DVD to H.264, with menus in MKV?

[Tjalfe]

Since I am being told that the DVD collection has to leave the living room, making room for kids toys, I am considering ripping them all to my HDD, before stashing them away in the attic. It seems that the .MKV format is preferred for HD rips, and I was wondering if it is possible to keep the menus on a dvd rip, while compressing it using e.g. H264 to save space, putting it in a .mkv file.. .and if it is, could someone tell me the how to?

thanks

[paulw]

Unless you want to keep all the launguage subtitles I see no point in going MKV. Why not convert them to DivX or Xvid..

[xortam]

The attic is a pretty harsh environment for storing optical discs.

[Tjalfe]

I can't say I have fully read up on MKV, but I had gotten the idea that you could still do chapters and menus in it, hence I thought that was the way I should go

What I will be doing eventually, when I get wife approval for the purchase, is get a TVIX box to play back all the ripped DVD's. I know it will do MKV files, and ISO files and such. I like the idea of keeping the special features from the dvd's, hence I did not think DIVX was the better route, but I could be wrong.
I could keep the menus in a .iso, from what I understand, but while ripping, I would like to change from MPEG2 to something which kept the picture quality, yet took up less space. I have more than 100 DVD's, which I hope to rip, so if I could re compress the video with e.g. the H.264, and keep the menus, that would be ideal.

I have an alternative place to store the disks, if the attic is no good.. I suppose it does get rather extreme up there for temperatures

Thanks for your suggestions

Kasper

[Evildead666]

autoMKV seemed pretty good for creating mkv's....
I'm not sure if it will rip directly from DVD tho...

as far as i understand, Divx/Xvid is good for SD video, and h264 for 720p and up...
I would just .ISO the disks into R5 or R9 and store them as is.
I have just about 100 on a 500Gb HDD. A RAID mirror might be a good idea, since if this pops its clogs i'm gonna have a lot of work to do again

[Evildead666]

The attic is a pretty harsh environment for storing optical discs.

I found some CD's that had been in the garage for a few years (8 max)...they had little white spots on, which would not wipe off....
it seems some sort of fungus has gotten into the minute cracks in the CD, and fubar'd it...

The VHS tapes DID look a LOT worse tho...

I'd store then in a hermetic container (tupperware) and with some silica gel inside to dry out the air. then store in cool, dark place.

[Brian Ellis]

I'd store then in a hermetic container (tupperware) and with some silica gel inside to dry out the air. then store in cool, dark place.

Not for tapes, though: they do not like a dry environment as the polyester shrinks and creates strains which are bad for subsequent reading.

[Evildead666]

No, that was just for DVD's and CD's.

ALL of my tapes are buggered anyway, they've been in a box for too long in the garage...

[Hulk]

I would consider using Nero Recode to painlessly get them into H.264. You can get excellent results at 3.5Mbps, virtually the same as the original MPEG-2 at twice the bit rate. You can also just encode the special features files and name them appropriately and save yourself a lot of extra work. For these things I usually find the simpler the better and nothing is simpler than having just the actual video files. Somehow an error always seems to occur when you do something "fancy" then you've got nothing!

[Tjalfe]

Thanks for the help.. I guess to keep the menus, the whole image has to be in MPEG2 still.. I was hoping there was a way to keep the chapters and such, while encoding the video to something better. oh well, I will ask my better half, if she can live without menus, if not, I will just .ISO them. Any suggestions for which software makes the better/faster .ISO?
alternatively, I will go with hulks suggestion and H.264 the main video files

[Hulk]

Just so you know Recode keeps chapters that work with players. At least Showtime anyway. I honestly think doing away with the agony of loading menus, digging through them is one of the better reasons to archive to H.264. Plus you get to compress to nearly half the original size with full quality. Oh yeah you can also select which audio tracks to bring over, as well as copying the uncompressed 5.1, which is how I do it. And the subtitles come along as well. It's really a great way to archive your standard definition titles. It just works.

[Fat Tone]

Two less technical suggestions:

1) Keep the discs in a wallet or two - takes up way less space. Put the empty cases in the attic.
2) Put the kids in the attic instead

[Evildead666]

DVDShrink set to R9 (no compression attempted) will take from 5-10mins per DVD.
Just the time it takes to copy from the Disc to the HDD.

AnyDVD will prob be needed as well to circumvent some kind of protection mechanism...