I've backed up my DVD collection to my media server. Most of the rips are main movie only and they typically come in at 4-5GB. I starting ripping my Blu-Rays using RipBot and AnyDVD HD with a cRF of 18 at 1080P and encoding the raw PCM or True-HD/DTS-HD audio to either FLAC or if the soundtrack isn't very impressive to AC3 640kbit. The rips for the main movie are coming in around 4-5GB and look virtually indistinguishable to the source. Why the source needs to take up over 20GB is complete baffling to me. It's driving me nuts that my lousy 480P MPEG2 VOB files are taking up more space than my 1080P rips. However sometimes I'm going to want to burn a DVD disc to take in the car (I won't use the original as my kids destroy them.) So it's easy to just burn the VIDEO_TS directory to a disc and go. But what if I want to cut down on HD space used by all my DVD rips? If I encode them to mp4 files, they'd probably end up being, what, 1GB a piece considering 1080P is coming in at 4-5GB? 1) What's the easiest solution to convert a VIDEO_TS directory with a bunch of VOBs to one x264 file (mp4 or m2ts?). 2) What's the easiest solution to take an mp4 or m2ts file and transcode it to MPEG2 and author/burn a DVD?
I've used so many different programs in the last 12 weeks I forgot what each does! One I haven't used in a while is Handbrake. I believe Handbrake is the answer to question #1. The only thing is I want the resulting file to be .m2ts not .mkv because I can't get Tversity (which I like better than PSM) to play .mkv without uninstalling Haali Media Splitter (which I need for RipBot.) So I guess I'll have to use TSMuxer to convert the mkv to m2ts. The reason I'm not using mp4 is because I don't want to have to transcode the AC3 soundtrack to AAC. Maybe I'm just better off leaving in DVD VIDEO_TS format and living with the waste of HD space. Transcoding to x264 (cRF 18) then back to MPEG2 is going to result in a DVD that has less (albeit probably not very noticeable) video quality than the original MPEG2 VOBs?
