This guide is specifically for people wanting to rip DVDs to an Archos AV series format. On a Mac running OS-X, this whole process takes under an hour for a 2 hour movie. [bold]You will need: =========[/bold] [bold]OS-X[/bold] [bold]Mac The Ripper v2.6.6 [/bold](http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22715) [bold]ffmpegX v0.0.9t[/bold] (http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ also contains instructions on how to install) [bold]1 DVD[/bold] [bold]DVD to VOB ========[/bold] 1. Insert DVD into Mac 2. Open Mac The Ripper 3. Click "Mode", choose "Title Extraction" and make sure you've picked the one that represents the movie (the running time is a clue) 4. Click Go 5. When it's finished (it takes a few minutes), you should have a single VOB file which can now be used with ffmpegX. [bold]VOB to DivX ========[/bold] 1. Open ffmpegX 2. Drag the VOB file you created into the box that says "Drop file here". 3. Get rid of the black bars: This bit is optional but, if you're encoding a 2.35:1 movie, approximately 2/3 of the screen is black, and there's no point wasting time encoding a black picture is there? Choose "Filters" and in the Preview section, change the minutes to 10 minutes in or thereabouts. Select Autocrop, check that it's done its job sensibley, otherwise choose another starting point (15 mins in) and try again. 4. In the Options tab, choose "High Quality", but leave the other options blank. 5. Check that the Audio section is set to: Codec: .MP3 Bitrate: 128kbit/s Sampling: 48000Hz Channels: Stereo (unless the original film was mono, e.g. Psycho) Mode: CBR 6. In the video section, make sure MPEG4 [.AVI] (mencoder) is selected, set the file size using 350MB per hour as a guide. Now set the Video Size width to 640, then, without setting the height, select the aspect ratio of your movie in the autosize drop menu (even if it was previously correct, select the same option again). It will automatically set your height for you. NB choose an aspect ratio that doesn't have "(keep height)" after it. 7. Press "Encode" and wait for it to complete. I recently encoded "Assault on Precinct 13" in only 42 minutes on a G4 Powerbook, so it shouldn't take too long, unlike the 4 hours AutoGK used to take on my Pentium 4 PC.
nice easy guide.. i know we could use more in the mac section.. you may want to submit it to this thread.. i've tried to post a guide or two and they never get notieced.. http://forums.afterdawn.com/forum_view.cfm/62 why would we want to convert to that format? any special reason?
As the article states (although maybe not explicity enough) this guide is specifically aimed towards people who want to convert their DVDs into a format that can be played on an Archos AV300 or AV400. Those Archos models have very pedantic requirements when it comes to playing video.
