Where / How to download films (legally)

[cantisque]

Best method I have found for ripping DVD's (and Bluray) is Ripbot, which is a nice GUI for x264 encoder.

You would need to use un-protected DVD's though, so in most cases finding another tool (like AnyDVD) to remove the copy protection.

I don't own a tablet yet so haven't been able to test them there, but everything else I've ripped plays fine in every media player I've tried with no issues. You can even dictate what filesize you'd like it to end up and it will adjust the settings accordingly. It also has some basic post-processing and upscaling options for removing noise and such.

Seems to work flawlessly every time with every disc I've tried. It's free too.

When I get my Scroll next week, I'll let you know if they work on it, but I don't see why they wouldn't.

[Edmundblackadder]

Thanks for all of the replies. Firstly, just to clarify, I expect to pay for a film if I download it legally just as you pay for a music download. I know people have got used to illegally downloading films for free but the point of the thread was to find a legal way and that clearly involves payment.

The latest DVD FAB edition that I downloaded ripped the DVD but left a DVDFAB monkey on the top left of the screen. A bit annoying that especially as that software is very simple and also fairly quick. I'll try one or two other suggestions mentioned here.

[Slipstreem]

The latest DVD FAB edition that I downloaded ripped the DVD but left a DVDFAB monkey on the top left of the screen. A bit annoying that especially as that software is very simple and also fairly quick.

Yes. That's why I suggested using it to just extract the VOBs from the DVDs and convert them to x264 with HE-AAC audio in an MP4 container with different software as the extraction process doesn't watermark the video, it just extracts it in its raw MPEG-2 form with no modification if the target disc size is set to DVD-9.

RipBot as suggested above will almost definitely work, but it doesn't take full advantage of many of the x264 encoders enhanced features so will produce inferior output for the achieved file size when compared to my profile running under MediaCoder which tweaks all parameters to the hilt in terms of what x264 can do and what the Scroll hardware can handle.

Mine is effectively a dedicated 'decrypted DVD to Scroll Essential/Excel' profile whereas all other strategies will use generic profiles. I guess which approach you take will depend upon how fussy you are about getting the best out of both the x264 encoder and your playback hardware. I'm an incredibly fussy sod, hence the custom profile.

[Edmundblackadder]

Right, didn't understand the first post but I do this one, I think. I will do what you suggest as I have tried Handbrake and that takes forever. Thanks.

[Slipstreem]

You're welcome, although this takes a long time too as it's transcoding the video from the original MPEG-2 to H264. It takes roughly 5 hours of encoding time for every hour of movie time here even on a heavily overclocked Intel C2D PC running at 4GHz.

I guess what I'm really saying is that if your PC is going to be spending hours crunching away converting something then it might as well be making the best job possible of it rather than spending a similar amount of time turning out mediocre results via generic profiles with the likes of RipBot or Handbrake.

It all depends what you want...

If all you want is a watchable file and don't care about the file size then simply decrypting the original DVD and transferring the resultant VOB file to the Scroll works (as long as it's smaller than 4GB) as the Essential and Excel can both play unencrypted VOB files with no need to convert them to any other standard first. This can usually be achieved in a matter of minutes and loses you no quality whatsoever.

On the other hand, if you want to maintain as much quality as possible whilst making the file as small as possible then it has to be transcoded (ie, re-encoded from one standard to another) to achieve the size reduction, and this is always going to be a very lengthy process unless sacrifices are made in terms of the amount of compression you get and/or the quality of the resultant file.

The latter of the two approaches gives a compression ratio averaging around 4:1 with my custom profile, so you can fit roughly 4 times as many movies into a given space with relatively little loss in quality.

[Edmundblackadder]

A good explanation,thanks. I was not sure if the 4-5 hours to decode was exceptionally slow but from your comments I see that is actually correct. I may set each film to run overnight so it is not slowing my computer down overnight. Ideally I want a cracking picture, small file and quick decode but I would rather sacrifice the speed of decode rather than take a hit on the picture quality. A poor picture is too distracting to watch so that is pointless.

[Slipstreem]

Ideally I want a cracking picture, small file and quick decode but I would rather sacrifice the speed of decode rather than take a hit on the picture quality. A poor picture is too distracting to watch so that is pointless.

My phylosophy exactly!

That's why I went to the trouble of experimenting to find out which x264 encoder features and advanced settings were supported and comfortably handled by the Scroll Essential on playback. Incidentally, I now use the exact same custom profile for movie storage on my main media centre PC as it's still quite pleasant to watch when viewed on a 32" Full-HD TV and saves me oodles of hard drive space when compared to storing the original VOB files.

Give me a shout if you get stuck. High quality video transcoding has been a keen hobby of mine since the days of Philips Video CD and I'm always glad to help when I can.

[cantisque]

Any chance you can share your Scroll profile? I should be able to use it with Ripbot as well .

What sort of filesize do you normally end up with for a 720p and/or 1080p 90 minute encode? Normally I just encode them with the standard profiles, aiming for a 4.5GB or 9GB filesize respectively (to fit onto DVD's). These usually stay pretty dam close to their source quality (720p rips from Sky).

[Slipstreem]

Any chance you can share your Scroll profile? I should be able to use it with Ripbot as well .

Hi. There's a link to it in my first post in this thread. It's an XML file and I'm not sure if that's readable by RipBot, but you should be able to read it in an XML viewer and dissect the settings you need, that's assuming that RipBot gives you access to all of the settings I'm using, and it may not do. That's why I'm using MediaCoder as the front-end, because it's almost infinitely tweakable.

What sort of filesize do you normally end up with for a 720p and/or 1080p 90 minute encode?

This profile is specifically aimed at 2-pass transcoding 720x576(i or p) PAL DVD sources or Freeview SD TV grabs and outputs 720x576p at around 10MB per minute of source, so that's around 600MB per hour of source, or around 1GB for a typical 1hr 40 min movie. It's not optimised for HD content, but you're welcome to play with it until it is.

[cantisque]

Will take a look when I get home, can't see it at work.

SD videos should be OK for a 10" tablet, so I may not even need to tweak your settings. It's not my primary reason for getting one anyway, but if I can squeeze a lot of videos on a single memory card that would be pretty awesome.
Then again, I guess it depends on how good the display on the Extreme turns out to be, I may need to up the ante a little if it's especially vibrant.

Thanks for sharing!