Hey,
I'm quite good at audio editing but completely clueless when it comes to video.
I recently started collecting videos (you may find my requests for Italy '65 stuff), but I'd like to have separate clips of the things I'm interested in, not a whole DVD full of stuff.
I know there's many ways of extracting the clips, but I'm not sure which is the best one in terms of quality and ease-of-use.
Also, I assume the best format is mp4, right?
Thanks and cheers,
Nick
Ps: I am on Mac.
DVDs to multi Mp4s
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Le petit prince
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Re: DVDs to multi Mp4s
It's important to understand the difference between container on the one hand and audio / video codec on the other: MPEG4 is a container format that can contain a number of different audio and video streams, which themselves can be encoded by a variety of codecs. If you want an analogy, think of the container as a box that typically contains a film roll (= the video stream) and one or multiple audio reel tapes (= the audio streams) and maybe transcription sheets (= the subtitles).
The relevance for your question on the "best format" is: It's the codec, not the container, that defines the acoustic and visual quality of the reproduction. So "MP4" is certainly not the "best format" in terms of quality, because such a statement would lack the information what streams by which encoder it contains, in other words the relevant information for a statement on quality. As far as the ease-of-use is concerned, MPEG4 containers have certainly the widest support by standalone devices, Matroska has fewer restrictions / more features on what you can multiplex (the process of integrating streams into a container is called "multiplexing").
Generally speaking, the "best format" in terms of quality will always be to preserve the streams of your source in their original formats by avoiding any steps of re-encoding or transcoding. Most a/v containers can be cut losslessly at key frames, e.g. by free, open source tools like FFmpeg. If you're not used to your Mac's bash or zsh shell, a decent GUI wrapper for FFmpeg designed for exactly that purpose is LosslessCut, available not only on Linux and Windows, but also for macOS.
The relevance for your question on the "best format" is: It's the codec, not the container, that defines the acoustic and visual quality of the reproduction. So "MP4" is certainly not the "best format" in terms of quality, because such a statement would lack the information what streams by which encoder it contains, in other words the relevant information for a statement on quality. As far as the ease-of-use is concerned, MPEG4 containers have certainly the widest support by standalone devices, Matroska has fewer restrictions / more features on what you can multiplex (the process of integrating streams into a container is called "multiplexing").
Generally speaking, the "best format" in terms of quality will always be to preserve the streams of your source in their original formats by avoiding any steps of re-encoding or transcoding. Most a/v containers can be cut losslessly at key frames, e.g. by free, open source tools like FFmpeg. If you're not used to your Mac's bash or zsh shell, a decent GUI wrapper for FFmpeg designed for exactly that purpose is LosslessCut, available not only on Linux and Windows, but also for macOS.
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Le petit prince
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Re: DVDs to multi Mp4s
You're welcome. 
Just one more thing: While an understanding of how GitHub works as a platform is certainly valuable knowledge, all you need to know for just downloading a GitHub-hosted project's application is that you'll find its published, downloadable binaries under "releases" in the right navigation area (provided the project community has released binaries):
As far as macOS is concerned, the LosslessCut project publishes its releases as a DMG image and, alternatively, as a PKG installer (I will not deeplink them here because they'll soon be outdated, once the project releases a newer version).
Just one more thing: While an understanding of how GitHub works as a platform is certainly valuable knowledge, all you need to know for just downloading a GitHub-hosted project's application is that you'll find its published, downloadable binaries under "releases" in the right navigation area (provided the project community has released binaries):
As far as macOS is concerned, the LosslessCut project publishes its releases as a DMG image and, alternatively, as a PKG installer (I will not deeplink them here because they'll soon be outdated, once the project releases a newer version).
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Lord Reith
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