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Author Topic: Movie Formats  (Read 603 times)

ed boy

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Movie Formats
« on: June 22, 2013, 10:05:08 am »

A few months ago, I bought a very large external hard drive. I then proceeded to copy all the dvds in my house onto it, a total of over eighty movies. When copying them over, I chose to keep them in iso format, because it would preserve all the dvd properties and allow me to convert to whatever other format I wanted at a later time. In the months since I copied the movies, I have found that although one can play a movie from the iso file, it is an awkward file type to work with, and I have decided to convert them to a better format. However, the question then arises of what format to use.

I have the following requirements:
-Long movies (3+hours) must be supported
-Subtitles must be supported (and not enforced; they must be toggleable)
-The video and audio must be of high quality with absolutely no danger of desynchronisation (I want a resolution of 800x600 for all of them as a minimum), with fast-paced scenes not stuttering

I have the following preferences, but am flexible with them:
-Filesize should not be too large. I aim to have the average file size less than a gigabyte
-Portability is important. I want to be able to run the movies on another system (potentially a mac) without having to download a whole bunch of things to support them
-A free utility to mass convert them from the isos is preferred. I am able to convert them individually from the isos, or even from the dvds, but I'd rather not.
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foil

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Re: Movie Formats
« Reply #1 on: June 22, 2013, 11:55:26 am »

Most dvd rips i have are in mkv or mp4 format and are about 700-900MB per normal length dvd, will be about 1/10 size of iso files.

I use total video converter to rip the dvds and is probably the easiest app to convert to "free" out there.

http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter/
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ed boy

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Re: Movie Formats
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2013, 12:43:24 pm »

Most dvd rips i have are in mkv or mp4 format and are about 700-900MB per normal length dvd, will be about 1/10 size of iso files.

I use total video converter to rip the dvds and is probably the easiest app to convert to "free" out there.

http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter/

But do those formats support subtitles? There are loads out there that don't.
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foil

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Re: Movie Formats
« Reply #3 on: June 22, 2013, 02:00:55 pm »

It says on wikipedia that mkv supports subtitles and i think you can export the subtitles to a separate file to load for other formats if you have a modern media player.

That app i listed seems to support subtitle recording but you would be better checking yourself, subtitles are something ive never used.
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