Wed Aug 08, 2012 3:43 pm by HellesAngel
I wonder if someone can elaborate on the best way to rip DVDs for playback under Serviio. By 'best' I mean a way that keeps as many of the features of the original DVD as possible - ie. best picture & sound quality, fast foward/rewind, chapter forward/back, switch subtitles - and of course remove all the annoying crap like region codes, advertising, copyright notices etc. and of course the ripper should not be confused by copy protection mechanisms.
So far I have experimented with Handbrake (Linux & Windows) and WinXDVD Platinum and had mixed results with both -
Handbrake provides the fastest rips, with good picture and audio quality (I use the MPEG-2 FFmpeg video setting with QP2, frame rate as source, constant quality) and good audio quality. Subtitle tracks can easily be selected, audio gain can be increased, but Handbrake is sometimes confused by copy protection mechanisms. Also bad is the resulting .mp4 files can't be fast forwarded or rewound on Serviio, and the chapter information is gone despite Handbrake saying it would preserve it. Actually ffmpeg -i <file.mp4> shows the chapter information is in the file.
WinXDVD Platinum has the easiest interface to use - 3 clicks to a copy - and this way produces the best video quality and the audio is also fine, and I've not seen it stumble on a copy protected DVD yet, however in this mode there is no control of the audio gain (some rips come out very low level, not good on the tablet) or subtitles, and the chapter information is gone. Switching to the manual MPEG settings unleashes a world of trouble - the audio quality is terrible (tested on the Bourne films, that need a particular subtitle track to make sense - the audio level was very low, and speech was in left channel only) and I just can't get it to rip with the same picture quality as the preset Copy setting which produces a 5Gb rip. Serviio will fast forward and rewind the resulting .mpg file, but no chapter forward/back.
Ripping I do on an Asus X53 Core i5 laptop running usually Ubuntu 12.04 or Win7 which I usually run in VMware Player. Serviio is running in a VMware ESXi 5 host on a Core i7 machine running Ubuntu 12.04 Server with 16Gb RAM, the VM has exclusive use of a single core and 1Gb RAM. My TV is a Sony Bravia KDL-55EX725BAEP. I know as much as the next man about computers but am a bit green with all these media formats so any hints how to get the best DVD rips would be much appreciated.