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So I have a bunch of family videos on DVD from the old jvc camcorder. I would guess they are mpeg2 dvd files. Since dvd's seem to be going extinct I would like to back them up to another format, probably hdd on the NAS I guess.

I'm just wondering what software will make this go quickly and keep quality equal or better and keep the file size within reason, say perhaps 1/2GB per hr of video or better if that's feasible?

File types? Something with good quality, something common that works almost anywhere/everywhere also good.

Thoughts?

They're already low-quality, so I'd not re-encode them. A DVD is only 4.7 or 9GB, not too big.

I'd remux to MKV, for example with this:
https://www.makemkv.com/

meerkt wrote:

They're already low-quality, so I'd not re-encode them. A DVD is only 4.7 or 9GB, not too big.

I'd remux to MKV, for example with this:
https://www.makemkv.com/

Thanks. I was looking at that. That saves as an mkv correct? I guess after that if I wanted mp4 or avi then pass it through handbrake?

Yeah, you could if your player doesn't understand MKVs for some reason. It's an open format so there's no real reason why it shouldn't unless it's super old. If I remember correctly Microsoft was one of the last holdouts, but they finally supported it out of the box under Win10.

If you want to end up with mp4s, then I'd probably just use handbrake from the start. The MPEG-4 container can contain MPEG-2 streams, so like meekt said you should still be able to just "convert" from one to the other without having to spend the time transcoding if you didn't want to. You're not going to lose quality if you do provided you don't pick a super low bit rate or something it'll just take longer.

If you mean remultiplex to MP4 or AVI, I've no idea if Handbrake can do that or it's only for transcoding.
But you can remux between MKV/MP4/others with Avidemux (GUI) or ffmpeg (CLI; can't suggest a GUI frontend).
There's no point in using AVI nowadays, I'm not even sure it can hold MPEG2.

If the source video is interlaced there may be benefit to doing hi-quality deinterlacing + transcoding, despite the generational loss of quality.
Interlaced is just a pain, and good quality playback is too dependent on the platform and player.

Handbrake has a whole mess of features for cleaning up interleaving and other analog broadcast/recording artifacts, if that's what you want to do.

Unless you have the source material (DV tape?) for the DVD, I would just backup the entire video_ts folder as your new "raw" and go from there. 4 gigabytes is nothing these days when we have 14 terabytes HDDs.

Heck, for a couple of DVDs that I have, I actually just rip the image and store that as the backup. So if I want to "play it old school" (with menus and stuff) I just need to mount it and play.

I just did one as a trial. Apparently some videos are in 480 and some 720, forgot to check if i or p.

MKV files from 1 full dvd was over 10GB!! A quick pass through handbrake at 1080p 30fps MP4 took about 50min and reduced size to ~600MB. Quality seemed ok, pc was an old 45nm Athlonx2 @3.1ghz.

I should see if handbrake can use the gpu to see if it can speed things up.

Looks like I have some reading to do on handbrake use and technical lingo.

As for storage I have a 2TB hdd and don't really want to buy more storage. I also bought an elgato video capture for all the vhs tapes. I think this may become a lifetime job

NTSC DVDs are always 720x480. They can be wide or not (16:9, 4:3 ratios) but that happens on playback, the actual stored images are the same resolution.

There's no point in encoding as 1080p. You're just extrapolating and adding pixels before encode. It increases your file size, or reduces quality for a given bitrate.

GPU-encoding may be lower quality.

MP4 is generally a container format, not a video format. The important thing is your codec. H264/AVC and H265/HEVC are the current common ones. Older hardware does not support H265 hardware-decoding, but on PC at least you can software-decode easily.

If it's going to be your only future copy, I think it's a shame to reencode to low bitrates and reduce quality. At least use high quality settings (which can still reduce the DVD's bitrate), like H264 with CRF 16 or lower.

Audio is generally not an issue, but stick with something decent like AAC at 128kbps for mono.

anotherengineer wrote:

I just did one as a trial. Apparently some videos are in 480 and some 720, forgot to check if i or p.

MKV files from 1 full dvd was over 10GB!! A quick pass through handbrake at 1080p 30fps MP4 took about 50min and reduced size to ~600MB. Quality seemed ok, pc was an old 45nm Athlonx2 @3.1ghz.

That does not make sense. Most homemade DVDs should be of the single layer variety: 4.7gigs max. Dual layer gives you 9.4 gigs. If you are "extracting" to over 10 gigs you may as well just store the video_ts folder.

anotherengineer wrote:

As for storage I have a 2TB hdd and don't really want to buy more storage.

As long as you are continuing to shoot more videos yourself, you will need more storage. I would say it is now a choice between how much quality you can live with vs biting the bullet and get an extra drive. You can easily get like 8TB for $140 or so if you go for those cheap externals.

As already stated, if you have the DVDs and they have been "finalized" (such that a standard/set top DVD player can read them), MakeMKV will mux (multiplex) the video and audio together inside an .mkv file as a single transport stream. DVD Video, the actual standard, uses MPEG-2 for video compression, and a properly authored DVD Video "stream" will consist of multiple .VOB files (I think the max size is 1 GB). MakeMKV doesn't compress the video or alter it in any way, it simply multiplexes the selected video and audio into a single transport stream inside the .mkv "container".

If you want some insight into your video/audio after you have used MakeMKV to create a file/stream, I recommend MediaArea's MediaInfo app, free here: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo. After you download and install it, launch it and choose the defaults. Then, you can navigate using File Explorer to the file you created with MakeMKV, right click, and open with Media Info. I choose the HTML layout for more info. You can then scroll down through the HTML output and see specifics about your video/audio (e.g., resolution, bitrate, progressive vs. interlaced, if interlaced, if it's top field or bottom field first, etc.).

As far as transcoding, I just finished up a ton of old VHS to DVD conversions using Handbrake. If you want specifics on settings, PM me, and I will be glad to help. But, essentially, I open Hand Brake, choose "File", point it to the .mkv I created after "ripping" the DVD, choose a save destination, use "loose" anamporphic, set the cropping to all 0s to preserve the aspect ratio, mp4 as the container, AVC as the codec, leave the decomb/deinterlace at their defaults, choose CRF (constant rate factor) of 20 to 18 (lower is HIGHER quality), do pass thru on the audio if it's AC3, and nuke any subtitles options, as it's home video and won't apply. I usually do "medium" on the presets/speed, choose "film" on the tune settings, and profile of "high" and "4.0".

I used MakeMKV on my standard DVDs as well. As Pagey mentioned, you get one, nice clean .mkv container file without re-encoding. MPEG2 might not be as efficient as newer codecs, but as mentioned, re-encoding is going to cause you to lose additional quality, and it's not like the space savings of a newer codec would be particularly meaningful (unless you're doing 1,000 of them).

If storage is a concern, just rip them with makemkv, then re-encode to x265 with a fairly high quality setting via Handbrake. You'll still end up with essentially DVD-quality videos but with much less space used (~30% or so for equivalent quality).