Having years of experience in video production, consumer video service and operating video streaming service for American Football Monthly, I am now working on a project that I realized remembering some of these details and where I wrote them down was a problem. The problem lends me to write down some notes on converting DVDs for the web.
For years the standard in video on the web for us has been flash, lo bitrates and resolution to keep buffering to a minimum. Today technologies and bandwidth have improved and its time to upgrade those flash videos to HTML 5 video formats. We are outputting .mp4, .webm, and .ogv using server side video conversion with ffmpeg. I may write about ffmpeg in a future blog, setting it up and using it was a slight challenge but once operating we have our own youtube, gigya, or bright cove type of service.
I produce a line of DVDs for AFM, and make those available for streaming on the web, but we do not keep the original production files so to upgrade it is necessary to rip our DVDs to create hi res mp4 files that we can upload and convert.
This blog is about getting those DVDs to an acceptable file format that can be uploaded and converted to HTML5 video specs by ffmpeg. After trying a few DVD ripping programs, I found that I needed to use Handbrake, the reason was simple, it seemed to do the best job at deinterlacing the DVDs. Some of the programs were not able to de interlace the video at all, not good for this type of project.
Under the filters tab I chose Deinterlace ‘FAST’ option, and for the resolution settings I’m looking for 640×480 display size (everything is standard def), next I set the Average bitrate to 3000kbps and use the H264 video codec. Click Source, and locate the DVD drive then make sure to load the correct movie off the DVD, most DVDs contain menus and titles other the main movie, next select the output destination and file name. Click the start button to begin the conversion. The program Hanbrake then uses its own built in FFmpeg library to convert the video and create a very nice mp4 file. That is all for the local process, I take that file and upload it, then let my server do the final conversion for web streaming.
