DVD to AVI?

Going away for the weekend, SWMBO wants some of her DVDs put on her Blackberry for the journey. It'll play AVI so that's what I'm going with.

Currently the process is to manually copy the DVD's video folder to my PC, convert the VOB file(s) to MPG using DVD authoring software, then convert that to AVI. Thing is, it takes pretty much real time (i.e. as many minutes as the movie is long) to do the AVI conversion, I don't know if that's normal or because my P4 XP PC is just slow?

Can't really be bothered to find and install some software since it's not something I envisage doing often, but if there's something which drastically cuts down on time/effort then I'd be interested?

And does anyone know which video/audio codecs I should use, or the horizontal/vertical sizes I could shrink it down to without noticeable quality loss? Does it matter if the GOP in the MPG file is broken (non standard) if it isn't going to be burned to DVD?

Rendering takes time, how long depends on the system, the software doing the rendering and the codecs it's using. Real time is actually quite good.

Are you resizing to the screen size of the device? No point rendering a 720p video if it'll only ever play on 320x240 screen for example. Not to mention the storage issues.

Originally Posted by fulltilt

I don't know if that's normal or because my P4 XP PC is just slow?

All computers are exactly as able as one another

Originally Posted by Slenver

Are you resizing to the screen size of the device? No point rendering a 720p video if it'll only ever play on 320x240 screen for example. Not to mention the storage issues.

If you notice, I actually asked for the recommended size...

As it happens, I may have found what I needed: AKME FFmpeg - Browse Files at SourceForge.net - it would appear to be able to convert an mpeg2 video and quickly convert it to an mp4 (or other file types) and gives options to optimise for a particular model of Blackberry. Should be able to test the output soon.

Originally Posted by Slenver

All computers are exactly as able as one another

Don't be a twat, some things have to be done in real time or slower no matter how fast/slow your PC is, I was curious if converting to AVI was one of them.

Handbrake? will run on a shitty P4 or your imaginary friends' well sexy MPB.

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Don't be a twat, some things have to be done in real time or slower no matter how fast/slow your PC is, I was curious if converting to AVI was one of them.

It's not actually as simple a question as it seems.

If your system has a multi-core processor, can the software exploit that and how efficiently can it exploit it? What is the final resolution of the final file, what is the bitrate stream of the final file, is the final image being resized or changed in any way, what is the codec used in the file to be changed, what is the file type of the original file to be changed etc. etc?

So many things can make a huge difference to rendering times. For example, you may wish to render an AVI to AVI (let's say you've removed the first five seconds of footage from the original file). Using decent software, on a reasonable system, and rendering a high quality codec on the original file, the render can take literally seconds for an hour of footage. However, if the original AVI was produced by cheap or free software, then just rendering five minutes of footage can take over an hour purely because the codec used by the cheap/free software is so crap.

Er, so, there isn't really a definitive answer.

Originally Posted by Alex Dangerfield

Handbrake? will run on a shitty P4 or your imaginary friends' well sexy MPB.

Looked at that earlier, it doesn't do AVI.

I realise I'm now trying with mp4, but this is after finding a google recommendation for the AKME conversion program I'm hoping to use. It optimises for iPhone too, amongst other things and is very much quicker than real time (on my less shitty dual core laptop).

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Looked at that earlier, it doesn't do AVI.

I realise I'm now trying with mp4, but this is after finding a google recommendation for the AKME conversion program I'm hoping to use. It optimises for iPhone too, amongst other things and is very much quicker than real time (on my less shitty dual core laptop).

show off..

aye looks like they dropped AVI.

Why did you drop AVI output?

AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete. It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display. Furthermore, HandBrake's AVI muxer is vanilla AVI 1.0 that doesn't even support large files. The code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance.

Originally Posted by fulltilt

If you notice, I actually asked for the recommended size...

Not the same thing though. The ideal resolution is going to be exactly whatever the screen res of the device is. Larger will involve wasted processing and storage and reduction in quality, lower will save on processing and storage but also involve (a greater) loss in quality.

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Don't be a twat, some things have to be done in real time or slower no matter how fast/slow your PC is, I was curious if converting to AVI was one of them.

I can't think of anything apart from recording a live event of some kind... could be videoing people or recording audio from a record deck, amounts to the same thing. Can think of nothing within a PC that requires that that's not tied to a live event somehow. Processing is processing.

Badaboom can speed it up if you have a Nvidia GeForce 8+ graphics card, I tried it when it first came out and it was buggy crap but i'm sure it'll have improved by now.

Transcoding Speed – Badaboom is fast! Instead of taking hours to convert a movie to play on your iPod, it can now be done in a matter of minutes. Badaboom 2.0 will support hardware transcoding using Intel's HD Graphics 2000 and 3000 series chips as well as NVIDIA Fermi GPUs.

Efficient Use of Your System Resources – Badaboom converts video using graphics acceleration available on systems with hardware described here, so you can continue other common tasks without unnecessarily slowing down your system.

To copy the DVD first i've used DVD Decrypter. I found my DVD drive copied slow + quiet due to Riplock which I had to change the firmware to bypass. The downside is when playing DVD Disc movies the drive is now noisy.

Originally Posted by Alex Dangerfield

Why did you drop AVI output?

Just cos I read that Blackberry could handle mp4 and that was the default option on the AKME program I'm using. The actual Blackberry site said the files should optimally be AVI, but it doesn't seem to matter, presumably since that's just a container format. It did work, btw, albeit slightly out of sync with the audio on the Blackberry, but watchable.

Originally Posted by Slenver

Not the same thing though. The ideal resolution is going to be exactly whatever the screen res of the device is. Larger will involve wasted processing and storage and reduction in quality, lower will save on processing and storage but also involve (a greater) loss in quality.

That's what I meant, an optimum resolution vs storage size vs processing, etc. The BB site said one thing, the AKME program said another, lower resolution - I went with the AKME program and it looks fine.

I can't think of anything apart from recording a live event of some kind... could be videoing people or recording audio from a record deck, amounts to the same thing. Can think of nothing within a PC that requires that that's not tied to a live event somehow. Processing is processing.

I couldn't either, but better to ask than mess about trying to improve the speed if it was doing some live frame by frame conversion/direct recording. I tried with a different converter afterwards, it was looking like 10hrs to reauthor a 1.5hr film in mpeg2 format! As Veggie said, lots of factors to consider even on the same hardware.

I'm actually trying to rip a copy protected DVD now, it's taking ages just to get the VOB files onto the PC, presumably something to do with the middleware I'm having to use to defeat the protection With my non protected DVDs I could copy the VOBs in seconds.

Originally Posted by TightRS

Badaboom can speed it up if you have a Nvidia GeForce 8+ graphics card

Unfortunately, I haven't.

To copy the DVD first i've used DVD Decrypter. I found my DVD drive copied slow + quiet due to Riplock which I had to change the firmware to bypass. The downside is when playing DVD Disc movies the drive is now noisy.

I'm using AnyDVD to defeat the copy protection, it's a kind of virtual driver which means I don't have to mess with my drive's firmware. It does have a rip option but I'm trying with a simple drag & drop of the Video_ts folder first, which is taking about an hour. I'll try the rip option on the next disc.