Re-Encoding DVDs For The Home Theater
May 3rd, 2008 by Clint
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?
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