video ripping software (in Off-topic)

I'm looking for some software to convert my bluray disks and dvds into files that I can play on various devices. Primarily, I will be playing them on a Windows PC, Droid 4, PS3, and possibly the Crapple gear that my wife owns. It doesn't have to be free, it just has to work.

So, what do you all use? 100k to the best suggestion.

not quite the answer your looking for, but i watch all my tv seris's and films on 1channel.ch

I beleive the law allows you to have backup copies of stuff you own so i see no reason you cant just download the stuff from the streams there guilt free if you want to keep copies.
Personally i just watch the streams and havent downloaded anything in years!

Due to 1channel.ch, I never bothered ripping my own movies, but see if this link helps: Lifehacker

You could try http://handbrake.fr/ since it's pretty awesome at encoding MP4 x264 compressed video (great quality for the size, with the proper encoding options works on almost anything) and it's also free (it uses all CPU cores but not the GPU).
I personally like it best.

It doesn't rip any copy protection out, though.

You could use something like "WinX DVD Ripper" for that (also free, but the free version has limited functionality, I think it only uses one CPU core instead of all, so it's slower).

If neither works well enough for some reason, you can try DVDFab DVD/Blu-ray Ripper instead (not free, unless you torrent it or somesuch), which usually handles most copy protection formats and can also use the GPU to speed up encoding.

There's plenty more out there though.

Yeah its not well know that a GPU is doing a worse job at video encoding that CPU as quality is concern.

There should be no difference at all between CPU and GPU encoding output, the only difference should be speed of encoding.
The exact same work is being done, it's just that the GPU is a massively parallel device, thus much better suited for such tasks than a CPU is (which only has a handful of very complex cores, not hundreds or even thousands simple ones like the GPU).
Same story as BitCoins or brute-force cryptographic decryption, for such jobs, a cheap GPU is so many times faster than any CPU on the market today, that it's not even funny.

P.S. Of course, many available (overly hyped and GPU-developer-backed) apps do a half-arsed job at it, trying to showcase the speed of whatever GPU they are trying to highlight, "optimizing" performance (i.e. intentionally sacrificing image quality for encoding speed).
There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't get the exact same output if you use the exact same encoding parameters. Problem is finding an app that lets you do that without having to dig through dozens of arcane knowledge base articles to find the appropriate settings.

P.P.S. MediaCoder ( http://www.mediacoderhq.com ) is another free app (some opt-outable-at-install adware included), the config wizzard can be helpful but a bit confusing at times, and other times it just doesn't do a damn thing even if you run it (and you really need to know how to configure everything for the best results anyway), but at least it can use NVIDIA and Intel CPU-integrated graphics (although configuring THOSE properly is an even greater pain in the posterior, and you're not getting a huge performance increase - I was getting about +60% encode speed vs CPU only, and the GPU -a 460 GTX - was sitting at around 20% usage while the CPU was at about 65% ; no idea why it won't go to 100% on either with CUDA encoder on my machine).

P.P.P.S. Handbrake is developing an OpenCL accelerated version (which means it should be able to use any GPU), but for now they're not releasing it yet to the general public (even if it actually works already, at least in certain circumstances) because it's not very stable at all, it has quite a few bugs left in it. No idea when it will be ready.

just no and no

No to which one first, and no again to what else ?

I can't see absolutely any NOTEWORTHY difference between CPU-only encoded and CPU-plus-some-GPU encoded video at the same bitrates (and any other settings ) with MediaEncoder, for instance.
And ~60% extra encoding speed is pretty damn relevant, especially when the difference is between taking 90 or 150 minutes to encode a 2-hour 1080p movie in its full original resolution, just smaller size.

Yes, true, if you're talking mainstream junky implementations like Media Espresso, Media Converter, Ultimate Video Converter, or older and no longer developed/supported packages like Avivo or Badaboom, then sure, the quality can be pretty crappy, but I've already stated that.

Normally, you would also reduce resolution, 576p is quite enough for most movies IMO, even 480p is fine, and at the same constant bitrate it might actually look better - plus, depending on what device you're using, encoding at a higher resolution than the device can display is pointless (you may actually need to limit the horizontal rather than the vertical in most cases).
You need at least a 4000 kbps bitrate for pretty decent 1080p video, and you really want 8000 kbps for an experience somewhat similar to the original (8000kbps is actually youtube's 1080p highest re-encoding bitrate). But that's a quite large filesize after you also tack on the audio (and there, 384 kbps AC-3 or MP3 is also quite enough in most cases, and 128 kbps will do just fine most of the time), we're talking roughly 7.2 GB for a 2-hour movie if you go with 8000+384 kbps.
IMO, you're much better off with 3000+128kbps and downsampled 480p video instead - not only does that reduce file size to roughly 2.7 GB for the same 2-hour movie, but it also looks more than quite allright for "on the go" video (in fact, you can easily reduce the bitrate even further for 480p, 1000 kbps is enough, or 1500 if you're feeling peckish).

Yes, it's also true, you can't YET select variable bit rate (not yet supported for the current version of CUDA encoder).
THAT, when finally implemented in hardware mode, would help you reduce filesize compared to constant bitrate without a significant drop in image quality (low-motion scenes would take up less space, but not THAT much smaller unless your video is mainly low-motion scenes).
But that's pretty much all it helps with, size, since the crux of the matter as far as image quality goes is the peak bitrate and not much more.

I knew I'd get a lot of info asking about this on CB. Thanks Sickone, it's a lot of info to go through.

Most of what I'm going to rip is for my kids to watch when we visit grandma. I'm fine with a lower resolution and smaller file size. Transporting dvd's around puts a lot of wear on them and some are starting to glitch from scratches. Speed isn't so important as my video collection isn't all that big.

Well, from a moral perspective, if you already own the DVDs legally, it would probably be fair enough (even if slightly dipping into grey areas of legality), also faster and simpler to just bittorrent the already-compressed files.

Hmm after checking a few aticle its seem that its mostly the consumer oriented software that are having issue with GPU encoding. Intel quick sync is mostly fix function base therefore is much faster that anything else but is not made or intent for high quality encoding mostly to get X video into a format compatible for IOS/android with newer version of hardware/driver/software its should expend its use. As for me i cant even use quick sync on P68 quicksync get disable and not longer able to use its.


As for the speed up from CPU to GPU, i far from been a expert on video encoding, i dont know if current software make proper use of AVX or where is the bottleneck and if its use FP32 or FP64 and if the decrease in precision on the GPU have a impact on the quality of the video.


For date encryption if you are using AES128/256 like what most SSD are encrypt with a CPU is a lots faster 2X overall (newer model exception to I3).

The only difference lies in the options you can select for encoding that have been programmed until now in either CUDA, DirectCompute or even as a shader.
Integration of the existing software on non-dedicated-for-video-encoding hardware (i.e. GPUs) is fairly slow, and there actually are quite a few dedicated hardware solutions (every newer video camera and even some phones have such a dedicated video encoding chip for realtime power-efficient compression, but with as good as no manually changing options whatsoever, each setting is hard-coded at the chip design stage - at most you can hope to get to select from a handful of available presets).


That's only because they actually added another slice of hardware on the chip, which is separate from the CPU (just like the integrated graphics is on Intel processors) which handles encryption separately.
Purely software encryption/decryption on the exact same chip (one that has dedicated hardware encryption/decryption bits inside) is many times slower.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/828-1/encodage-h-264-cpu-vs-gpu-nvidia-cuda-amd-stream-intel-mediasdk-x264-test.html

I far as i know its the most advance benchmark quality test for H.264 and X.264.

I have used HandBrake to digitize all of my movie and TV DVDs (no Blu-Ray). Works pretty well on my iMac. It has options for sound channels (like 5.1 AC3 passthru), subtitles, and some nice templates (and you can save your own.

No idea bout performance relative to other products, as HB is the only thing I have used. I have MP4 encoded around half a terabyte of stuff which is then saved to my Network Area Storage (spelled out for benefit of the spell checker restrictions) for backup and DLNA sharing.