Genral Ripping/Encoding Questions/Remarks

[KiLLerCloWn]

Hi all

OK, I've been at this for a few days now, I've been reading all the faqs and guides and I've done some backups and althjo I get the general picture there's always one or the other hickup, so I was wondering:

How easy is this supposed to be? How successful should my ripping br? Do you guys always get it right?

Here's how it's gone for me.

- Backed up first chapter of The Guilty just fine but Smartripper could read the whole movie, got stuck on reading some blocks almost at the end of the movie - 1st attempt, moderate success

- Backed up Terminator - with Flask Mpeg this time and the Audio is out of synch, stretched. Couldn't fix this, even with Nicky's tool, after messing for about 6 hours...pain in the neck.... - 2nd attempt, moderate success

- Backed up Chocolat, again with Flask Mpeg, don't get any Sound, God knows why. Did a two minute test which had sound, now the whole movie doesn't have any. It's encoding again right now, we'll see what gives in a couple of hours time - 3rd attempt, moderate success

...with all this I'm wondering: If I have to mess about for hours every day, using different softwares every time, running test encoding, readjusting, starting over, then I'd rather leave it and spend my time playing games or sth, I do have a dayjob...or, have I just been unlucky and normally it works quite well without you having to spend your entire free time backing up your movies...

Thanks

KC

[Trancemaster]

Hey KillerClown, it makes me sad to see you having so many problems, after all your doing it because you enjoy it right?
The only thing to do is persevere I'm afraid and you'll get it right, and get it right again. I haven't had any problems since the first time, but I think that's probably because I use the same method every time.
Maybe you should try making VCD's instead of DivX, you might have more success. Here's how I make all of my backups:
Rip with SmartRipper, using all default options
Then use Flask 0.6 on the following settings:
DivX 4.11 - 1 pass quality based, all other DivX options default
MP3 128Kb/s, 48000 Hz
Video at 576*304 (for widescreen), default fps, Decode audio, HQ bicubing filtering.

That's it!
hope this helps.

BTW - What audio synching tool do u use? Have you tried AVIinfo?

[KiLLerCloWn]

Hey T., thanks for the sympathetic post

Yeah, it's supposed to be fun, that's why I was wondering if this was an art which is hard to master or whether it should just work if you use the right proggies.

I used Flask to do both video and audio, I guess I should try usind VDub and multiplex audio and video streams....

I'm looking at sth completely different at the mo but I'm not sure how it'll work out: I have dedicated a partition for a complete rip of a movie, 6 gigs in this case. No quality lost yet and playable off the HD through PowerDVD.

I will now proceed to do a partition clone image of the whole partition with Norton Ghost. It ususally has a really high compression ratio. If I can get that partition compressed to 2 gig I could split the files and save them on 3 CDs...and have no quality loss whatsoever!

To view the movie I would only have to redump the partition, which only takes a few minutes, and I'd have a perfect quality DVD rip to view...

We'll see about compression ratio, but it's an idea I was having while fiddling with the audio aynching ast night...why have any quality loss if there are other backup methods...we'll see how it goes

Cheers

KC