Hi, I have recently purchased the western digital tv unit which allows you to watch files from an external hard drive via usb, Now my problem is that when i try to back up my personally owned dvds to the hard drive the picture is sizably smaller and contains subtitles on every attempt even on different titles, My conversion method is to to use dvd shrink to open the disc and then only take the main movie from the list and back this up onto my internal harddrive, once this back up is complete i use winavi to convert to avi and merging the vob's into one avi, Can anyone tell me where im going wrong or suggest a method of back up allowing me to store my dvds on an external hard drive as avi's. Thanks
First use the free dvdfabhddecryter to rip your dvd (it will rip the main movie or the entire dvd). When you rip the dvd save it as an ISO. Next use the free "fairuse wizard lite" to convert that ISO into a avi. Fairuse will allow you to crop it. If you will be playing the avi on a regular tv make sure you check the box that says "use tv display mode". This is the method I use and it works great, Fairuse has the xvid and h264 codec. The free version produces a 700mb file only. H264 will give the best quality (near dvd) but you need to see if your external drive can play it. I record everything with the h264 codec, but xvid will also give you a decent avi but not outstanding. I've used winavi video converter before (on dvd's)but it doesn't produce the best quality and I had audio/sync issues , but it is quicker than fairuse. I only use winavi nowadays on mpeg2's (recorded off the broadcast tv) and convert them into avi, it works perfect for that. quality = fairuse wizard speed = winavi or avidemux
...I would not put Winavi in the same category with Avidemux...it cannot even come close to what Avidemux can do(I use Avidemux to convert any +1.5GB AVIs that I have to a much smaller X.264, using multi pass, and the resulting quality is very good). Winavi will hardcode the subtitles, that's why you have "subtitles on every attempt". Some people like AutoGK to convert DVD to AVI, however, I would also recommend FairUse 2. It is hard to beat.
I am one of those people who prefer AutoGK (which only encodes to xvid or divx) ,but I tend to encode to slightly larger files, usually around 1400mb. But if want to keep them small (700mb) then I would definitely go with Fairuse Wizard and encode to h264.
