DVD to HQ AVI Tutorial

Application Description:

· DVD Decrypter:

DVD Decrypter is a free tool which enables you decrypt and copy a DVD to your PC's hard disk. From there you can choose to watch them with the likes of PowerDVD and WinDVD or you can re-encode them to MPEG1 (VCD) or DivX. Advanced functionality can be found in the DVD Decrypter context menus.

· Gordian Knot:

Gordian Knot started out as a simple bitrate calculator for DivX encoding but has evolved to become an integrated package or tool for the entire process of DivX/XviD encoding.

· DGIndex (Within Gordian knot):

DGMPGDec DGIndex is an MPEG2 decoder suite. It is used to decode MPEG2 streams from such sources as DVD VOBs, captured transport streams, dvb/digital/hdtv streams, *.mpg/*.m2v/*.ts files, etc. Based on DVD2AVI and MPEG2Dec. Can also demultiplex to video and audio files.

· VFAPI Reader:

VFAPI Reader is a tool to create "dummy" AVIs from project files produced by DVD2AVI, AVIUtl or TMPGEnc.

· DelayCut:

Delaycut corrects delay and is also able to cut audio files coded ac3, dts, mpa and wav, It is also able to fix CRC errors in ac3 and mpa files. CLI support.

· VirtualDubMod

VirtualDubMod is a unification of several popular modifications of the famous video editing software VirtualDub. Unification of three projects, VirtualDubMPeg2, VirtualDubOGM, VirtualDubAVS and more.

Step 1: Ripping the DVD to your Hard Drive

First things first, create a new folder anywhere on your hard drive and label it the name of the movie you want to rip.

Insert the DVD into your DVD drive making sure that you stop and close whatever program you use to watch DVD’s.

Assuming DVD decrypter is installed, start her up.

DVD Decrypter will search for any CD/DVD drives on your PC and show them in a log. In some cases DD will alert you of the DVDs region and you will have to make a choice on which region you want to use. It really does not matter in which one you choose, but we will choose Region 1.

You will come to the main window of DD. Examine the image of the main window and follow the directions below to set up DD for ripping correctly.

1. Enter the “Mode” menu and select “IFO”.

2. Enter the “Edit” menu and select “Select main movie PCG”.

3. Choose the folder you created as the file destination.

4. Click “Decrypt”.

All you have to do now is sit back, relax and wait for the DVD to be ripped. After the DVD has been ripped, you will no longer need the DVD for this tutorial.

Step 2: Extracting the Audio

This next step is as simple s the first one. Simply start up DGIndex (It can be found in the “Apps” section of “Gordian Knot” with-in the start menu/programs.).

Open the “File” menu and click “Open”. Navigate to the folder that was created for this rip and choose ALL the “.vob” files in the folder and click “ok”. After that’s done you should have the following “File list” opened.

Make sure that all the files are in order. If everything is correct, click “OK”.

For the next part of this step, we will set up everything needed for the rest of the Audio Extraction.

Follow this easy guide to set up DGIndex for Audio Extraction.

*Video Menu*

iDCT Algorithm (Leave as is)

Field Operation (Forced Film)

YUV->RGB (TV Scale)

*Audio Menu*

Output Method (Demux All Tracks)

Track Number (Leave as is)

Dolby Digital Decode >Dynamic Range Control (Normal)

Dolby Digital Decode (Dolby Surround Downmix)

48->44.1 KHz (off)

*Options Menu*

Process Priority (High)

Playback Speed (Maximum)

Now that everything is set up, open the “File” menu and choose “Preview”.

The movie should start playing and DGIndex will open up a status window displaying the information it’s collecting.

Let the film run it’s course, which may take a while, depending on the film length & your PC. This is a good time to hang back and do what it is you do when not following tutorials.

As is quite apparent in the preview video, there is a huge aspect ratio problem in the source video. Why is it stretched like that? DGIndex is interpreting it as 16:9 widescreen, when in reality most movies are shot in a wider aspect ratio such as 2.35:1 or 1.85:1. This isn’t a problem, in fact we’ll capitalize on this later when we set up VirtualDubMod to encode.

Finally, select the “File” Menu And then “Save Project” to save your D2V file to the created folder. I like to name it something informative, like “NameOfMovie.d2v” but it’s completely up to you. Your AC3 file (or files, if you selected Demux All Tracks) will also be dumped in this directory.

Step 3: Fixing Delays in your AC3 Audio

Skip this step if your AC3 audio files say “Delay_0ms”.

Check out the filename of the AC3 file that DGIndex dumped out for you. If it states a delay (anything other than “DELAY 0ms”) we need to fix this delay to maintain the audio/video sync of our final movie file. Thanks to AC3 Delay Corrector, this is a fairly simple process.

Load up DelayCut. If the program crashes right away, you need to get a hold of the GfaWin32.ocx file and put it in the same directory as your DelayCut.

The rest is very simple and quick. Follow the image guide to complete the rest of the step.

1. Select the Main AC3 file for your film

2. The output folder will be the same as the input (Done Automatically)

3. Click “Process” wait for it to finish & your done.

You can do this to all the Audio tracks you want to add to your finished rip as long as they have a delay. This will sync all your sound to your video.

For now on you will use the “Fixed” AC3 file to add to your film.

When it’s finished writing it will dump a delay corrected AC3 file in the same directory with “_fix” appended to the filename.

Step 5: Removing Letterboxing And Correcting The Aspect Ratio

Here we will work with VDUBMOD to fix the aspect ratio, remove the letterbox and set up the XviD codec for excellent quality video encoding.

Let’s start by opening VirtualDubMod. Once open, open the avi file you just created in VDubMod by going to the “File” menu and choosing “ Open video file”.

Once open, go to the “Options” menu and choose “Vertical Display”.

This now gives you the choice of resizing the top video pane which we will do now. Resizing the video pane does not affect your video project in any way. We are setting up your workstation so that VDubMod is focused on the output video, not the input video since the output video is what you will end up with when as is said and done.

Right-click the top video pane and choose “25%”. This resizes the input video pane to 25% of the original.

Now right-click the bottom video pane and choose “ Reset to actual size”. This pane will change size when we do some cropping and resizing to better maximize the quality and to keep the ratio television friendly.

Time for some cropping.

First we must go to the “Video” menu and choose “Filters”.

Another window opens up. Click the “Add” button and choose “Null Transform”. Click “OK”.

Now click “Cropping”

Here you will remove the letterbox from the output file. This minimizes the encoding of unneeded parts of the movie.

What is letterboxing? If you’ve ever watched a widescreen movie you’ve seen it. Basically, it’s the use of those black bars above and below the image to show the movie correctly. Why don’t we want the movie to retain its letterboxing when we encode it? Well, there’s really no reason to keep it. Media players on computers can handle video files of any resolution, so why not make our movie a size that exactly fits the video data? Not only that, but if you include the black bars in the video file they’re going to be wasting some of our precious bitrate to store their information.

Scrub to a frame of your movie where the edges of the video are pretty well defined. Drag the tops and bottoms of the image down until they get pretty close to the edge of the image and then use the up and down arrows in the Y1 Offset and Y2 Offset boxes for pixel-perfect control.

Please make sure that all the numbers are even numbers as shown in the image guide below. It is better to cut off 1/16^th of an inch than to waste bitrate on unneeded stuff. After you are satisfied with the cropping, click “OK”.

Now we are back to the filter list, we are going to change the ratio of the film. Click the “Add” button in the filters window again and click the “Resize” filter. When you click OK you’ll be presented with an options dialog that let’s you set the new video size.

Now here’s where a little bit of math comes into play. To keep the highest resolution possible, we want to retain our 720 pixel width. We just want to “squash” the video into the correct aspect ratio.

What I have in the image above is what I use for certain Fullscreen movies. Yours may be different though.

Common Aspect Ratio	Real Aspect Ratio	Video Frame Size
2.35	2.35:1	720×306
1.85	1.85:1	720×390
16:9	1.78:1	720×404
4:3	1.33:1	640×480

Type in your new width and height values in their respective boxes on the resize filter options screen. Under filter mode I prefer Lanczos3 for the highest quality but feel free to choose something else if you like.

Do not check the Interlaced checkbox and especially do not check the Expand Frame And Letterbox Image checkbox, because that would undo all the work we’re doing right now.

Finally, click the “Show Preview” button. Scrub through your video and make sure that it looks right and that you chopped off all the necessary black bars earlier.

This is what our output video file will look like. If it looks good to you, close the preview window and click “OK” on the resize options screen to return to the filter list. Click “OK” to close the filter list.

Step 6: Setting up XviD’s First Pass

We need to set up VirtualDubMod to run two projects in batch processing mode. The first project it runs will be the first pass by the XviD encoder, which won’t actually output anything. Instead it will collect information about each frame to give you higher quality results when it actually encodes on the second pass.

Go to the “Video” menu and make sure that “Full Processing Mode” is selected. Next, go to the “Video” menu and select “Compression”. This will bring us to the screen that allows us to configure our encoder options. Select the “XviD MPEG-4 Codec” from the list on the left and click the “Configure” button.

Use the following settings:

Setting	Value
Profile @ Level	AS @ L5
Encoding Type	Twopass - 1st Pass

Click “Zone Options” and use the following settings.

Setting	Value
Start Frame #	0
Rate Control	Weight 0.00
Begin With Keyframe	Checked
Greyscale Encoding	Unchecked (unless your video isn’t in color)
Chroma Optimizer Enabled	Checked
BVOP Sensitivity	0

Click “OK”

Click the “More” button next to the “(User Defined) box and use the following settings.

Setting	Value
Motion Search Precision	6 - Ultra High (reduce for smaller files)
VHQ Mode	4 - Wide Search (reduce for smaller files)
Use VHQ for bframes too	Checked
Use Chroma Motion	Checked
Turbo	Unchecked
Frame Drop Ratio	0
Maximum I-Frame Interval	300
Cartoon Mode	Unchecked (unless you’re encoding something like anime)

Use the following settings on the quantization tab.

Setting	Value
Min I-Frame Quantizer	1
Max I-Frame Quantizer	31
Min P-Frame Quantizer	1
Max P-Frame Quantizer	31
Min B-Frame Quantizer	1
Max B-Frame Quantizer	31
Trellis Quantization	Unchecked

Click “OK” and you will return to the main config menu. Click the “more Options” button at the bottom and use the following settings.

Setting	Value
Automatically Detect Optimizations	Selected
FourCC Used	XVID
OutputDebugString Debug Level	0×0
Number of threads	0
Print Debug Info On Each Frame	Unchecked
Display Encoding Status	Unchecked

Click “OK”

From here you want to click the “More” button next to the “Profile@Level” box. Here you will save the first pass to file. Click the button next to the “Stats filename” box. Name the file whatever you want, making sure that you also add “.pass” to the end of the filename. Save it to the same folder that your other files are in for this tutorial. Make sure that everything is unchecked as shown below.

Click “OK” here and “OK” on the next menu to return to VdubMod main screen. Go to the File menu and choose “Save As”. Make sure the file type is Audio-Video Interleave (*.avi) and give it a file name. Most importantly, check the box that says “Don’t run this job now; add it to job control so I can run it in batch mode”. Click the Save button. That’s it for the first pass.

If your “save as” screen looks like the image below, you have done it correctly and are ready to move on. Do not close VDubMod!

Step 7: Setting up XviDs Second Pass

Go to the “Video” menu and click “Compression” again. Choose the “Xvid” codec again. Here we will set up the second pass. Change the “Encoding type” to “Twopass-2^nd pass”. Below that change the box to “Target bitrate (kbps)” by clicking on it. In the box next to it, type “1500”. This will give you an excellent quality AVI file. The file size will be about 1.36GB. If you are looking for a smaller file size just click the “Target bitrate (kbps) box to change it to “Target size (kb)”. The most common size for CD-R/CD+R is 700MB but since XviD only calculates by the kbit you may want to type in the box “5734400”. This number equals 700MB in kbits. Doing so though won’t guarantee you a high quality file. The choice is yours.

Click “OK” to close the XviD options window and click “OK” to close the video compression window. Now we’ve got to add our AC3 audio to be muxed in on the second pass.

Go to the “Steams” menu and select “Stream List”. Click the “Add” button and select your AC3 audio file from earlier. After a short pause as VirtualDubMod parses the AC3 audio, it should show up in the stream list. If you had a delay in your audio before, use the AC3 that has _FIX in the file name. Click OK to close the stream list box.

Go back to the File menu and select “Save As”. Type in the same name you did before (taking care to select the AVI file type) and again check the “Don’t run this job now” box.

Click Save to close the window. Now open the job control box by going to the “File” menu and selecting Job Control. Both the first pass job from earlier and the second pass job we just configured should be listed.

Your box will differ from the screenshot below because I’ve already finished encoding. Just click the Start button and VirtualDubMod will start the long and arduous process of encoding your movie.

This would be a good time to go and do something else for… quite a while. Once the project starts running you can open a status window from the main VirtualDubMod window that will display its progress and let you play with the priority settings.

After it’s done you will have your beautiful new high-quality XviD movie file with AC3 audio. Good luck!

Authors notes:

All the files used for this tutorial can be downloaded from www.videohelp.com

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