what is best decoder to use?

hi all,

using xp on my home pc, what is the best free dvd decoder to use to convert vob files to .avi to suit the screen resolution on my aspire one?

i've used iriverter at it's highest settings (640 x 480) but they are too small and only half of the screen is displaying video. i can't zoom vlc in any further.

obviously the aspire one screen resolution is 1024 x 600, so it won't fit most formats exactly, but the nearest would be great.

any suggestions?

 

I use MagicDvdRipper. Its not free but worth the small fee they charge. I have used MagicDVD products for a while to backup my DVD's and can not recommend them enough.

Before I use to use DVD Decryptor, which was free.

 

If you can stand the command-line, I suggest mencoder. It's free, open source, and will rip a DVD to MPEG-4 in a single operation. Because there is no GUI overhead, it's about as fast as this sort of thing can be on a particular piece of hardware. And the bonus is that the Linux version is identical. Like all good command-line apps, some learning is involved. You can't just cross your fingers and hope for the best. But it's worth the effort.

 

Another vote for mencoder, part of the mplayer package. If you can work out the command line recipe, you'll have it made anyway you like. Unfortunately, finding that recipe is like cooking everything yourself rather than just ordering the pizza.

 

It occurs to me that another issue is whether you've changed the Linpus media player. The built-in one won't play MPEG4, I believe, which is a bit of a shame. So when you rip DVDs you're stuck with either ripping to a format that is supported (MPEG1?) or installing a proper mplayer or VLC. I would certainly suggest the latter, because MPEG4 is a good format for small-screen devices (in my view).

On windows the following mencoder command will turn a DVD movie into an MPEG4 video that will basically play on the AA1 with an improved media player (and, indeed, on most other players)

mencoder -dvd-device=e: -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=800 -o mymovie.avi dvd://1

mencoder has about a sqillion other settings, which you might want to play with to get optimal results. But the basic command will give you something sort-of watchable if you don't want to spend a long time fiddling.

 

kevin

can i clarify this?........

my main pc is xp, as it is used by my g/f who will not entertain linux in any form.

however, i have set it up to run ubuntu 8.

shall i just run that command line input on this main pc once i have booted it up into ubuntu, seeing as it has the actual dvd drive, then save the resultant file and transfer it to my aa1?

is this the easiest way to do it?

 

If you're running it on ubuntu, then I guess you need

-dvd-drive=/dev/dvd

or something like that. On Windows you need

-dvd-drive=e:

or whatever the drive letter happens to be. Apart from that, mencoder works almost exactly the same on Windows and Linux. I'm not sure how to install mencoder on ubuntu, however, as mostly I use RedHat. But I'm sure it's on one of the repositories that ubuntu folks use -- try the ubuntu section of this site.

With the settings I suggest, you'll get an AVI file that will play on the AA1 _with VLC or an updated mplayer_. It won't play on the standard Linpus because the mplayer is crippled.

But, to be honest, if you're going to use mencoder, it's worth taking the time to read the documentation to see what it can do and how it does it. You'll get far better results if you experiment a bit. If you prefer GUI-based software, there's no end available.

 

mplayer (dumpstream) and mEncoder are good for extracting individual tracks. However, they cannot preserve the DVD's structure.

 

dvd::rip or k9copy if you want to preserve the DVD structure (menus, etc). For individual tracks you can also use mplayer + mEncoder, ffmpeg or transcode (powerful, but not for the faint of heart).

For DVDs, I tend to extract the disc as a VIDEO_TS+AUDIO_TS structure and play it as a DVD. In this case since you are not transcoding to anything, you preserve the full quality of the disc.

This is because the tool you are using is set to scale down the video for portables. Your playback software should scale it back up (unless if you use X11 as output, which is incapable of on-the-fly scaling). However, the quality will be worst.

 

On Windows, Handbreake together with DVD43 works great and is pretty easy to use.