transcode360 is free and requires no user intervention. What more could you want?

This was actually something I was doing over the christmas break myself.

The steps I followed were:

First I used DVD Shrink to rip just the main titles from the DVD into a temporary directory.

Here came the issues, some of the discs had self contained episodes which were usually split into two vob files. I used JoinVobFiles to join them into a single vob.

However, some of the discs didn't have individual episodes so episodes sometimes ran over into vob files that contained other episodes. To get around this I again used JoinVobFiles and joined them all into a vob that contained the entire series.

I used another directory to save all the joined files to (wouldn't want to stuff up and have to re-rip).

To convert all the vobs to .avi's, I used a great little freeware app called MCEBuddy. This is an awesome little application that will convert any video file (with an extension you nominate) into an .avi container using a variety of formats. I personally use the h.264 profile as it reduces a 1.4gb vob to around 275mb.

It's all automatic so I pointed it to the directory, selected an output directory and file extension and hit go. I left it running overnight and woke to find a whole pile of freshly minted .avi files (the beauty of a quad core I suppose).

Once that was complete I moved the individual episodes into my Videos folder, but I still had to cut the episodes out of the series vobs (stupid red dwarf).

To do that I used Ultra Video Splitter, which is unfortunately a paid product (i think it was around $9.90US), but it worked pretty well in cutting out the individual episodes from the series vob.

So, it was fairly easy to do, and most of it was automated and if you are lucky enough to have tv episodes stored individually on the dvd it's even free (and even less time consuming).

As a side note, I should mention that MCEBuddy was originally designed for DVR-MS files, a job which it does brilliantly, so you can use it on your TV recordings. It will also automatically take out ads if you ask it too (using either comskip or showanalyzer) so if you have a good ad skipping config you could try that function.

This all seems like WAY too much effort just for shows you are going to delete.  Why not just rip them as DVD's.... and when your done watching the 4 episodes on the disc.. delete the whole disk......  Am I missing something?

Some people don't delete them. I like to keep my TV episodes organised, and with episode information using myTV rather than storing them as DVDs. It also uses around 1/6th of the storage space.

It's not really that much effort, if they are stored correctly on the DVD, but even then it only takes about 15 minutes of actual work, the rest is just set and forget encoding.

I wouldn't do it for rubbish shows, but there are some classic series that you just want to keep.

I completely agree with you, some people dont.. but the person who started this post and asked the question says he WILL delete them.  It seems counterproductive to spend all that time breaking them up by episode to save time later if he is only watching it once.

alanroy2:

TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 does it all for you as you described (as long as you have AnyDVD)

Yes, its not so cheap ($100) but is soooo good. It will also take advantage of your dual core and let you convert two DVDs at the same time.

Have a stab with the trial version, I have been using it after trying all manner of free solutions and I would never go back.

I have tried this with movies in the past, I could never get anything that wasn't slightly jerky.  It is a very complex and powerful program with lots of different things to tweak.  On my machines it takes forever to encode.  Do you have a settings file that you'd be willing to share?

Edit: I should add that Iwas trying to convert to wmv.

dlawson12:

This all seems like WAY too much effort just for shows you are going to delete.  Why not just rip them as DVD's.... and when your done watching the 4 episodes on the disc.. delete the whole disk......  Am I missing something?

Well, since MCE will not stream DVDs to an extender and as far as I am aware you cannot stream vobs either. 

Are all of you that are pushing Transcode360; are you saying to just rip to vobs and play them that way using it?  If you are saying to encode them to DivX or Xvid, I rather not have to go through that process as I am sure the encoding is processor intensive.  On a side not though, I think you can now (with the last update) stream these formats to the 360 without Transcode 360.  Haven't verified it for myself yet.  My contention is that going from Vob to MPEG or DVR-MS is just a file conversion, there is really no video compression going on. Because of this, the conversion is very fast and the quality is as good as the original.  If try to go to DivX, Xvid or WMV you are converting from an MPEG2 to an MPEG4 which requires alot of compression (=>processing time <video quality).

As an update:  I think the problems I was having with my original VideoReDo method are source related.  I tried playing the ripped VOBs through VideoReDo and they looked jerky there.  It plays fine in the DVD player so who knows.  I tried my conversion process on another disk from another TV show and it seemed to work flawlessly with it.  Not sure why there was a problem with the first one.  Maybe there is a setting in DVD decrypter that I need to change for that particular DVD.  Maybe I should try ripping with DVDshrink.

In your original post... you said nothing about an extender, you only said you wanted to play them back on your media center pc and delete them when your finished.  If you had said you wanted to play them on your extender I would not have given that advice.  dvr-ms or wmv are the best options for your situation if your using a 360.  Transcode 360 WOULD work as well with my original solution of just ripping the DVD's... transcode 360 will stream dvd vob format I believe.

transcode 360 has been mentioned, and ignored like 10 times already in this thread

Sorry I failed to mention the 360 it in the first post but I thought I mentioned it a few posts after that.

I am not ignoring transcode 360, I made mention of it in my last post.  I am just apprehensive of having a service running in the background on my MCE PC.  It is slow enough to respond at times already.  I have tried very hard to keep it a clean install.  Since the Vobs are already MPEG2 I'd rather do a simple conversion on another PC and transfer the files over.  I could see the need if I already had a collection of DivX files that I wanted to play.  Again I was unaware that it would stream Vobs.  Would I just rip the contents of the DVD to a folder and it would see it just as if it was placed in a DVD drive?

hellerbrewing:

Are all of you that are pushing Transcode360; are you saying to just rip to vobs and play them that way using it?

That's what I do, and it works with my extenders. I don't know anything about the xbox 360, though.

transcode360 just does a video conversion on the fly, and rather then writing to disk, it streams the new file to the 360 in a format it can handle

if you have no intentions of ever keeping the files afterwards, I have no idea why you wouldn't just do it this way