Creating high quality DVD Rips in h.264 format

This is test 1 to get the absolute best rip of a movie on dvd encoded into an MPEG4 format with a size <1G.

The first test is on the movie Mallrats

This fixes the 3:2 pulldown (telecine) problem when movies are converted from 24fps (in the theater) to 30fps (on your tv) with the

 -vf pullup, softskip

which must be done before any cropping and

-ofps 24000/1001

which fixes framerate

I’m also using the h.265 because it’s new and shiny, not because i know anything about it. I’m doing 2 pass just like i would with XVid.
First pass:

mencoder dvd://1 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=704:464:8:6 -ofps 24000/1001 \
 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1024:pass=1 -o /dev/null

Second Pass:

mencoder dvd://1 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=704:464:8:6 -ofps 24000/1001 \
 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1024:pass=2 -o /mnt/external/Media/Movies/Mallrats.avi

The picture looks great, it actually looked really good when i didn’t specify a bitrate and it came out somewhere around 600 kbps.

The problems so far seem to be that the audio bitrate is too low, i don’t understand why the br=192 flag isn’t getting picked up, i think it ended up being 44kbps which is too low, i’d also like to turn the volume up a bit more. I’m also still looking for more options to tweak to get the absolute BEST conversion available.

Once it’s perfected, then we do Trainspotting again.

Update: 5:17 (6/14/09)

Wow, i did an encoding of Mallrats in both high-bitrate xvid(~1500kbps) and low-bitrate x264(~940kbps), the x.264 looks vastly superiour. Supsequently i encoded an episode of Nova which was broadcast and recorded at 1080i from 28.1

I did a 2 pass encode:

mencoder /mnt/mythtv/1038.nuv -vf scale=1024:576 -af volume=18 -oac mp3lame \
-lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=1 -o /dev/null

and

mencoder /mnt/mythtv/1038.nuv -vf scale=1024:576 -af volume=18 -oac mp3lame \
 -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=2 -o /mnt/external/out.avi

Which took a 6GB input file and the output was 886MB. I scaled it down to 1024×576 (which is still 16:9) because the monitor on my Myth box currently is 1024×768, so it’s really the largest resolution that i’ll need in the near future. I also added the “volume=18″ because PBS broadcasts always seem to have very low volume, and this jacks it up pretty good. I’m still trying to perfect it, and once i do, i’m going to do Trainspotting.

After that we get to encoding full length movies so they can be played back on my palms (with MMPlayer).

~ by lucidity on June 5, 2008.