Ian McCulloch wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Paul Stear wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> Can anybody tell me the best way to convert multiple vob files into one mp4 
>> file. I want to convert these files so that they take up less space whilst 
>> still maintaining a reasonable level of quality.
>> Any suggestions?
> 
> Isn't that completely off-topic for this list?

If he wants to encode it on an AMD64 system: no, not completely ;)
> 
> Anyway, I would problably use mencoder.  And read 
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Backup_a_DVD
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_a_DVD:Encode
> 
> These are aimed at making a backup of an existing DVD, but it also 
> covers re-encoding at a different bitrate.

Simply reencoding and creating a DVD at a lower bitrate isn't the best
idea since MPEG2 isn't the most efficient codec around. You either won't
save that much space or will lose quality pretty soon.

There are a few relatively easy to use GUI Tools around (ogmrip comes to
mind), but they are somewhat limited in options. One tool that has quite
a few options (but therefor requires some knowledge and reading on your
end) is dvdrip. All of these are best used for encoding to xvid.
But there is a new star on the codec horizon, and that's h264. Takes a
lot of CPU cycles to encode (10-12h on an opteron 148 for a 2h movie
with high quality settings here), takes more CPU power than xvid to
decode (Though that shouldn't be as bad as encoding) but gives you the
same quality as xvid with half the bitrate. The best way to encode this
is with mencoder, their homepage has some good information and the
mplayer man page has the rest. Check
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html chapter 14 and following.