My 70 Gigabyte Mahler job

Today I completed my Gustav Mahler 11 Symphonies ripping job, requiring almost 70 GB free space from my ripping workstation. Not mentioning of two 3GHz CPU-s, running hot at 99% performance level.

Matherial

I have bunch of DVD-s in my posession. All Gustav Mahler's symphonies fom 1 to 10, plus Das Lied von der Erde. All DVD-s had:

• Video: MPEG-2 / 720x480 (NTSC) / 4:3;
• Audio: DTS audio + PCM stereo audio 48KHz 16bit

Original recording was done in stereo and DTS was artificially generated later.

What I did

I copied the contents of DVD-s to my workstation's HDD, using DVD Decrypter. Decrypting happened at the speed 7x - 10x, depending other simultaneous tasks. Then I converted original MPEG 2 video to much more efficient format MPEG 4 in AutoGK. It took about 1:1, eg 20 frames per second.

Result

I have now Gustav Mahlers 11 symphonies in MPEG 4 compression with hi quality PCM stereo sound.

Mpeg 4

Today I ripped The Matrix again and converted it into Mpeg 4 AVI (Xvid). My Matrix DVD is NTSC 16:9 format with english AC3 sound. In that case my particular workflow was:

DVD Decrypter ver 3.5.4.0 Read more
AutoGK ver 2.40 Read more and download

My main objective is to save some disk space, keeping high audio and picture quality. Also, my current media renderer D-link DSM-320 hangs playing huge VOB files. So, basicalyy I'm searching the way to playable.

First DVD Decrypter phase copies the raw content of DVD to HDD, removing copy protection. AutoGK phase converts number of 1 GB VOB files to one AVI file.

Size matters

VOB form: 5 GB (main movie + AC3 Dolby Digital 3+2/1 soundtrack only, 720 x 480)
AVI MPEG 4 1,86 GB (Target quality 100%, 720 x 304 resolution)

BitRate while playing: AVI 1954 Kbit/s; VOB 7600 Kbit/s (measured by DSM-320).

Viewing experience

First I looked video from my Dell Optiplex 20" Wide aspect monitor. I looked good.
Then I copied the AVI file to my Media Server and lloked it via D-Link DSM-320 media receiver on my Hitatchi 42" 1080HD plasma and Onkyo TX-L55 digital receiver. The result was disappointing. Sound was good -- as soundtrack is probably unaltered during compression, but image was unharp and had problems with moving objects and camera panning. Movements were jerky, not smooth. Soud was badly out of sync. Not recommended.

Next steps

Have to try other media renderers. May-be I have to build one, based on Intel SFF desktop PC?