[Help] DVD To H264

Okay I've been asking around on other forums, but I cant understand why others don't have an answer for me. I'm looking to convert VIDEO_TS folders of dvdrips to h264 movie files. I know of 2 ways so far that this is done on OSX, Handbrake and FFMpegX. Actually either FFMpegX is not working or it's too complicated for me. I tried with Handbrake do convert SinCity to H264 at 100% quality and the result came out to be an unplayable 16GB!! file that took a staggering 21 hours to encode. Later on i read that there might be problems with Handbrake and encoding at 100% quality.

I used to do conversions like this on my PC with AutoGK, only i would convert to Xvid. I want to move on to the future format and am looking for a solution on OSX. The encoding time doesnt bother me all that much, i just want an easy and reliable way to do this. Can anyone help out?

#336983

Perhaps try VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ not sure if it has excactly what you need but certainly try it, it has a whole bunch of encoders, including H264.

#336994

maybe this would help

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ipod.html

#337051

you should get mac the ripper, rip one of your own dvd's to you mac hd then drag and drop the video_ts file into FFMpegX and change it to whatever format, i you get stuck install FFMpegX there is a guide on the website, i think this is the easiest way to do it.

#337092

Hey.... if you tried AutoGK... you might wanna give a try at Gordian Knot.. big brother of AutoGK... which supports encoding in x264 codec. Offcourse it's not H.264, but quite euqivalant on Windows platform.

Anyways, if you want to convert them to play on your iPod.. then sorry, bro. I suppose that's all I can be help of...

#337110

No no, i got the whole ipod deal down. Yea i also have a video iPod, and i got the software FortyTwoDVDx. Yea i know you may not have heard of it, but it is incredibly easy to encode for ipod with it, there is a separate ipod option in it.

What i want is to put my DVDs onto the Xbox harddrive. I used to do this with AutoGK on the PC when i encoded to Xvid. But now i wanna do the same thing on OSX with H264. I guess i'll give FFMpegX another try though.

#337122

Handbrake really is good, but H264 takes a while to encode compared to other formats.

Also, 100% quality is not the way forward, I encode mine at constant 1024kbps and the resulting feature movies weigh in at around 1GB with no discernible quality loss.

#337149

cant quicktime pro rip a dvd to h264?

#337151

I have heard this quicktime pro implication before. Can someone please confirm this. I have quicktime pro and it doesnt open a dvd disc or a ripped VIDEO_TS folder.

#337194

No. Quicktime cannot open VIDEO_TS folders. The only Mac program that can is DVD Player, and that can't encode out to other formats.

#337200

Thats pretty dumb that QuickTime can't open DVDs. With it's HD decoding, you'd think Apple would want to emphasize that.

#337250

I don't think Apple would really want their media player to be able to rip and reencode DVDs do you realize how much hell they'd get into?

#337251

QuickTime can open DVD files with separate plugin from Apple for MPEG-2 playback (at least what I've heard), which unfortunately is payware.

#337254

I don't think Apple would really want their media player to be able to rip and reencode DVDs do you realize how much hell they'd get into?

Edit:// Oh, wait... would decoding H264 be considered as re-encoding them?

#337259

the new version of ffmpegx is out, i'll give that a try to see if everything is working

#337280

what about 3ivx?

#337734

Handbrake works like a dream.. I don't know what you guys are talking about.

#346517

Hey.... if you tried AutoGK... you might wanna give a try at Gordian Knot.. big brother of AutoGK... which supports encoding in x264 codec. Offcourse it's not H.264, but quite euqivalant on Windows platform.

Anyways, if you want to convert them to play on your iPod.. then sorry, bro. I suppose that's all I can be help of...

Seeing as this is in the Mac OS section I don't think AutoGK or GordianKnot proper will actually help here.

x264 is h.264- or an implementation of it in the same way the QT h.264 is an implementation of the h.264 standard.

ATM I still would take a well encoded XviD over anything H.264. The codecs are just not that mature at this point in time, where as XviD has had a lot of tweaking.

#346556

Yes Aleph... I did not notice that when I posted that msg, but anyways..... was just trying to help!!

Besides, I would agree with you on XViD part... I would favour XViD (with MPEG quantization) anytime over H.264 / x264... cause it offers really good quality when set properly and it has lot of settings to tweak !!

Offcourse, when H264 quantization becomes common and offers better speed in encoding, things might look different... I suppose it would be a matter of time XViD starts supporting H.264 quantization natively !!

#346764