Compressing whole DVDs for playback on a Mac.

February 21, 2009 11:04 AM

How can I store DVDs for use in a media library and get the benefits of compression without losing the menu structure and special features?

I store DVDs on a Mac for playback with VLC or most recently Plex. Both of these programs will read directly from VIDEO_TS folders and display the normal DVD navigation screen so you can access special features, subtitles, all the audio tracks, etc.

I currently do one of two things: Use MacTheRipper to create a VIDEO_TS folder from a physical disc, or use Handbrake to extract only the main title and compress it into a single H.264 file.

The first method is good because it preserves the entire disc and all of the features on it. The second is good because it takes up only about a quarter of the space.

Is there a way to compress all the video on the disc and write it back to a VIDEO_TS folder, thus preserving all of the features of the disc but getting a smaller size?

I don't need these folders to be readable by standard DVD players.

posted by odinsdream to computers & internet (12 comments total)

DVD shrink might be helpful if you can use a Windows box: you can throw out the parts you don't need (such as other languages, the less interesting extras) and recompress the bits you do. Be warned, though, that the recompressed files will not be as good as similar-sized one from Handbrake.
posted by robtoo at 11:22 AM on February 21

If you can get access to Windows, you could try converting to ratDVD. I've never used it, and this is not a recommendation.
posted by Solomon at 11:37 AM on February 21

Difficult question: If you must have small file sizes, DVD-quality vdeo, and DVD-like menus, you could make an AVCHD file structure with custom menus like you might do to convert homemade hi-def H.264 video to a DVD-5 size Blu-ray compatible fomat. You can use an arbitary file size (M2TS) and normal 480p H.264 video from a DVD source. More info and a how-to when I get a working keyboard on Monday.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 11:46 AM on February 21

Handbrake (and other ripping tools) don't constrain you to only ripping the main title. You should have no problem ripping several titles each with multiple audio tracks (assuming your output is a Matroska-like format). Of course, you would lose the menus, but you'd keep everything else.
posted by mohrr at 11:48 AM on February 21

(Also, if you don't absolutely need graphic menus, Matroska is you new friend: chapters, multiple audio streams/video angles/subtitles, episodic linking, etc.)
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 11:54 AM on February 21

DVDs are already compressed and have menu structure and special features.

Storage is only getting cheaper. Asking as someone who had built up a sizable collection of divx files, do you really want to put effort into inferior video which will be obsolete faster?
posted by ODiV at 1:45 PM on February 21

Regarding Windows; I'm not interested in any solutions requiring it.

Regarding why I'd like to compress: It may very well be that the best answer is to just rip the full disc and not compress it, however I'm getting really great results encoding with H.264 at an average bitrate of 1500 kbps. I don't do any re-encoding of the audio track. I leave the video at the native resolution. In short, I'm not trying to create files that fit on a CD, but I do like that I can get down to 1GB from 4.3GB and, in my opinion, suffer no significant loss in quality. Storage is cheap, but if I can do some compression without quality loss, I figure I might as well.

mohrr: It's true that handbrake can rip any title on the disc, but as far as I know this is a manual process and leaves you with separate video files for each title. They wouldn't be tied together with a menu structure. If I'm storing a TV show season disc this makes sense, since each episode should be represented individually in the media library program, but it wouldn't make sense for the special features of a regular movie.
posted by odinsdream at 2:20 PM on February 21

Matroska looks promising... I'll do some reading on that.
posted by odinsdream at 2:22 PM on February 21

The Mac version of DVD2One, DVD2OneX, is used to shrink DVDs and will leave you with the DVD structure. This is normally done in order to get a DVD to fit on a single-sided, 4.3GB disk. But the size is up to the user. I don't see why you shouldn't re-size a 4GB DVD to half that size for instance.

Whether the loss in quality is "significant" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 8:13 PM on February 21

I would personally make an ISO of the DVD. I know it doesn't affect size much, but they're easily portable and it retains all menus and features. That's what I do.
posted by karizma at 8:24 PM on February 21

I believe Popcorn can do this, but if I read your question correctly what you want to do is preserve the menu structure of the DVD while compressing the video with the codec of your choice [specifically h264]. I don't know that tools like DVD2OneX and Popcorn will do this, because they are targeted at creating a DVD structure and compressing in such a way that the result will work on any DVD player, thereby disqualifying the use of non-standard compression systems.

This whole DVD menu system that you're trying to preserve is designed to work in very specific situations. It's kind of analogous to [Mac|Windows|Linux] software in that way.

If you preserve the menu structure as-is, then only standard DVD-playing software/hardware will be able to interpret it; unfortunately those same interpreters will expect the linked video files to be MPEGs, not h264.

I think "preserve menus" and "compress using h264" are mutually exclusive. What you'll need to do is compress the video and then recreate the menus, and I don't know of an automated tool to do that.
posted by chazlarson at 10:07 AM on February 23

I'll start using Matroska to at least include all of the audio tracks (commentary, specifically) since that's one of the things I missed out most, and I'll just write out physical discs to pull back up in case I want to review something from the special features or deleted scenes. I'll keep doing H.264 compression as well.

Thanks everyone!
posted by odinsdream at 10:12 AM on February 23