Something a little shorter then the epic that is Tagert's Guide.. Just want to try something to backup my DVD collection if possible.

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Do you want it together with all the menu's or just the actual movie?

http://handbrake.m0k.org/?article=details

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If there was an option to keep the menu, would be nice. I have been using DVD shrink, but at 5GB per ISO I store on my PC it's starting to use a huge about of space.

Are there standalone players that can play with menus, and when in divx format, I am such a newb to all this.

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I'm not sure why you feel the need to back up your DVD collection.

Or why you'd use a lossy format to do so.

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http://lern2play.mine.nu/ !

Well they have to be divx6 ultra compatible to be able to play the menus as well.

And you need that special divx menu program creator to do it.

I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure how user friendly it is, but my bet is that it isn't

Do you have kids? FYI I backed up my entire CD (music) collection a few years ago, probably half of the music I have electronically now the originals have been destroyed.

Also at some point I could do some sort of media streaming.

Also I thought that divx was no more lossy than standard MPEG2, just needs more decoding power.

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Well it all depends on how much bitrate (filesize) you're willing to spend on each movie which controls how crappy the quality will be.

In my opinion divx isn't a good backup codec to use. It blurs and unsharpens the picture.
That's why xvid is mostly used in the piracy circuits.
It's sharp and delivers crisp picture.
So I'd suggest you use that one or the H.264 tech.

The program Wharry suggested has output support of both H.264 and xvid.

So try it out

If it's just for backup, you could always copy them to another DVD, then keep the originals safe and play the copies.

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Cheers,

Ratel

can you get players for H.264 and xvid or are they PC only?

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I prefer keeping them on HDD if possible, keep them on the RAID 1 array I have, then also backup to external disk for off site backup.

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Pffbt, then I'd be helpful. We can't have that.

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No, but I'm not sure why your kids are able to wreck your DVDs.

Surely for backups just buying DVDs and...backing them up onto DVD makes more sense?

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http://lern2play.mine.nu/ !

All the dvd players with a divx support logo on it has also xvid support.
xvid and divx are so closely related so theres almost 100% certainty of support of xvid as well if there's divx.

Although almost no current players out there support GMC and QPEL compression techs within xvid, but almost no releases are made to be encoded with that anyways so its a longshot

H.264 has support in some hardware dvd players, but not many and they have pretty restricted settings for decoding H.264 so it's not worth it at the moment.

But encode your dvd backups in xvid instead.

A 2GB xvid dvd resolution encode of a dvd movie yields almost identical as your original.

If you're not that picky you can go down to 2CD xvid encodes (lowered resolution) (1400MB encodes) or even 700MB depending on which television you want to watch the backups on.

But with ease and with an advantage, you can fit two dvd movies on a single layer dvd with almost no quality lost.

Try it


Many dvd movies today are sold as double layers. so unless he wants to spend time re-encoding them into MPEG2 to fit single layers, I believe he's better of encoding them to xvid and able to fit two movies on one single layer dvd instead with almost the same quality as the original.

WOAH xvid IS divx BACKWARDS

CHECK IT OUT MAAN 420 FOR LYF

But a straightforward recoded DVD has the bonus of being a plain bogstandard DVD that'll play on any DVD player known to mankind, not something you can say about an xvid rip!

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http://lern2play.mine.nu/ !

true, but I got the impression he only wants backups

but yeah, good point, the ball is yours Asir !

A useful topic with even more info about this very topic:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=131478

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