Noob DVD Encoding Question

I've got 200 dvds stored on my hard drive as VIDEO_TS. I'm using Serviio to get them to my Samsung BD5500C. I don't want to have to got through and select which multiple .VOBs to watch a movie so I'm thinking about re-encoding everything into a single file format (mpeg4 perhaps?).
Questions:
What format should I encode them into for the best quality (space is not an issue)? .avi? .mpeg4? something else?
Is there any format (including .VOB) that will allow me to access the DVD menus (Scene Selection, Bonus Features, Deleted Scenes, etc) or is everything just played as a single linear stream?

Thanks!
roy.

Hi,

formatwise i'd definitly recommend H.264. Using http://www.handbrake.fr you can convert DVD-VIDEO_TS folders quite simple. Encoding with a constant quality with "RF" set to something between 20 and 22 should be fine. You will end up with a MKV (or MP4), but you will loose all the menus and extras (you could of course encode the extras to additional files). I don't know any format that preserves these... If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I'll try to answer them

unbekannt

You may have already gotten an answer that works for you but I'll add my 2 cents since it may help someone else...

I've run into this situation before also and the simplest solution turned out to be the "cat" command. It' won't save you any drive space but it will at least combine all the files into one huge VOB.

Do an "ls" in the VIDEO_TS folder and find the series of large VOBs. Lets say they are the VTS_01_0.VOB to VTS_01_6.VOB. You can combine them on a linux or Mac with the following command.

  Code:

cat `ls VTS_01*.VOB|grep -v 0.VOB` > myfile.vob

At least then everything is all in one and you can remove the extra files so your not using extra space. The command below doesn't remove your output file from above since in the example it was lowercase and the files in the VIDEO_TS folder are all uppercase.

  Code:

rm *.VOB *.IFO *.BUP

[tombert]

I'am using makemkv which keeps all subtitels, chapters and languages ... but serviio is currently not supporting language selection and thus ffmpeg might fail ...