Fair Use Wizard

[[JiF]Mike]

Just thought I would take a minute to mention one of my favorite new programs.

It's called Fair Use Wizard and it allows you to rip your DVD's to your HDD in a nice compressed format like Xvid or Divx. This may not be an important thing for many of us, but since I use SageTV for most of my TV and video watching I am building up a nice library of movies that are available at all times without searching for the disc. My hope is that I can start storing the original discs to free some shelf space up and protect them at the same time. The program itself is very easy to use, has a simple wizard that walks you through all the steps, of which there are only about 5 or 6. The only place that there isn't an auto-set feature is the final one where you can tweak the settings, and the defaults will work pretty well for most.

Before I found this program I was using like 6 or 7 different programs each playing a different role in the overall process. For example I would yank out the AC3 surround sound audio track with one program. Calculate the bit-rate with another, compress the video with yet another, and finally combine the audio and video into one file with still another program. All this took a lot of time and patience, with Fair Use Wizard it takes me about 5-10 minutes of my time, then I let the pc do the rest and the videos are better quality.

Give it shot, it's great at what it does.

[[JiF]KellysHero]

How is it with HD content?

[[JiF]Thos]

Wow Mike, we are on the same wavelength today. I started looking for a program that would allow me to stream dvd's that I've ripped to .iso files. No luck so far, but looks like TVersity is looking into supporting that format. I use TVersity for streaming my media files to a DLink DSM520.

Do you lose picture/sound quality when you convert the movies to the xivd format? What is the average size of a movie? I don't care if the TV shows I watch are lower quality, but for movies I want the best picture/sound quality. I started ripping DVDs and burning 'backups' but have been thinking it would be nice just to leave the iso's on my system for on-demand watching.

[(BDU)opcenter]

I use Handbrake for that myself. Mostly with TV shows because it's annoying to have 5-6 DVDs per season if you're looking for a specific episode... much easier to just store them on a file server and navigate through that.

I don't do that much for movies though because I generally have a lower tolerance for quality degradation with movies... I want them to be as close to their native format as possible.

[[JiF]Mike]

On the last step I bump the file size up to 1400MB and set the quality vs. speed slider all the way to quality. I then select ac3 as my audio format to maintain surround sound and then move onto the resolution setting. I try to keep the width to around 640, with a compression ratio of ~100:1. I vary the file size accordingly to achieve the right resolution and ratio to account for the length of the movie. I've watched a few movies I've done and they've been great. I can't say they are perfect dvd quality but I think that has more to do with my HTPC, it needs an upgrade badly. I've also streamed these files to my MediaMVP and they are perfect. SageTV integrates the MediaMVP in nicely, glad I held onto it. It's well worth trying to see if it's what you want.

As for HD content, I can't really say. This software is really for riping dvd's and I do not know if it supports HD-DVD or BluRay...my guess is that it does not. I will mention that I downloaded all the episodes of Planet Earth in HD and they look great...not sure what software was used to convert them. Each episode is 2.5GB though.