Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs

I bought my first DVD about 10 years ago. At the time, they were a technical marvel:

* 8.5 Gigabytes per side

* 720 x 480 MPEG-2 video at 30 frames per second

* Dolby Digital (AC-3) or Digital Theater System (DTS) digital multichannel sound

Today, those specs are rapidly becoming pedestrian in the face of high definition cable, broadcast, and Blu-Ray discs. A few of the video sharing websites offer something perilously close to DVD quality already.

I say the DVD is the new MP3. We’re going to start tossing these things around like candy.

Unlike audio CDs, DVDs are already compressed digital data. You could extract the files from the DVD as-is, and play them back to your heart’s content. No re-encoding required. But like The Six Million Dollar Man, we can rebuild them better than they were before. Video codecs have advanced tremendously since the heady days of MPEG-2. These new codecs take a lot more playback horsepower than MPEG-2, but offer comparable quality in about one-fourth the size. We can turn our digital DVDs into better digital DVDs through superior computer science.

[From Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs]

The article is right on the money. I am going through that exact experience: I have tons of DVDs scattered all over the house, and (exercising my fair use rights) I am slowly converting them to h.264 for our two AppleTVs. Once you get used to picking your DVDs off a menu, there is no turning back, especially if you use MetaX to pull the DVD’s cover and main information off Amazon. It looks no different than browsing for movies through the iTunes Music store.

The main problems to doing this are logistics:

1. Using my particular settings for Handbrake, it takes about 1.5GB of disk space for each hour of DVD video. Thanks God 1TB external drives are affordable now.

2. Limitations of the Mac Book Pro Superdrive. It is a bit too slow to do a real time rip + encode. That means using Mac The Ripper first, to rip the movie, then Handbrake to convert it to h.264.

3. Some DVDs are using protection schemes that are not part of the DVD specification, so these may not be ripped consistently. Not the end of the world, all it means is I have to keep the DVD at hand instead of buried into a closet.

4. I have a hardware accelerator for h.264, but it doesn’t allow me to do AC3 passthroughs. This means if I want to use the encoder, I will lose 5.1. Not cool.

5. 3GB per movie is kind of large when you are trying to move it across a home network to a different machine. My piece of shit wireless G router would choke on it, same router with everything on 100MB ethernet seems to work OK. I expect this to stop being an issue once I upgrade to wireless N.