[MPlayer-users] vobs

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 11:59:53PM -0800, Brian Craft wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Newbie question: Why does everyone encode dvds to divx instead of leaving them
> as decrypted vob files? Is this just a size issue? Doesn't it lower the video
> quality to decode and recode in a different format?

If you want to make a 15-cd rip of your dvd, be my guest. However this
is total nonsense since you'd have to swap discs every few minutes to
watch it, and since sharing such massive files is not feasible.

Also, yes, reencoding does lose information. Whether it reduces
quality is a more subjective question. A 2-cd mpeg4, if made properly,
is usually not visibly distinct from the original dvd unless you look
at still frames or scale it up huge (with a projector or something).
Even a good 1-cd mpeg4 will look the same on a normal (crappy) tv
screen, and it's probably acceptable for watching on a monitor.

Further, sometimes the rip can actually have "better" quality,
subjectively. For example, if the dvd is interlaced, it will look
horrible on a progressive scan monitor (IMO it even looks horrible on
a TV screen interlaced). When reencoding to mpeg4, you can
deinterlace, eliminating these ugly artifacts.

Rich