DVD GuideThe files of the DVD must be located on the hard drive. For legal reasons only undecrypted files are supported. In case subtitles should be included they have to be extracted from the VOB files. Download and start VSRip. Press 'Load IFO' and select the IFO file. Press 'Save To' and attach .idx to the suggested name. Press 'Next', select the proper PGC and press 'Next' again to start the demuxing process. The result should be a IDX file and a SUB file. Start StaxRip and load the DVD template found under 'File/Project Templates/DVD'. Open the destination directory with windows explorer. Select all VOB files in windows explorer and drag the files on StaxRip, alternatively you can open the files in StaxRip using 'Open Files'. StaxRip now launches DGIndex to process the VOB files. When DGIndex is done it should have created a D2V file and AC3 files and StaxRip should have loaded that files. At the bottom of the main dialog the assistant gives instructions that must be followed precisely. It displays what step must be taken next and warns if incompatible settings are used. Once DGIndex has finished the assistant instructs to open the crop dialog in order to crop borders if there are any. Open the crop dialog and check if StaxRip has detected all borders properly, correct the values if necessary and close the dialog. Click on 'Next' to see the next assistant instruction. The assistant reminds to verify the filter setup. The default filter setup has a enabled MPEG-2 source filter, a Crop filter and a resize filter. The deinterlace filter is disabled. Most DVB sources are interlaced. In order to find out if the source is interlaced uncheck the resize filter temporarily and open the preview (View/Preview (or press F5)). In the preview double-click somewhere for fullscreen and examine if the source is interlaced. If you don't know how a interlaced image looks visit www.100fps.com. Close the preview recheck the resize filter and check the deinterlace filter in case the source is interlaced. The next assistant reminder is cutting if necessary. This step can be skipped (click Next) unless only certain parts of the DVD should be encoded. If you want to encode only certain parts open the preview. How to cut is described in the help of the preview (press F1) and by the tooltips that appear when the mouse hovers over the buttons. Once cutting is done close the preview. In the main dialog the new length can now be seen. Before reading the next sections it's important to understand that multipass is not necessarily better than single pass in quality mode. Some codecs are tweaked better for multipass but the difference is as far as I know not huge. The assistant reminds to make a compressibility check. The compressibility check is for multipass encodes and multipass encodes are done hit a exact file size so since there is a fixed file size and a fixed movie length which result in a fixed bitrate the only left variable is the image size. The compressibility check helps to find a ideal image size for the targeted bitrate. Movies differ greatly in compressibility, a movie with a lot action like many explosions need a much higher bitrate for the same image size. A image size around 200000 pixel (e.g. 528x384) is a good compromise. A smaller image size requires a smaller bitrate which will result in a smaller file size but a smaller image size means of course also less quality. Another solution then aiming for a file size is aiming for constant quality. It can be achieved by setting up the codec to use single pass quality mode encoding at a fixed quantizer or a similar quality metric. StaxRip offers profiles for constant quality. Since movies have a different compressibility the resulting file size will always be different. Using single pass with constant quality is a good encoding method if you use your hard drive to archieve your movies. It's recommend to use the following codec settings: DivX in Quality Mode using quantizer 4 or XviD single pass using quantizer 3. This will produce similar results than multipass at 60-80% quality (100% quality is quantizer 2). This is very high compression and might require post processing while decoding. DivX has excellent post processing which is enabled by default as most MPEG-4 encodes use (and should use) high compression. The DivX decoder is also excellent to decode XviD. Not using post processing requires encoding with a lower quantizer or higher bitrate which means a bigger file size so it's recommend to stick to the values explained above. StaxRip supports the following container formats: AVIFor a single audio track it's recommended to use AVI. AVI has the best compatibility with existing software and hardware but don't support subtitles and can't display the name of a audio track. Supported audio formats are MP3 and AC3. MKVMKV is the container with the most features but unfornately it's not supported by standalone players (which is no problem if you have a HTPC). MP4MP4 is supported by many newer standalone players but unfornately it's not possible to use subtitles without much hassle. MP4 don't support Vorbis or AC3. DIVXDivX is supported by many newer standalone players. Vorbis and AAC are not supported. Select a container in the main menu and in case you've demuxed subtitles open the container configuration in the encoder menu and select the subtitles. It's important to know that in StaxRip the muxer (container) is part of the encoder so loading another encoder into the project loads also another muxer so always load the muxer after you've loaded the encoder. Once the assistant displays no more instructions or warnings you can start encoding by clicking 'Next'. |
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