Best way to convert episodic DVDs for Windows Media Center?
- by Roger Lipscombe
I'm archiving my DVD collection. My goal is to be able to play them back in Windows Media Center. For feature-length DVDs, I'm using AnyDVD and CloneDVD, which is working well.
For playing back TV shows (and other episodic content), I'm using Media Browser, which doesn't support a VIDEO_TS folder per episode. It expects the shows to be broken up into one file per episode (e.g. "Willo the Wisp - S01E12.avi").
For this, I'm attempting to use Handbrake, which, for extracting the episodes from DVD (or already-ripped VIDEO_TS folder), is working pretty well.
The problem that I have is that the default x264 encoder over-compresses the resulting video stream, which results in hideous artifacts in animated shows. The aforementioned Willo the Wisp is a particularly bad example, because the original DVD is particularly "noisy".
If I switch to using the ffmpeg encoder, the artifacts are gone in Windows Media Player, but I can't get the resulting files to play back in Windows Media Center. I see the first frame, and then there's an error message.
I've installed the CCCP codec collection, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
So: what's the best way to convert VIDEO_TS to individual episode files for playback in Windows Media Center?
