I'll apologize right off the bat because this one might be a little long. Feel free to skip to the second paragraph to skip the circumstances.
I just bought a 37" HD TV, and I'm looking into buying a Western Digital HD TV Media Player and a 2 TB HDD to play files off of. I've only ever downloaded a couple of TV shows and I don't like the idea of stealing the content. What I did want to do was to rip and encode all of the tv series that I already own, put them on the external HDD and create my own on demand media server of sorts. I've done some research into programs like Fairuse, AutoGK, IMtooDVDRipper, and the DIVX Converter that comes with the Divx Pro package. I've gotten mixed results with all the programs, and they either take too long (AutoGK took ages for an episode of LOST) or yield too unsatisfactory results (IMtooDVDRipper left so many artifacts it was unwatchable).
What I want to know is if there is a good way to rip/encode a TV Series so that it would playback well on an HD TV. I downloaded a single episode of House off of a torrent, and at only 350 MB for a ~45 minute episode it looked fantastic. No artifacts to speak off, a high enough resolution so that it didn't look blurry and enduce headaches, and decent sound quality. What type of programs do these uploaders use to get such quality with such a consistently small file size? (Note, it doesn't have to be Divx, any format would work as long as the WD player supports it). I'm hoping to keep 22 minute episodes around 200 MB and 45 minute episodes around 350 MB.
I would prefer it if the process would go quickly, meaning that I could go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the whole disc done (AutoGK wasn't even half done after a full night of sleep)
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I don't mind buying the program either.
The speed of the conversion is all relative to the speed of your cpu. A quad core being the fastest.
For the best quality you need to use the divxcodec2-pass home theatre mode. Dr.divx 2.0 produce the best quality for me when doing episodic dvd's. Avidemux is the fastest for me, but the quality isn't the best and you sometimes have to tweak it to keep your video in audio sync. Fairuse wizard can also do episodic dvd's but it isn't easy to use and it's very slow, but the quality is very good.
