DVD2AVI

DVD2AVI is an amazing little program which is not quite so powerful as FlaskMpeg but the author is working hard on making it better, adding audio decoding and other neat things. DVD2AVI will allow us to kind-of frameserve to TMPEGEnc. I say kind-of because using DVD2AVI's VFP plugin we don't have to run the program, we simply create a DVD2AVI project that will allow us to access the VOB files much as if they were an AVI file. Great, eh?

You'll maybe have to copy both DVD2AVI and the VFP plugin to the TMPEGEnc folder before you start. You should also have the VOBs on your harddisk already, preferably only the main movie. I suggest to use SmartRipper to rip the movie. DVD2AVI is capable of opening VOBs directly off the DVD, if you enable the Fault Tolerance mode. However, it's not possible to use that feature to encode because of legal issues.

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SMARTRIPPER

So start up DVD2AVI and select File - Open.

Then press F5 which will launch the preview mode. DVD2AVI is a really fast VOB player and besides it can show you the video structure, much like FlaskMpeg's built-in player. 

If the Frame Type changes between Progressive and Interlaced you'll have to either deinterlace you have 3 possibilities: Do not worry about it and encode at 29.97fps if you're encoding at a low resolution (for instance VCD), encode at 29.97 and set source and destination to interlaced if your encoder allows that, or apply IVTC in TMPEGEnc. If you're encoding to DivX you could also deinterlace in VirtualDub.
If the movie is solid Interlaced you can either Deinterlace or perform an IVTC and if the movie is Progressive you can enable preserve FILM and then encode at 23.976fps. 

Here you check Preserve FILM and the output will be 23.976fps - progressive frames, and that's what we love. 

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IVTC

Then set the audio options:

The latest release supports AC3 decoding and Linear PCM and MPEG audio demultiplexing, along with audio normalization and 48 -> 44.1 downsampling. Make sure that you have the right option checked.. if you want the AC3 channel make sure that no Track in the Decoding submenu is checked. If you want DVD2AVI to decode the audio simply select the right track. If you're wondering which track is which: Start a software DVD player, then right click in the window (or however it's done in your player.. I'm using PowerDVD and WinDVD), go to the audio submenu and you'll get a list of audio tracks.. they're listed in the exact same order as you can select them in DVD2AVI. Normalization will compress the audio range and increase the volume of the soundtrack. Sampling downconversion should be a pretty straightforward operation. If you have a DVD with PCM soundtrack (mostly music DVDs) make sure you select the right PCM track. 


Then save your current project:

Depending on your settings this is going to demux the AC3 channels from the VOBs and they will be put in the same directory as the d2v file and will be labeled something like this: new T01 -66+0ms.ac3. TXX is the number of the AC3 track and -66+0ms means that the audio has to start 66ms earlier than the video. Anything above 80ms requires that you actually care about that since that is about the time it takes you to notice that the audio is slightly amiss. 

If you're using the DD decoding you don't have to worry about asynch.. DVD2AVI will make the adjustments for you when saving the WAV file. 

If you're going to make a DivX, create a VFAPI AVI and load it in VirtualDub. Otherwise you can either load the d2v into TMPG should you chose that encoder, or create an VFAPI AVI that you'll load into your MPEG encoder of your choice. 

If you want subtitles, that's also possible. However it requires some additional steps. You have to extract the subtitles as explained in the Subtitle guide, create a VFAPI AVI, load that into VirtualDub, and frameserve the output to your encoding program. Frameserving from VirtualDub will be explained in the subtitle guide.. then come back here by using the back links.

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VFAPI
SUBTITLES

>> Encode to (S)VCD using
CCE
LSX
TMPG
HEURIS

>> or encode to DivX
VIRTUALDUB