Hi, I have all the rippers and burning app's that anyone would need -including; MTR, FFmpegX, Handbrake, DivX converter & Toast 9.

Disregarding time and effort, as I'm prepared to put in both, what is the best end format for display on both a 720p (26") LCD screen and a 1080p (50")?
Please also note the aTV is hacked to the limit and can do almost anything!
If one conversion is best, say .mp4, then great.
-please also advise best settings for audio and video if possible
If one conversion is needed for each, what are they?
-please also advise best settings for audio and video if possible

I neither have the space for the hardcopies (DVDs) or the full-size files (Video_TS Folders) and therefore want to compress my collection without losing too much quality.

Thanks,

Converting video files from DVD to xvid divx mp4 etc has a lot to do with the movie it self and about the size you want your product to be etc, etc.

For the best performance just rip the movie from dvd to a plane mpg file. This can be done with mplayer. This code is MY code, the audio language is probably dutch. So you might need to change your -aid flag value. I wrote this to copy 'copy-protected' dvd's without commercial software. But this is a raw copy, your files will be the same size as your dvd ( over 4 GB).

Bash-$:

CYCLE=0;while [ $CYCLE -lt 50 ];do let CYCLE=CYCLE+1; mplayer dvd://$CYCLE -dumpstream -aid 128 -dumpfile title$CYCLE.vob;sleep 1;done

But now i prefer to use handbrake when my dvd's are not copy protected.
The handbrake options i mostly use are:
(Remember: Sometimes you need to adjust your settings with different movies, there is no such thing as 'perfect for all movies'.)

Codecs: AVC/H.264/AAC Audio (with iPod Atom for my iPhone)
Framerate: same as source
Encoder x264
Quality: Average bitrate (kbps): 1500
2-pass encoding
no turbo first pass
For sports i also do some: Denoise (weak), Deinterlace (fast)
My advanced options are:
level=30:keyint=300:keyint-min=30:bframes=9:cabac=0:ref=6:vbv-maxrate=1500:vbv-bufsize=2000:analyse=all:me=umh:subq=6:no-fast-pskip=1:bime=1:brdo=1:merange=64:mixed-refs=1

This gives me about 700 mb per hour movie.
The encoding takes very long (5 / 10 hours encoding per hour movie on a 2.0 Core 2 Duo) but the quality is great and the file is compatible with my iPhone.

You can learn allot about encoding in the mplayer manual pages. You have got to understand that most of the encoders you downloaded are based on mplayer / mencoder. Mplayer / mencoder is the best on the market imho. So read the mencoder manual and know how it works. If you do, you will understand that a bitrate higher than 1500 will only bring you allot more megabytes and not allot more quality in mp4 (h.264) files.

Good luck and happy encoding,
and remember, there is no such thing as the best setup. It's just what you want.
You can build 30.000 mb files with great quality, but is that what you want?

Gl,

CC

wow. thanks cousincocaine for really spelling it out. you have been a great help and i'll be getting as familiarised with MPlayer as possible.