Hey all, been having some things I'm not too sure about regarding converting DVDs to WMV; mainly my train of thought here, so I was just wondering if I could get a second opinion (although more would be welcome
). (There's kind of 2 questions here, hope that's OK.)
Firstly, why WMV? Basically, I have a Zune 80, and would like to do a few things:
- Watch stuff on it.
- Watch stuff on my Laptop.
- Do both of those without having two copies of the same thing.
My reasoning behind ripping to WMV is basically if I have a copy of something in relative high quality, I can watch that on my Laptop, and have it sync across to my Zune without needing to reconvert, so I can save on HD space. However, this also means that the high quality file gets synced to the Zune, which eats up space on that; I'm somewhat OK with this, since I don't have a lot of things on there anyway. Also, WMV means I can use programs to edit the Metadata show it shows up properly under TV Shows/Movies, etc. on the Zune.
First Question: Does this make sense, or should I be doing something less silly?
I'm having also trouble actually converting the thing to WMV, and having it look good.
I'm trying to get Band of Brothers done, and ripped the VOB for Parts 1 and 2 off the DVD using DVD Decrypter. Problem is, it has 6 channel sound, which doesn't play too well with the Zune (has to reconvert upon sync, I hear).
I've tried using MediaCoder to convert the VOB into WMV, also converting the audio to 2 channel, but it just fails every time saying something's wrong with the encoder, even with all kinds of different settings, so I've given up on that.
I've tried SUPER, which also failed miserably (and the interface was horrible, but I could overlook that if it worked.)
I've tried Encode360, which kinda-sorta works. On Constant Bitrate (1-Pass), with a Bitrate of 1100, it converts fine, but any movement looks really bad (basically any of the combat scenes have what looks like horizontal lines at the edges of things - is this called tearing?). With Quality-Based VBR (1-Pass), it still has this issue, at 95% of the quality of the original (resulting in large file sizes, too - about 1 GB for almost 1 hour of video). These two options are the only ones which'll let me downmix the audio to Stereo.
On the setting recommended on the program's forums, Bitrate-based VBR, I CANNOT set the option to downmix, because apparently this will just end up failing. Even without the option, the program seems to start to do something, but just ends up sitting on "Pre-processing (No-Preview)" for ages, while CPU usage is high. Searching for this on their forum doesn't turn up anything either.
Second Question: For lack of a better way of phrasing this, what should I do?
TL;DR: I'm having issues converting a DVD for playback on Laptop/Zune. Any suggestions?
Posts
Here's a good tutorial on how do rip DVDs to mp4s.