New PC advice for DVD ripping

[Sky West]

Hello,

I've been ripping DVDs for the past three years using this PC spec:

Intel i7-4770 CPU 3.40 GHz with 8GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 625 graphics card.

This has been fine to rip standard quality MP4 files which played fine on my old TV. Unfortunately I bought a new TV at the end of last year and little by little I've noticed that a lot of my DVD files aren't displaying very well.

I've been doing some tests with various file formats and am now planning to re-rip all my DVDs as Mp4.H265 (or possibly MP4.H265 10 bit files).

In the tests I've done today, changing the ripping format to MP4.H265 and encoding at CRF 18, High Quality, it has an least doubled the time to takes to rip each file to around 30 - 50 minutes (from about 10 - 20 minutes when I was ripping "Standard quality" MP4 files using Fast 1 pass encoding.

As well as increasing the quality, I also want to try to keep the file sizes down as I already have a large DVD collection and it's likely to only get bigger as the years go by.

So my overall questions are:

1) Is there a significant quality difference between H265 and H265 10 bit files, and is there another file type I should consider instead? (I know it will depend on the quality of the DVD image to begin with but a large proportion of my films/TV programmes are older so I'm not particularly looking for perfect HD quality as the source DVDs are 60s, 70s and 80s TV etc., although at the same time I'd like a balance as I do have some more visual remastered films, such as the Planet of the Apes series, which even if they're older, benefit from a better image quality).

2) If my budget for a new PC is around £1000, what are the priorities?

I'm guessing the obvious components are the processor, graphics card and memory but I'm not sure if any one of these is more important, or if spending a lot more on a very very fast processor will make much overall difference than spending quite a bit on a very fast processor.

So for example if I could have:

Processors:

a) AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Six Core CPU 3.6 GHz 19MB Cache
b) AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight Core CPU 3.0 GHz 20MB Cache
c) AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight Core CPU 3.4 GHz 20MB Cache
d) AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight Core CPU 3.6 GHz 20MB Cache

Would I notice much ripping speed difference between a) and d) as the price difference is £241 (as a side note, the DVDFab 10 user manual mentions that "You can configure your CPU cores to run for DVDFab, which can be set up
to 4 cores": http://download.dvdfab.cn/manual/dvd...ser-Manual.pdf - so does that mean that 6 or 8 cores are unnecessary apart from for future proofing?


Graphics Cards:

a) 4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050 Ti
b) 3GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060
c) 6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060

(Same question as for processors, this time a £72 difference)

Memory:

a) 16GB Corsair Vengance DDR4 2133MHz
b) 32GB Corsair Vengance DDR4 2133MHz

Same question again (price difference of £119)

And overall, is there anything else I should consider? I'm planning on getting a 256GB Samsung 850 EVO SATA 6Gb/s SSD drive for the ripping bit and then a larger HDD for general storage, so hopefully this will speed things up too as I currently only have a HDD in my PC.

Also just to clarify, I don't do any other processor intensive things. I'm sure it looks a bit like overkill to be considering spending so much money just to rip DVDs but I have a lot of DVDs and I've already spent a lot of time ripping them, so to spend the money and reduce the time to rip each one down to a manageable level feels like a price worth paying.

Many thanks in advance for any help that anyone can offer.

[martythebrit]

There comes a point when your spending a lot of money for a few extra seconds... I would go with an i7 CPU, 16GB's of ram and a GTX 1060 3GB, which will speed up the x265 encodes a lot.

I have and older i7-3770K, 16GB's of ram and a GTX 1060. My 1080p x265 movie encodes are in the 10-15 minute range.

Hope this helps...

[martythebrit]

Looking at your current spec, you might just want to upgrade your video card, that would give your x265 encodes a big boost, and save a bunch of money...

[Sky West]

Looking at your current spec, you might just want to upgrade your video card, that would give your x265 encodes a big boost, and save a bunch of money...

Thanks Marty, that's really good advice which I hadn't thought of before. It will also solve the issue of what to do with my old computer.

The only drawback is I now have the agony of realising that the GTX 1060 6GB was £80 cheaper last week on Amazon (and in stock).

I'm torn between paying the £80 and having it for my week off work next week or else putting a tracker on camelcamelcamel and hoping it comes down again fairly soon (although given we've just had prime day, I could be looking at a few months yet).

I'm also tempted to get another 8GB of memory, although I'll probably hold off to test how much of a boost the graphics card on its own gives me.

Finally, I need to work out whether I need to switch the PSU as it's only 300W and although the online calculator I tested told me I could get away with 302W, the specifications for the card tell me it's 350W minimum so I'd probably be chancing my arm (although don't particularly fancy messing around with too many components if I can avoid it).

Thanks again, it looks like you've saved me a lot of unnecessary cash.

[martythebrit]

I would upgrade the power supply so you have some headroom, I don't think that extra memory in the video card is going to help, unless your playing newer games. My 1060 has 3GB and the x265 encodes are blazing fast.

[Sky West]

I would upgrade the power supply so you have some headroom, I don't think that extra memory in the video card is going to help, unless your playing newer games. My 1060 has 3GB and the x265 encodes are blazing fast.

Thanks Marty, again you've set me on the right track. After a lot more looking/reading etc. this morning, I bit the bullet and went for a 3G 1060 card as I'm definitely going nowhere near games. I also bought a new PSU so hopefully I'll be able to figure it out how to fit it altogether in the next couple of days with the help of youtube/online articles (I had the case open this morning for the first time and managed to work out how to get the graphics card out so with a bit of luck and patience I should figure it out).

At the risk of asking too many questions, you've mentioned that you're ripping "1080p x265 movie encodes", is this from DVDs or Blu rays? I played about with the encoding settings for The Godfather (Coppola restoration) and apart from the 4K options which produce huge 4K files and the passthrough options which show as huge 720p files, every other option shows as 480p. Am I missing an option where you can upscale the files to 1080p without them becoming huge?

[martythebrit]

I haven't bought a DVD in years, everything I watch and convert is Blu-ray. Maybe someone else here can answer your question. I ripped Cast Away to my hard drive yesterday, the source file was around 40GB, the conversion to x265 took around 8 minutes and came out around 3GB.

The power supply is pretty straight forward, you'll have a large and small connector for your motherboard, a similar looking one for the video card, and the rest will be 4-pin molex for older hard drives and SATA plugs. If your really lucky you may even get a tiny floppy drive power connector!

[signals]

The native size of a NTSC DVD is 720x480, most players will automatically upscale it while playing to match your display. Upscaling during encoding costs you time and file size, letting the player upscale it is without penalty. Better to choose 720x4xx (xx=480, 408, etc.) for DVD conversions.

[Sky West]

Thanks both. Unfortunately since I last posted things haven't quite gone to plan. I tried to upgrade the PSU but in the process think I might have damaged the motherboard as it now will only switch on and off at the plug and the fan is going crazy while the monitor doesn't come out of stand by. On top of this, the new graphics card was too.wide for the space meaning that even.if I do manage to get it resurrected, I'd be limited with the types of graphics cards I could use.

All in all, it's many me realise that I've been wanting a laptop all these years so I'm going down that route, although now hoping to rip blu rays too as the 7700HQ processor has slightly better benchmark data than my current PC, and I'm still going for a GTX 1060 which is just about as powerful as the desktop version.

The only questions I now need to pin down are whether it's worth paying an extra £200 for the 1070 (with the thought that it would likely to be harder to swap as the general rule of thumb is it's harder to upgrade laptop graphics cards, and I'm not keen on thinking about more upgrading given my recent experience). Beyond the question of whether the blu ray ripping speed boost would be significant (I.e. 1 minute plus), is whether the 1070 would make it more likely that the laptop would heat up more than I'd like under load and start the fan going. The tests I've seen give a figure of 3 degrees and 20w power difference which don't sound all that much as numbers but could be the difference between cool and quiet and a lot of whirring which wouldn't be great.

Luckily I'm planning to order it on Monday so either way I'll stop asking so many questions and be able to stop reading and thinking so much about computer components.

Thanks again.