DVD To MPEG4 Guide V1.12

I no longer maintain the DVD to MPEG4 guide as the information was getting very old. I recomend you visit http://www.clonead.co.uk/.

Index

Software Required
DVD Ripping
MPEG4 Encoding
Problem DVD's and Suggested Workarounds
Alternate Ripping/Encoding Method

News & Updates

5th December 2000

Software Required

The following software is required to be able to rip a DVD and convert it into MPEG4.

DVD Ripping

Run CladDVD and select the desired output directory and press the 'Decrypt Movie' button. It's as simple as that.

Make sure the 'MultiAngle' option stays ticked so that if any DVD's are ripped which contain multiple angles then the additional angles are skipped otherwise you will get strange effects!

The 'MultiRegion' option removes the region protection but only has an effect when the entire DVD is ripped and so is not of any use for our purpose.

The 'No Macro' removes the Macrovision information imbedded within the video stream and may be of use if you wish to do something else with the extracted files.

The 'Merge MM' option combines all the extracted VOB files into one large VOB file. This only works on NTFS (NT,Win2000) partitions because of the 4GB file limit on FAT partitions.

MPEG4 Encoding

  1. Open FlasK MPEG and open the first VOB file. It will automatically detect the subsequent VOB files and show a list of all the files it will process.

  2. If the DVD contains more than one audio track then a window will pop up as below asking which audio track you would like to convert. Audio tracks can be the main film soundtrack in various formats, other languages, directory commentary etc… In the vast majority of cases (all that I have seen) the English movie soundtracks are the first numerically (not necessarily the first listed so be careful!).

    FlasK MPEG supports the decoding of MPEG and Dolby Digital audio (not DTS). If the film is available with a Dolby Digital 2.0 (sometimes called Dolby Surround) audio track then convert that one as it has a much more suitable dynamic range. Dolby Digital 5.1 has a very large dynamic range so you have to turn the volume up quite high to hear the quiet sections and the louder sections are much louder (Even home cinema decoders have their default set to reduce the dynamic range slightly!).  If this is not available then you will have to use the Dolby Digital 5.1 track. If the large dynamic range bothers you then there are tools available to reduce the dynamic range.

    How do you know what audio format is which?
    You will have to proceed on until you start the decoding process at which point you can see how many audio tracks it contains.
  3. From the 'Options' menu select the output format to 'AVI Encoder'.
  4. From the 'Options' menu select 'Global project options'.
  5. In the 'Video' tab set the 'iDCT Options' to 'MMX iDCT'. Next the detected movie framerate is shown and you have the option to change it. Before saying what settings I tend to use it helps if I explain what is done to the framerate when converting films to DVD.

    Films are shot at 23.975fps and that is the rate that they are played back at in the cinema. When films are being converted to the NTSC format for the USA it needs to be converted to 30fps. The way that this is done it to duplicate or interpolate every 4th frame therefore turning film into 29.97fps which is close enough to the 30fps NTSC standard. When films are being converted to the PAL format for the UK it needs to be converted to 25fps. The way that this is done is that the film is actually played at 25fps and the tone of the audio track is compensated for the higher playback speed. This is the reason why UK released of films are sometimes stated as being shorter than the USA even though the content is identical!
    When converting NTSC R1 DVD's I normally set the frame rate to 23.976fps and turn on the 'Reconstruct progressive images' option. Without this option set you can often see jagged lines at the edges of objects which are moving horizontally on the screen. Some people say that you should set the frame rate to 29.97fps but I have found that the very slight loss you get with using the slower framerate is much more than compensated by being able to use a higher quality value on the compression setting.
    When converting PAL R2 DVD's I normally set the frame rate to 25fps as I have always found that this is the rate detected by the software and the one which looks the best. Don't use 23.976 as the frame rate because if you do you will notice a judder on the screen every couple of seconds because of the 2 dropped frames (you can't drop a single frame if the source is interlaced).
    If when viewing the encoding while it is in progress you notice that you can see jagged lines on the horizontal moving objects then you will need to turn on the 'de-interlace video' option although this will make the encoding take about 50% longer. Whenever I have had to use this option I have also noticed that the source format alternates between 'progressive' and 'interlaced' so look out for this.
  6. In the 'Audio' tab select the 'Decode Audio' option and keep the 'same as input' option checked.

  7. In the 'Post Processing' section set 'Nearest Neighbour' as the resizing option.

  8. In the 'File' section type in the directory/filename you wish to have (note no extensions like .AVI or .ac3 are needed as it is added automatically).

  9. Click on the 'Show Output Pad' button to bring up the following panel.

    From here you can crop the black bars off the top and bottom of the source film if it has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 or 1.85:1. Click the 'Reset settings' button to reset everything and then check the 'Crop' box. Next reduce the height in the crop area to 416 of the film is 1.85:1 or 320 if it is 2.35:1. Then use the 'Top offset' and the 'Height' within the Output Size area to adjust the preview such that the entire picture just about fits on the screen. Click the 'Hide' button and then the 'OK' button.
  10. Next from the 'Options' menu choose 'Output Format Options'.

  11. Press the button to select the video codec and choose the 'DivX ;-) MPEG-4 Fast-Motion' codec. The low motion version is not adaptive bitrate and in order to cope with the fast motion scenes the bitrate would have to be set at over 1000bps and therefore it is never worth using it.

    Now is a good time to run up a bitrate calculator to see what the maximum bitrate can be. Because the codec is adaptive you can never guess accurately what the average bitrate will be at the end of the film. In time you will get a feel for what to use. Generally for 2.35:1 films a common average bitrate is between 550 and 750. For 1.85:1 the average is about 100 higher. Therefore if you have a 1.85:1 film which because of it's length you need the bitrate to be less than 700 you may wish to initially reduce the target bitrate from the default 910 to about 750. You will need to encode at least 25% of the film to get a good idea of the average bitrate as often it varies throughout the film.

    When you have decided what bitrate to use click on the 'Configure' button and select the desired bitrate. Keep the other settings the same. Press 'OK' on the two windows.
  12. Press the button to select the audio codec and choose 'MPEG Layer-3' as the format and '96 Kbit/s, 48KHz Stereo 11kb/s' as the attributes. Click 'OK' on the two windows.
  13. From the 'Run' menu choose 'Start conversion' and the following box will appear together with a preview of what is being converted.

    This shows the format of the file being converted and the average bitrate so far. Note that the 'Remaining Time' indicator does not work correctly. It starts reporting incorrect values at between 25-33% into the conversion and at 50% onwards it reports '00:00:00'.
  14. You should now have a converted film. Check it plays correctly in Media Player 7. If Media Player crashes or thrashes the disk for a while and then reports the file is not in a supported format then perhaps FlasK MPEG went wrong which unfortunately it does occasionally. Quit FlasK MPEG and run it up again and re-encode the film and try to leave it alone (perhaps leave it running overnight). 
  15. If the AVI file is slightly too large to fit on a CD then you can use the VirtualDub software to chop the credits off the end of the film but this software only works in Win98.

Alternate Ripping/Encoding Method

When I tried extracting some films in the normal manner upon playing back I found that at either the beginning or end of the film some sections seemed to repeat themselves. Upon further inspection I realised that they were infact separate languages. In order to cure this problem I used CladDVD to extract the files directly and then used the 'Open DVD' feature of Flask MPEG to open and compress the correct frames of the film. Here is a procedure to do what I did. In light of me seeing more and more films which do this and the minimal additional time it takes to extract the extra files I now recommend that it be done this way.

Use CladDVD and turn off the 'MultiAngle' tickbox as it is not compatible with the 'Open DVD' feature of FlasK as FlasK will do this anyway.
Select all the VOB files and the corresponding .IFO for the main group of VOB files which will be the main movie. You may see groups starting with VTS_01, VTS_02, VTS_03 etc.. but just extract the group with the largest size. Then press the 'DeCrypt Files' button as shown below.
zorro01.jpg (27751 bytes)

NOTE that on my Windows2000 machine CladDVD 1.65 would not save the .IFO file. I had to run version 1.64 to save this particular file.

Next run FlasK MPEG and choose the 'Open DVD' option from the 'File' menu and the following box will appear.
zorro02.jpg (18773 bytes)
Choose the .IFO file and the following box will appear.
zorro03.jpg (19063 bytes)
The section 'DVD Audio Tracks' is basically similar to before where you have to select the audio track to convert except this time it presents it in a different way.
The 'DVD titles' section enables you to select the angle that you wish to convert. I have always chosen 'angle 0' without any problems.

Now convert the film as per normal.

>>Problem DVD's and Suggested Workarounds