Encoding stuff on a Mac is a pain in the ass right now. Mencoder and FFMpegX make it a little easier, but both of them have their downfalls, and I have trouble getting them to work consistently.
Here's another thread that talks about using ffMpeg instead; it might do what you're looking for in fewer steps.
encoding with ffmpegX
For me, the best combination of video stuff I've found is the following:
The way I do it isn't the most straightforward way, but for me it's the fastest, and I get the results I want without trial and error at the command line.
Here's another thread that talks about using ffMpeg instead; it might do what you're looking for in fewer steps.
encoding with ffmpegX
For me, the best combination of video stuff I've found is the following:
- OSex, a ripper. Hasn't been updated in a while, and I had trouble getting it to work consistently under 10.2.5, but it's the best of what I've seen out there. Also tried command line based vobcopy, but I couldn't get that to work at all.
- Diva, a front end to the 3ivx codec. Only does video at this point, but it's the only one of the tools out there that is MP aware, and has a graphical crop window, which is a lot nicer than having to manually put in values. The rate calculator in FFMpegX is nice, but I feel like the GUI cropping is worth more.
- BBDemux, to pull the audio apart from the video track.
- mAC3dec, to take the AC3 file and change it to an AIFF
- QuickTime Pro, to encode the audio track into AAC, aka MP4, audio, and assemble the component parts into one movie.
The way I do it isn't the most straightforward way, but for me it's the fastest, and I get the results I want without trial and error at the command line.
- Rip the audio with 0Sex. Again, it's sort of hit and miss as to whether it'll work or not, but a series of login/logout and/or restarts will get it working. Pull the vob files out and put them somewhere. Make sure to have around 6 gigs free.
- Demux the vob into separate tracks with BBDemux. The m2v is the mpeg 2 video, and the ac3 is the audio track.
- Use mAC3dec to change the ac3 file into an AIFF. This might take a while with a full length movie soundtrack.
- While that's going on, open Diva and find your m2v file.
* Pick an output file name and location
* Open the crop and scale window. Go to the middle of the window and drag the blue lines so that there's only movie, and no letterboxes. The default size works well; most of my movies end up being 480 wide by however tall. On playback, this size is pretty decent for full screen, and is pretty decent for output to TV. YMMV.
* Open the compression window. Use the pulldown to select the 3ivx codec, and select a data rate. You'll have to do some math here to make the right choice.
Assuming you're writing this to a 700 MB CD-R, let's say you want to leave about 70 megs for the soundtrack, leaving 630 megs for the movie. The data rate will be given by
(target video track size) * (1024) / (movie length) * (60) = Data Rate
Go a couple K below the data rate given, just to be safe, and then click options. Drag the slider to somewhere between QP= 8 -- 12. This will help ensure that your final output is the right size and will fit wherever you're trying to put it. Also, if you don't want to keep the closing credits, you can bump the data rate a little bit up by calculating it without that extra couple of minutes at the end.
* Hit encode. This will take a long time. On a Dual 1.25 G4, it can do about 30 fps, which is realtime. The best part about this is that if your movie is too long, you get to sit through this step again.
- While that's going on, encode the audio. Open the AIFF exported from mAC3dec in QuickTime, and export it as an mp4 audio track. You will need QuickTime Pro to do this. I've found that a sample rate of 44 khz, 64 kbit and medium encoder quality gives acceptable movie sound, and a good datasize. YMMV. Export it; this will take a while as well.
- When the video and audio tracks are done encoding, you'll want to assemble them into a single file with QuickTime Pro. Open both, select the entire audio track, copy, then switch to the video track. Under edit, select add scaled. Play a bit to see that this went smoothly.
- If all went well, then you'll have a single file with the entire movie. If you want to get rid of the credits, use QuickTime Player to select everything that you want, copy, and then paste into a new, blank QuickTime Player movie. This is sometimes a pain in the ass, as QuickTime only lets you select the movie in very rough chunks.
- Last step...with your final movie, minus the credits if you want it that way, select File > Save as. Make it a self contained movie, and verify that the combined movie is gonna fit where you want it to. If so, then do it, and you've got yourself a movie.
- The resulting .mov will play in QuickTime Player as long as you have the 3ivx codec installed. Won't work so hot in MPlayerX or VLC.
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Using Diva instead of ffMpegX or Mencoder means you sacrifice one click DVD to Divx encoding and the possible quality gains from 2-pass encoding. However, I've found the 3ivx quality to be more than adequate, even in just one pass. There are a lot of steps involved here, but here are the advantages of this way over some of the others.
- GUI-based cropping.
- Diva is MP aware, making things a little faster. Real-time simultaneous video and audio encoding on a dual 1.25 ghz is not too shabby.
- Using QuickTime gets you mp4 sound, which IMHO is a lot better than VBR mp3, even at lower bitrates.
- Doing it this way guarantees you audio sync, where many of the other tools have some problems with that.
It's kind of a pain in the ass, but a lot of that will go away when Diva starts supporting audio in later releases. For now, this is the best way that I've found for me; maybe someone smarter than me will be able to refine this process a little more.
