Written by Like many people, I have a fair number of DVDs; and given the upscaling strengths of both the PS3 and Denon amplifier, I don’t have many Blueray discs. In fact, the PS3 is almost exclusively used as a media player since it ties beautifully to the NAS on which I store every bit of non-DVD media; and every CD I buy gets ripped to mp3 and dutifully archived in the loft…
Given this trend, I’ve decided to take a similar approach to the DVDs, and store the lot of them digitally instead. My experience of this process goes back almost 15 years now and I would normally just use DivX and mp3 audio as my codec-of-choice. However, a few keys things have changed since those heady days of Winamp:
Firstly, I find that between the PS3, the Samsung TV and VLC on various computers, AVI containers with DivX video just aren’t reliable as a storage method. What plays on one won’t on the other; audio synchronization can be as issue; and there are filesize limitations. The new kid on the block appears to be MKV, but that has inconsistent support – so it doesn’t really solve the problem.
Secondly, 15-10 years ago, disk sizes were in the 10-100GB range. I remember having my first RAID disaster with an array of five 120GB disks. These days, 2TB is the norm and (subject to regional floods) can be got for almost nothing. So, whilst my gut instinct is to stick to the ~700MB per film approach I used to, I don’t intend to burn these to disc nor do I care about the capacity I’ll use (within reason!).
Lastly, I used to use stereo MP3, and that was (and is) fine for audio that requires nothing more. I never used to have decent surround sound equipment, nor the desire to sacrifice video quality within the tight constraint of that 700MB target filesize. These days however, I just can’t think why I shouldn’t retain all 5.1 surround sound channels.
With these new requirements in mind then, I’ve elected for MP4 containers with h264/AAC encoding. Some tests I’ve run show 320kbps AAC audio with 1.1Mbps h264 video runs at about 10MB/minute, with quality pretty indistinguishable from the original DVD. It also plays nicely with every piece of equipment I own.
The problem I have is that I have no idea on the optimum way to convert what video I already have. With a couple of thousand existing video files in predominantly AVI(Divx) format, I need something scripted; ffmpeg is likely the correct option, but whilst I can put together conversion parameters that do the job, the resulting quality is abysmal. Answers on a (h264) postcard…
</alex>
