I have my high school football games on DVD and I wanted to put them on my Media Center. Since the video stream for DVDs is MPEG2 and the audio stream for these DVDs were ac3, I should be able to compress them nicely with a newer codec. The tool I use is open source and is called MEncoder. It can be found here.
MEncoder is a very advanced and complicated tool. This is by no means a complete guide on using it, but I hope to point you in the right direction. The documentation is on its website. Basically, you need to tell MEncoder to read the DVD title “DVD://1″ (it knows how to figure out stream information based on that), then tell it what kind of output you want. The output is specified by “-oac” for the audio and “-ovc” for the video. The file format can be specified with “-of”, though MPEG and AVI are currently only supported (other types are possible, but are experimental). Finally, tell it where to output it using “-o”. So, for example, I’m going to encode the first title of the DVD to an AVI file using an XVid video stream and the ac3 audio stream. The DVD is already using the ac3 audio stream so I’ll just copy it. There are some options that XVid requires. Specifying the bitrate will satisfy those requirements. Here’s what we got:
mencoder.exe -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1800 -o "C:\output.avi" dvd://1
Left to right, that says to copy the audio stream (whatever it may be), encode the video stream to XVid using a bitrate of “1800″, output to “C:\output.avi”, and the input is the first title on the DVD. Note: Maybe you have the “VIDEO_TS” file structure on your machine, or wish to use a non-default DVD drive. Specify the location with “-dvd-device”.
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