DVD to ??? Conversion!

[nitevision88]

Hey-

I will be leaving for college in some months from now (woo!) and I don't want to leave my family with zero DVDs, and I also don't want to bring a bunch of DVDs to college so they can be stolen/lost/damaged, etc.

I know full well that I could use something like DVD Shrink to either copy them to my PC (and store as .VOB files) or simply re-burn them to DVD+Rs, however neither of those is acceptable - it would still present me with the problem of DVDs being lost/stolen, etc.

I'm looking for a file format to convert the .VOB files [that a program like DVD Shrink would output] into something more usable and possibly slightly smaller in size. I would like to keep the quality as good as possible - I want to be able to watch these with decent picture on *at least* my 19" WS HD monitor.

I tried DivX format a few months ago, but it took an ungodly long amount of time to convert (upwards of 4 hours for each DVD) and also the quality of the files produced was not ideal - the sound was extremely quiet.

Any suggestions? I would prefer something somewhat standard and not extremely proprietary, if possible. Also, if anyone has a suggestion of what settings to use if I was to try DivX again, (or a different program to convert with other than the one made by DivX).

Your help is appreciated.

 

[EricB]

you are 2 greedy. you can't have your cake and eat it too

 

[nitevision88]

uh.. thanks.. but in what regard? i'm merely asking for a decent file format to convert my DVDs to so i can store/watch them while at school. I'm fully willing to buy about a terabyte worth of space for the occasion, I don't expect any file compression miracles here, but hey - look, if you have a suggestion, fire away.

 

[revenge2]

lol, if i cant help you, no one can (jis jks) i have been through all of these conversion problems my self, anyway.....
try these programs

DVDCutter Stream and Mp3CDWav Converter Pro 5.04 click this url
http://www.download.com/DVDCutter-Stream-and-Mp3CDWav-Converter-Pro/3000-7970_4-10615196.html?tag=lst-6-1

or try

Augart Video Converter 2.3
http://www.download.com/Augart-Video-Converter/3000-2194_4-10618388.html?tag=lst-6-2

i searched for these programs and im pretty sure you will have some luck

-hope this helps

 

[kwokwai]

Hey-

I will be leaving for college in some months from now (woo!) and I don't want to leave my family with zero DVDs, and I also don't want to bring a bunch of DVDs to college so they can be stolen/lost/damaged, etc. ...

Purchase a notebook, and a USB 120BG HDD then, nitevision88!
They will be your good friends.

120GB HDD should be enough to store your DVDs.
You can set password to protect files in your USB HDD so that
no one except you can have the files even if it is stolen.

800 dollars (US) should be enough for a notebook and a USB
120GB HDD.

Hope this helps!

 

[nitevision88]

I'm well aware that a notebook and portable/external hard drive would serve me well. In fact, I have both right now. (The external is about 250gig, actually)

Perhaps I was a bit unclear as to what I was asking - I have gigs and gigs of DVDs backed up on my hard drive currently - each is about a 4.7 gig folder of random VOB files.

What I want is to take each of these movies (in broken up VOB format) and synthesize each into ONE, SOMEWHAT HIGH QUALITY VIDEO/SOUND, NOT GIGANTIC file.

They are somewhat unwieldy at their current size, and playback is not spectacular, since I have to find which VOB file it is, click on it, then in the middle of my movie, find the next file in the sequence - I'm trying to correct this, and allow myself to store all of my movies in this one location. Since I have over one hundred movies, this is impossible if each is 4.7 gig.

Could anyone give me ANY insight on a file format to convert these folders of VOB to that is quality, relatively small (under 2 gig is fine), and won't take an enormous amount of time to convert each file. (The current solutions I'm seeing take upwards of 7 hours per movie.)

 

[horndude]

http://www.videohelp.com

there's a variety of apps that will re-encode VOB's to something smaller, no matter what there will be some loss of quality, its a fact of life, takes time to re-encode them too, that is inescapable

if you do it right though a dvd5 can be shrunk down to 700mb without enough loss of quality to really see it on a TV though, I take other people's 700mb xvid rips and convert back to dvd all the time without too many complaints

lookup rip.net and avi.net

pretty simple to use and they are freeware

avidemux and virtualdubmod would do it as well with more options as far as the encoding specs you can set