Re-Encoding DVDs For The Home Theater
May 3rd, 2008 by Clint Posted in tech | 4 Comments »
Jeff Atwood has been re-encoding his DVDs to make them smaller! I guess I understand that if you’re loading your iPod. For lower-resolution playback, it looks like Handbrake solves all the old problems of fighting with VirtualDub in codec hell.
For movies on my projector? I save as many of those bits as possible. I try to keep DVDs in full MPEG-2 resolution on my hard drive now that terabytes are becoming affordable. This also preserves all the menus, special features, and audio tracks.
If I really need to shrink a DVD (to fit a DVD-9 onto a cheap DVD-5 for example), then I don’t transcode with DVDShrink, I re-code with DVDRebuilder. One of my better software purchases was a license for DVDRebuilderPro. If you don’t vote with your wallet like Jeff encourages, then there’s a free version you can use. I’d also encourage you to visit Hank315’s tip jar, he wrote HC Encoder, the under-the-hood powerhouse responsible for the quality of DVDRebuilder’s output.
Once you start trying to be a pixel purist, you can set up FFDshow to do magnificent up-scaling.
As for the multi-core processor debate, I’m firmly planted in the “people don’t need more cores (yet)” camp. The whole concept reminds me too much of razor blades. But, I still own a quad-core because my HTPC’s primary activities are up-scaling and video editing.
Hey, did anyone else notice that this is Jeff’s 15th post according to the archive ID?
May 30th, 2008 at 2:14 am
>15th post
Uh, I read it as 001110.
Which is 14?
Maybe he removed a post somewhere…
May 31st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
John
I’m pretty sure a programmer would zero-index his entries, so I still think it’s the 15th.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
I stand corrected.
Looking back, I realized all I had to do was check to see if 000000.html worked… which it doesn’t. 14th post it is.
February 16th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
The processor chip is labeled as a little recent model amount however it and the GPU are likely the same speed since the 3GS. The old Touch using the similar Processor and GPU since the 3G was quicker. Apart from having the clock pace turned up greater the Touch has less software to run because it is not a telephone. It ought to do more than any iPhone to day in performance.