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DVD Conversion

sdrawkcaB emaNsdrawkcaB emaN regular
edited March 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
So I ripped some DVDs (I own them, but I want to take them on the campaign trail with me), but this .VOB file format is ridiculously huge, and I want to convert to .mpg or .avi or .something that isn't so damn enormous.

What (free) program for Mac would do this for me?

sdrawkcaB emaN on

Posts

  • UnknownUnknown
    edited March 2008
    This content has been removed.

  • sdrawkcaB emaNsdrawkcaB emaN regular
    edited March 2008
    mcdermott wrote: »
    I recommend Handbrake or FFmpegX. The former is freeware, the latter is (IIRC) donationware. Either should do the job splendidly, I use Handbrake.

    Handbrake works great, thanks

    sdrawkcaB emaN on
  • CrashtardCrashtard Registered User regular
    edited March 2008
    I don't know what device you want to play them on, but I had a zune and used ImTOO DVD to Zune ripper to rip from dvd straight to wmv format. It worked great and the files were 400MB-ish in size. They also have a ripper for ipods and the like.

    Crashtard on
    Robert Khoo wrote: »
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited March 2008
    This content has been removed.

  • CrashtardCrashtard Registered User regular
    edited March 2008
    I just picked up an ipod video, and this sounds like what I'm looking for. What formats does the ipod support for video? Just quicktime and m4v, or can I put mpeg4 and avi's on it too?

    Crashtard on
    Robert Khoo wrote: »
    I pinky swear that we will not screw you.

    Crashtard.jpg
  • UnknownUnknown
    edited March 2008
    This content has been removed.

  • CrashtardCrashtard Registered User regular
    edited March 2008
    mcdermott wrote: »
    Crashtard wrote: »
    I just picked up an ipod video, and this sounds like what I'm looking for. What formats does the ipod support for video? Just quicktime and m4v, or can I put mpeg4 and avi's on it too?

    Pretty much just the Quicktime containers: .m4v, .mp4 (from what I understand, these are exactly the same), and .mov. That's the container; for the codecs, I believe it supports either MPEG4 or h.264 (baseline), and the max bitrate and resolution for each is different. For audio, I think it has to be AAC (low complexity).

    Generally you're best just going with a program that has an iPod preset (like either Handbrake or FFmpegX, among others). From what I hear, they're somewhat finicky. If you have video in other formats (like .avi) then something like FFmpegX will convert between formats as well (it basically will convert anything into anything else...it's pretty handy). The biggest issue you'll run into is that a lot of people seem to like stuffing VBR audio into .avi containers, which isn't (IIRC) technically standard. Seems like I remember that sometimes causing issues when I tried to transcode.

    On a Windows machine, I don't really know what your best option is for transcoding. Handbrake does the job fine from DVD, but I really haven't found a replacement for FFmpegX on Windows.


    Thanks for the info. I'm going to download handbrake and give it a try tonight.

    Crashtard on
    Robert Khoo wrote: »
    I pinky swear that we will not screw you.

    Crashtard.jpg
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