Help converting for WDTV

[bburwell]

Good day, I am extremely new to this, I am wanting to utilize a new WD TV box, and have around 240 purchased dvds on a escient system with sony 400 disc dvd player. I would like to take these and convert them to the hard drive and put discs away for safe keeping. I am also wanting to eventually make the move to Blu Ray. I understand from this thread there is no current conversion to the mobil for blueray and thats fine. I was however wondering if the dvd to mobil will utilize multiple dvd drives to cut my transfer time down signifigantly. If so I think I can scrape up a total of 3 dvd drives and then it could bang off 3 movies at a shot ?

I am looking forward to your response... I am anticipating buying this very soon... Just trying my first dvd with this to AVI (the hulk(new version)) and we will see how it looks and sounds on the wd tv.


Many thanks... Brian

[signals]

Converting to AVI/MP4 or other formats is very CPU intensive and I don't think you'd be able to run more than one instance of this at a time with any gain in speed. It will help if you have a fast CPU with plenty of RAM and a state of the art video card that supports CUDA or DXVA acceleration. DVD to Mobile will allow you to queue up several jobs and leave them to convert while you sleep or do other things.

There are other approaches to storing your movies on the WDTV, but I will defer to someone who uses it or a similar device and can give you better advice.

[Complication]

You can experiment with different AVI settings to see what works for you. There is a trade off between file size and quality loss. The amount of quality loss you are comfortable with can vary greatly from person to person.

If your interest in Blu-Ray is an indication that quality is rather important then I would suggest you use VOB Passthrough. This will create a file that averages about 5GB per movie and since it is part DVD to Mobile you can batch as many DVDs as you have drives. There is almost no CPU used because it is doing a straight copy of the audio and video streams.

Unfortunately the WD TV box does not have DVD Menu support (most requested feature) or else I might suggest something else. With VOB Passthrough you will loose chapter stops and may have some difficulty using fast forward.

[genoh7]

I'm doing the same thing to put on a wdtv. Is it just going to take a lot longer to convert to a file? Its taking well over an hour for 1 dvd. The other question I had is if I convert it to an mp4 and then at some point want to make a physical DVD can I do that? How do I do that? Is there a preferred file that is faster than mp4? I just used that because I know I can always put it on my Ipod if I wanted to take it with me?

[Complication]

I'm doing the same thing to put on a wdtv. Is it just going to take a lot longer to convert to a file? Its taking well over an hour for 1 dvd. The other question I had is if I convert it to an mp4 and then at some point want to make a physical DVD can I do that? How do I do that? Is there a preferred file that is faster than mp4? I just used that because I know I can always put it on my Ipod if I wanted to take it with me?

VOB Passthrough is much faster than conversion (any other option) but takes much more space and would not work on your Ipod.

Could you convert the MP4 back to a DVD format? yes.
Using DVDFab? No.
Will the quality look very good? No (double conversion).

If you can create an MP4 and the video quality is good enough for you watching it on your Ipod and WD TV then I wouldn't bother with Blu-Ray.

[bburwell]

Impressed

I must say the DVDFab is pretty awsome.. So far there are only 2 movies it has had trouble with. Schindlers list and insomnia. Schindlers list errors out at around 80% and insomnia wont get past the initial loading screen before you get to select locaitons and such.

But overall yes nice program and I will be purchasing here very soon.


Anyone know if there is a way to add a index of about the movie from the IMDB ? Kinda like they do on the escients ?

Thanks.. Brian

[GregiBoy]

If you are using an AVI profile, you can use ABCavi Tag Editor (google it) to tag each file with info such as genre, actor, director, date and even a sysnopsis and export at any time to an Excel spreadsheets and also other formats.

[GregiBoy]

I would also not recommend ripping from multiple optical drives. Please see my DVD to Mobile: Best Practices in the Knowledgebase

[GregiBoy]

I also suggest that you try the Samsung TV profile in the "New Profiles" thread as this gives me great results on my TV which plays the files directly.