Hello everyone, over the last few months i had been copying a few DVD family home videos onto my computer, however each video takes up about 7 GB's of HD space. I was wondering if there was a piece of software that could convert these Video_TS folders currently residing in my HD to a more compact format like MPEG, MOV, or MP4 i would even accept AVI files as long as i can compress them to take up less HD space. I am in desperate need for more HD space to import digital video and do not have the funds to purchase a new HD for the next few months. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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DVD to MPEG, MOV, or MP4
- Thread starter ColdFlame87
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Do you already have this stuff burned on to DVD? If not, you may wantto look at getting an external DVD Burner first.
Compressing the stuff on your hard drive will make it difficult to come back and make DVDs later.
Hard Drives aren't that expensive. You can get an external Firewire box and put any size Hard drive into it. They can also be replaced as they get full. I have a stack of 4 sitting on my desk now.
How much stuff do you have stored?
Compressing the stuff on your hard drive will make it difficult to come back and make DVDs later.
Hard Drives aren't that expensive. You can get an external Firewire box and put any size Hard drive into it. They can also be replaced as they get full. I have a stack of 4 sitting on my desk now.
How much stuff do you have stored?
Thanks for the help guys!, ive tried handbrake but the compression times are extremely slow. It took me 4 hrs to compress one video 
i guess im just impatient but yeah ill give encoding them a try I already went through one of them so thats a plus. I have eight videos to encode and each of them are around 7 GB so that would be 56 GB of video data.
i guess im just impatient but yeah ill give encoding them a try I already went through one of them so thats a plus. I have eight videos to encode and each of them are around 7 GB so that would be 56 GB of video data.rjphoto said:
I have the DVD in my possesion so there would be no need for me to burn them again, some of the DVD's are movies that I have already purchased but decided to copy to my hard drive for quick access. As stated in my previous post I have 56 GB of data
ColdFlame87 said:Thanks for the help guys!, ive tried handbrake but the compression times are extremely slow. It took me 4 hrs to compress one video
They said Handbrake was good, they didn't say it was fast.
I've been using a PowerBook 867Mhz. I set it up and go to bed and let it run over night.
There are a few post on MacRumors that will give you an idea of how fast different processors will do the same conversion.
A dual or quad G5 would be faster of course, but how fast is fast.....
There ain't no decent quality, low-bandwidth video codec that is fast. This always seems to be the case. Video encoding is usually one of the most taxing jobs a computer can do. Decoding usually gets an assist from the GPU, but encoding just sucks.rjphoto said:
I tend to actually use Nero on my 2.8 GHz Dell since it's got a larger HD than any of the Macs, set it for two pass and let it run overnight to chew on ~1 hour of video. Takes about half the night.
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rjphoto said:
I support that too. Whether it's 2 hours or 8, just set it up before bed time... 8 movies = 8 nights, you're done before the end of the fortnight ! Additionally, you can always store a couple of movies on a single DVD afterwards, so even this is off your HDD, although still available.
Additional HDDs are a limited solution, you'd fill a 250 Gb with roughly 40 Dvd's, and then same problem again...
I've got a total 1.3Tb HDD storage capacity by now, but it's mostly because of video edition.
balamw said:
Word.
Imagine that video is 29.97 frames per second.
Which translates basically to 30 pictures every second.
Imagine Photoshop looking at those 30 images, and having to look at every pixel in each and decide how best to compress them to save space, using complex algorithms and magic.
Now you understand that takes time to do, even with a fast computer, because work is work. While a computer can save a huge Digital Photo into a tiny JPG in under 10 seconds, doing that for an entire movie (30frames x seconds) can take a long time.
MPEG2 is a complex codec, hard to decode/encode efficiently without sufficient CPU power.
Yup, codecs tend to really hit their stride when the CPU/GPU/DSP power becomes available to encode or decode them in real time, but the codecs you want to use are always just beyond that. I remember when I first encountered MPEG1 files (thing 4 MHz 286 days), they had to be decoded to uncompressed AVI before you could watch the movie. The same was true for MPEG2, for a long time the available computers didn't have enough oomph to keep up with simple DVD playing, and much less encode the stuff. Today it has become routine, even thoug hmuch of the work is handed off to the GPU.Sdashiki said:
This is why I was pleasantly surprised to find handbrake encoding to H.264 at slightly faster than real time (32 fps) for a trial encode run on my 17" iMac.
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ffmpeg encoder. This is what I use to reduce .avi, mpep files down to a reasonable size for my smartphone.
It can read a video TS folder (and it's free!).
It can read a video TS folder (and it's free!).