I have been trying a variety of encoders. In a thread on here someone suggested Nero Recoder. I realised I had that on my computer so I gave it a go! In a word having tried quite a few others this is the one I will be staying with. It is a one step process from DVD to file.

It encodes to MPEG4 and gives you the option of setting the finished file size. Unlike some other encoders the actual finished file size was within 1MB.

I encoder a film to 250MB, with Betaplayer the finished file plays wonderfully on my X50.

One happy chappy!

Martin

Edit: I have found some DVD's that it won't encode, so I am going to try using DVD Shrink to produce VOB files and go from there - I will report back.

The mission goes on! With some experimentation I have found that Nero will not encode protected disks (the first few disks I tried must have been protection free). So when this happens I have been ripping them with DVD Shrink and then running the files into Nero Recoder.

In DVD Shrink I have been copying the disk uncompressed and letting Nero do all the encoding - this helps with quality as the final film is only compressed once.

The final quality is excellent - Very smooth playback using Betaplayer, and no problems with lips sync.

I hope this info helps someone. This is definitely the best ripping I have got, trying numerous methods.

Martin

Have you tried FairUse LE? Its a one step process DVD to AVI that produces great results also.

I was un-aware that Nero did this, thats great to have another option.

More great reviews!

   

I've been using Recode also, superb. I presume you are using the "Portable" profile which produces max size of 352x.....

I also bought Slysoft's AnyDVD which removes all the protections from your DVDs so recode then can rip anything for you - well worth the money in the extra step it now saves

One thing I have discovered though if you haven't already... if you set max target size to say 250mb, in order to achieve this size it may not use 352x.... size i.e. one I did ended up with a size of 240x166 or something so looked quite poor on my lovely hx4700 screen. I've since discovered the best way is to untick the target size and drag your movie quality slider down, keep going in and checking what dimensions (behind the Video button) it is going to use, you'll find a certain bitrate will suddenly start making the dimensions start reducing so what I now do is find the bitrate that JUST gets it up to 352x whatever in size thereby I get the best quality full screen conversion at a reasonable file size.

If that makes sense!

Fedorov.