Tools to re-encode DVDs

[Dan Dar3]

@Oldxboxusa
I think we've got it. Now, its time for you to do something about it - either for a laptop or a desktop, need to open up, clean it's fan(s) and or vent(s), and even replace the fan if not working, get a stress test application and a temperature monitor application and judge the difference by comparing the before and after situation. If a laptop, either raising it a bit off the desk (usually even just the back side helps if you need to use it) and/or investing in a notebook cooler (either passive or preferably active). If a desktop, don't leave it on the ground cause in time it will suck all the dust off and fans will either starting making a noise or will impede air flow and cooling.

[Oldxboxusa]

@Oldxboxusa
I think we've got it. Now, its time for you to do something about it - either for a laptop or a desktop, need to open up, clean it's fan(s) and or vent(s), and even replace the fan if not working, get a stress test application and a temperature monitor application and judge the difference by comparing the before and after situation. If a laptop, either raising it a bit off the desk (usually even just the back side helps if you need to use it) and/or investing in a notebook cooler (either passive or preferably active). If a desktop, don't leave it on the ground cause in time it will suck all the dust off and fans will either starting making a noise or will impede air flow and cooling.

I do this every 3 months on every Hardware i had. I don't smoke in my rooms. I dont understand why my imac was burn so hot. When i clean my fans i renew thermal paste and next to that i fire the cpu and gpu with prime95. This makes all off them very hot, but normally imacs would be shut down in emergency. On all my PCs and Macs are tools to monitor the temps. In my pc i have charcoal filter mats. The imac i describe was my old one, i don't have it anymore because the repair was too expensive (imac repair in that state around 600-900€).
Since that i use Macs Fancontrol, it runs on Mac Desks, Mac Notebooks and on windows too.

But thanks for your help Dan Dar.

[Dan Dar3]

And that's where you could be doing it wrong. I can only assume you use a good quality thermal paste, you clean the old one well and you apply the new one correctly - I've seen enough videos with people out there applying it incorrectly, instead of reading and following instructions and notes from the manufacturer; spreading the paste instead of using a peasize or a line, possibly introducing air and/or putting too much which could overflow and act as an insulator, or worse as an electrical conductor.

You could be throwing away time and money and only getting back the good feeling that you might be doing the right thing - for example, with Arctic Silver 5 it takes a good while and a few thermal cycles for the paste to set and act optimally.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/as5.htm

Important Reminder:
Due to the unique shape and sizes of the particles in Arctic Silver 5's conductive matrix, it will take a up to 200 hours and several thermal cycles to achieve maximum particle to particle thermal conduction and for the heatsink to CPU interface to reach maximum conductivity. (This period will be longer in a system without a fan on the heatsink or with a low speed fan on the heatsink.) On systems measuring actual internal core temperatures via the CPU's internal diode, the measured temperature will often drop 2C to 5C over this "break-in" period. This break-in will occur during the normal use of the computer as long as the computer is turned off from time to time and the interface is allowed to cool to room temperature. Once the break-in is complete, the computer can be left on if desired.

I dont't know about Prime95 as a burn-in test application, there's definitely better software out there, e.g. PassMark BurnInTest or HeavyLoad (both for Windows) - encoding video can take 1-2 hours or more and depending on the software implementation could potentially use both the GPU and CPU at the same time (especially worse for laptops which usually have both on the same same copper heat pipe), temperature builds up over time, you need to run it for a while to see valid results and watch it in a graph.

[Oldxboxusa]

I know it Dan Dar3, Arctic Cooling 5 is my favorite since many Years. The way to be use Thermalpaste, it is the same question with Android or iOS XD. Joke beside, i use it when i must, thats right (because it cost between 8+12€ per 5grams). I do so much on a CPU or GPU that i can spread it with a keycard (by me it is a mini spatel (don't know the Englisch word for it)). My headsinks are all off copper. I grind all of them with sand paper and polish it with NEVR-DULL and a polish paste for copper and chrome metals. it gives some of the tools to burn in the cpu respectively made them hot to spread the Thermal Paste ( on Mac over Terminal the command to made all Cores up to 100% i use: yes > /dev/null & yes, by they so much as i have cores).

[bornagainpenguin]

Good, or just take from the script what you actually need - that seems to have been written do convert one or more files in a folder, you open up a command prompt yourself navigate to the files and simply run the command for your one file:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i "Rod Stewart ...mp4" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska "Rod Stewart ...mkv"

It's only rocket science until your first test flight

Tried that. Didn't seem to work...

Code: Select all

bornagainpenguins-MacBook-Pro:XBOX bornagainpenguin$ ffmpeg -i "Rod Stewart ...mp4" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska "Rod Stewart ...mkv"
ffmpeg version 2.4.2 Copyright (c) 2000-2014 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Oct  8 2014 19:37:09 with llvm-gcc 4.2.1 (LLVM build 2336.11.00)
  configuration: --prefix=/Volumes/Ramdisk/sw --enable-gpl --enable-pthreads --enable-version3 --enable-libspeex --enable-libvpx --disable-decoder=libvpx --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-avfilter --enable-libopencore_amrwb --enable-libopencore_amrnb --enable-filters --enable-libgsm --enable-libvidstab --enable-libx265 --arch=x86_64 --enable-runtime-cpudetect
  libavutil      54.  7.100 / 54.  7.100
  libavcodec     56.  1.100 / 56.  1.100
  libavformat    56.  4.101 / 56.  4.101
  libavdevice    56.  0.100 / 56.  0.100
  libavfilter     5.  1.100 /  5.  1.100
  libswscale      3.  0.100 /  3.  0.100
  libswresample   1.  1.100 /  1.  1.100
  libpostproc    53.  0.100 / 53.  0.100
Rod Stewart ...mp4: No such file or directory
bornagainpenguins-MacBook-Pro:XBOX bornagainpenguin$ 

@bornagainpenguin
Without going into script programming (which if you want to tackle you can Google and find a few answers on StackOverflow for example), I would recommend Handbrake again, it has a queue system you can use and then even configure to hibernate or shutdown when done.
https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Queue
http://www.osomac.com/2013/08/08/handbr ... rocessing/

Would be willing to set up Handbrake if someone were to help me build the profile so I can just add the video location and trust the app will output something that works in a different location.

I'm downloading it now and will muck about with it once I get it, but I freely admit that I'm pants at video encoding having largely given up on the whole process back when my most powerful machine was a SiS 800mhz AMD Duron box...I know things have come a long way since then but after beating my head on the then state of the art I now have a mental block. That's why I was hoping to use the script--it looked as though the configuration had been done for me.. HAH! Oh well.

Thanks very much for your help and patience with me.

UPDATE: Did some googling. Found this topic where it was discussed here, but the wiki article was deleted for some unknown reason (what did it hurt to leave it up, I mean really?) and the recurring mention of a preset that no one ever seems to post and a bunch of discussion about ffmpeg from the command line--which was why that was my initial approach in the first place. Then I saw a discussion where someone with a name very much like that of a senior forum member posted and a few links down in Google I suddenly got luck and found what appears to be the mysterious preset people speak of. The post can be found here. Amazingly the link is still live and produces a working preset which as mentioned on our forums produces mkv containers.

I tried it out and resulted in what appears to be a nice mkv file, about ten megabytes smaller than the original with no loss of quality I can see. The only thing that concerns me is that it is listed in VLC as being h264 and I thought our consoles were better off with h263? Is that right or ??? Could you please investigate and see what changes should be made to the preset if any? Thanks again.

UPDATE x2: Don't bother with the preset unless you're just curious. The file it creates might as well be a slide show when I play it on the Xbox.

[Dan Dar3]

I'm sorry, I feel I'm completely out of patience today, so it's probably best I leave it to someone else to give a try. All I can say before I go is look at your screenshot, why I can't possibly know the exact name of your video file, why I used "..." as placeholder for the missing part I can't see, and then look at the error message the program gave you:

Code: Select all

Rod Stewart ...mp4: No such file or directory

[bornagainpenguin]

I'm sorry, I feel I'm completely out of patience today, so it's probably best I leave it to someone else to give a try. All I can say before I go is look at your screenshot, why I can't possibly know the exact name of your video file, why I used "..." as placeholder for the missing part I can't see, and then look at the error message the program gave you:

Code: Select all

Rod Stewart ...mp4: No such file or directory

The name didn't matter. I also used a wildcard the second time and got the same response from the Terminal.

I'm usually a wet noodle after work -- I process faxes and data entry all day some by the time my shift ends I'm not really ready to do any mental heavy lifting, but it did occur to me that the naming might have been off so yeah, I tried a wild card too. But because I'm an idiot I didn't remove the quotation marks and stared at my screen. Having then removed them, I was dumbfounded at the swift encoding that took place. Really makes a difference!

Disregard the previous posting regarding the Handbrake preset. I don't know if the options were heavily dependent on the software as it was in 2010 or whether the preset is heavily dependent on what the source file was to begin with but the ffmpeg out was clearly superior. The Handbrake output didn't even play really, more of a slideshow than anything. I will continue to look into getting the command line to work.

Thanks for your trouble.

Edit: Have been using this post to build a somewhat working preset for Handbrake for myself. The problem is the need to reapply at every encode...

[spinnersp]

I'm sorry, I feel I'm completely out of patience today, so it's probably best I leave it to someone else to give a try. All I can say before I go is look at your screenshot, why I can't possibly know the exact name of your video file, why I used "..." as placeholder for the missing part I can't see, and then look at the error message the program gave you:

Code: Select all

Rod Stewart ...mp4: No such file or directory

The name didn't matter. I also used a wildcard the second time and got the same response from the Terminal.

I'm usually a wet noodle after work -- I process faxes and data entry all day some by the time my shift ends I'm not really ready to do any mental heavy lifting, but it did occur to me that the naming might have been off so yeah, I tried a wild card too. But because I'm an idiot I didn't remove the quotation marks and stared at my screen. Having then removed them, I was dumbfounded at the swift encoding that took place. Really makes a difference!

Disregard the previous posting regarding the Handbrake preset. I don't know if the options were heavily dependent on the software as it was in 2010 or whether the preset is heavily dependent on what the source file was to begin with but the ffmpeg out was clearly superior. The Handbrake output didn't even play really, more of a slideshow than anything. I will continue to look into getting the command line to work.

Thanks for your trouble.

Edit: Have been using this post to build a somewhat working preset for Handbrake for myself. The problem is the need to reapply at every encode...

Onec you have it setup,in the bottom right corner of handbrake,hit the +ADD button.Name your preset,then it will be in the list on the right under, user presets

[bornagainpenguin]

Once you have it setup,in the bottom right corner of handbrake,hit the +ADD button.Name your preset,then it will be in the list on the right under, user presets

Thanks for that. I found it out once I realized that the preset I thought I was saving was blank. A bit of Google later and I found out what you said.

I was feeling particularly slow by that point and was embarrassed to revisit the post again.

Also found and tried several DivX encoding methods with version 0.93, but didn't really notice that much improvement over mp4. Certainly not at the expense of the additional time costs!

Can anyone speak to the advantages of 720p x 480p versus 960x540 IIRC? It was supposed to be a more native resolution for the xbox hardware.

I'm attaching my current preset, the one I'm using for my music video collection. I'll have to play around for encoding any movies though. Would appreciate any feedback!