Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

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journeyman
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

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Thank you so much for you wisdom and your response, much appreciated. I have a few dvdr's which contain some small clips that were copied from vhs, these could probably do with some tweaking, using the crop tool - this I would do by using the 'convert' method (instead of copy) but do I need to adjust anything else to maintain the highest quality, or limit the degradation in quality that converting would bring about - or do I leave well alone on the other settings? Thank you :-)
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Lord Reith
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

Post by Lord Reith »

journeyman wrote: Wed Oct 27, 2021 9:29 am Thank you so much for you wisdom and your response, much appreciated. I have a few dvdr's which contain some small clips that were copied from vhs, these could probably do with some tweaking, using the crop tool - this I would do by using the 'convert' method (instead of copy) but do I need to adjust anything else to maintain the highest quality, or limit the degradation in quality that converting would bring about - or do I leave well alone on the other settings? Thank you :-)
To avoid all the usual mistakes people make it's probably better to use matroska but change the codec to MPEG-2 and check "Display Mode" is set to either INTERLACED TFF or INTERLACED BFF (usually the former in 90% of cases). You can deinterlace but most people make a hash of this if they are not expert in video. Use a constant bitrate of at least 4000 for best quality.
journeyman
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

Post by journeyman »

Thank you so much for your expertise.... The program keeps crashing at the moment, so I'm going to re-install it and then get practising using your recommendations :-) I appreciate your knowledge , thank you ...
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Lord Reith
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

Post by Lord Reith »

You can also have MPEG-2 in an mpeg container with .mpg extension if your tv can't load mkvs. I have even seen it wrapped in an mp4 container but I'm not sure how compatible this is.
journeyman
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

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Thanks LR, been having a little try using your expertise. MKV works fine for my TV, although haven't watched them back yet. Have noticed if I use 'convert' mode the files size is half the size, so that may have an impact on the quality I guess. Mind you, with my ageing eyesight who knows ;-)
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Lord Reith
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

Post by Lord Reith »

journeyman wrote: Thu Oct 28, 2021 10:31 pm Thanks LR, been having a little try using your expertise. MKV works fine for my TV, although haven't watched them back yet. Have noticed if I use 'convert' mode the files size is half the size, so that may have an impact on the quality I guess. Mind you, with my ageing eyesight who knows ;-)
The file size depends on the bitrate which also directly affects the quality. For MPEG-2 anything below 4000 is useless. If you use the "average bitrate" setting instead of "constant bitrate" though, you can set the lower limit to 2000, the average to 4000 and the upper limit to 8000. This will use more bitrate on scenes which require it, and less on those that don't.
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Re: Advice for ripping unbootlegged Beatleg DVDs to digital

Post by journeyman »

Thank you for that, I'll definitely give that a go :-)
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