I'm just an average joe trying to convert my DVD movies into a smaller single file to store and watch on my HTPC. I have Win 7 on it and like to use WMC to pull up and watch my movies. My delima is that I've tried several different converters and it seems the video quality is poor compared to leaving it in a vob file format. I've downloaded video on line that has been converted to other formats as well as greatly reduced in size that is still good quality. I don't expect great quality after a huge reduction in size but right now I'm still getting the vissible squares in the picture after converting even without reduction in size.
Can anyone recommend a good converter program and tell me what file formats work best?
Thanks.
fuzebox40 0 Newbie Poster
chris.stout 14 Junior Poster in Training
I'm not terribly familiar with what tools exist on Windows for this. However, you can use VLC to convert video files. Here's a article showing the basic process.
fuzebox40 0 Newbie Poster
The article shows the procces for converting any file to .mp4. Is the .mp4 format the best way to go? What I'm hoping to achieve is to take just the movie from my duel layer DVD's and reduce the size as much as possible (to save hard drive space) yet avoid having extremely poor quality. Of course I don't expect high def, I just don't want to see it breaking into little squares constantly either.
chris.stout 14 Junior Poster in Training
The process for converting to mp4 is pretty much the same as any other format with vlc. I'm really not sure what the best format would be. I personally like my videos in mkv. I'd suggest taking a shorter video clip and trying many formats/settings to find what you like the most.
I'd also suggest trying multiple tools to find out what suites you best. Below are two I quite like.
Handbrake is a very solid video conversion tool. I didn't realize it was available for Windows.
I've also heard good things about WinFF. If my understanding is correct, it's just a gui for FFMpeg (which I'm quite fond of). It's available for Windows and Linux.
Be a part of the DaniWeb community
We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.