotten it to work (it keeps asking for libdvdcss2 and I can't find version 2 anywhere) but you can give it a try.

Transcode takes for frigging ever, and that's mostly all dvd::rip is - a very well put together frontend for transcode. Xvid is also, IME, extremely slow. 2 pass non-cropped transcode of a dvd to xvid, with deinterlacing can easily take over 20 hours. I'd recommend divx or mp4 as an alternative - you can still (IIRC) use avi as the container, and it will be at least 1/3 quicker.

However, personally, I started using acidrip a while back for most stuff - many of the transcode filters are better (IMHO), but acidrip is finished in about 1/4 the time. Unless you have some really gnarly inverse telecine deinterlacing to do, I'd really highly recommend acidrip based on speed alone. Acidrip is really just a frontend for mencoder FWIW.

I'm sure others will disagree though.

Also, check out the article Pat posted in his blog about mencoder. Although I've never tried any of the newer codecs mentioned, it has a ton of good information in it that can be applied to pretty much any of this variety of programs. Always crop - that's one I learned the hard way. Cropping takes some time, but nowhere near the time it takes to encode the screen-edge fuzz that you don't need, and isn't adding anything but size to your rip.

Can I use avi/xvid or avid/mpeg4 in order to play the file on a regular standlone DVD attached to a TV? Or, to put it another way, what file type do I need to use such that I can then use qdvdauthor or something to create a DVD that I play on a regular Sony DVD player?

The reason I ask is that my kids have all these 30 minute cartoon type DVDs and I would like to rip them, encode them, and then put a bunch on a single DVD with a menu so we don't have to shuffle 6 different DVD disks -- I can put in my DVD disk with 6 different "episodes" on one disk.

Does that make sense?

I'm afraid I have no experience at all with that type of thing - my computers are more or less how I do MM at this point, other than stuff we save on the DVR. I understand exactly what you're talking about though - I have a 3 year old with about 20 Thomas the Tank Engine dvds that run about 20 min apiece - I'd love to be able to consolidate them somehow. He's also managed to destroy a number of these dvds, so I started backing them up a while back. He's happy with avis on a computer, but an avi dvd would be sweet for those times I have to leave the sanctuary of my "computer room" for extended periods.

Chess wrote:Can I use avi/xvid or avid/mpeg4 in order to play the file on a regular standlone DVD attached to a TV?

Some of the newer DVD players can handle xvid/divx files. Check out the line of players from Phillips.

Chess wrote: Or, to put it another way, what file type do I need to use such that I can then use qdvdauthor or something to create a DVD that I play on a regular Sony DVD player?

That would be MPEG2.

Chess wrote: The reason I ask is that my kids have all these 30 minute cartoon type DVDs and I would like to rip them, encode them, and then put a bunch on a single DVD with a menu so we don't have to shuffle 6 different DVD disks -- I can put in my DVD disk with 6 different "episodes" on one disk.
Does that make sense?

If you're looking to make backups of your DVD collection for your kids to use I recommend one of the following:
K9Copy - rips, re-encodes commercial 9 gig DVDs to fit on 4.7 DVD's and burns them all in one shot: http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/

Xdvdshrink - not as nice as K9Copy but does the same: http://dvdshrink.sourceforge.net/


I was watching the IT crowd by downloading the divx files from bit-torrent and using Tovid to re-encode them to MPEG2 files. Then I used dvdstyler or qdvdauthor to create a DVD with multiple episodes with a simple DVD menu. It worked great. The quality was fantastic and there was no audio going out of synch whatsoever. This was legal as the folks from the IT Crowd wanted people to download the show and check it out.

Yeah, recent versions of k9copy are so nice, I've pretty much stopped using lxdvdrip (which is a great app, but requires more thought than Click-Click does). I'll have to check out tovid - my favorite app for this kind of thing is avidemux2, which is an absolutely fantastic app - if you haven't messed with it, you must! I'll also look at dvdstyler - qdvdauthor has a TON of potential, but last time I tried to use it, it crashed constantly (of course this was on kubuntu, and probably 6 months ago).

Thanks for all your help, guys. I've been able to encode to xvid to view on the computer and also used dvdshrink to rip them to mpeg2 in order to put a bunch of 30 minute shows on one dvd that plays on our regular standalone dvd player. Cool!

DeVeDe is a program that allows you to create a video DVD from an MPEG, AVI, MOV... video file, suitable for home DVD players. DeVeDe uses Mplayer, Mencoder and DVDAuthor, so you can use any video playable with Mplayer.
it only crashes on Suzi, actually that might not be true, never mind.

Yeah avidemux2 is an AWESOME app. A real jack of all trades.

What i wanted to post about here is simply to say k9copy rocks!!

I was expecting a 1:1 iso that i could then try DVD shrink under wine to "shrink". Process took alot longer, so I was hopeful. And what ya know, out pops a 4.3 gig iso. Quality is muh better then i recall DVD Shrink on Windows ever being [years ago since I used that combo as I" hardly 'shrink' DVD's', usually rip to lavc and dump about 6-8 onto a single DVD.]

Anyway, just wanted to say I am sitting here greatly surprised it how good K9copy is, even sent them an email