The odd thing is I did manage to get it to rip a personal DVD to the N900 earlier this week. I think I used the settings from an early post in this thread and it worked a treat.

The DVD was something personal that I had created but I tried with those same settings on 'The Chariots of Fire' dvd but it didn't work.

I will keep trying different things to see if I can come up with some workable settings for other windows users. Thanks for all the help in this thread everyone.

Change constant quality to RF:16

Windows Media Player

If you get workable settings.. upload that file. I can zip it with a .bat file so users can just extract those two files to a directory somewhere, and run the bat file to copy the user_presets.xml to the right location.

That way users don't even need to worry about finding %APPDATA% and moving things around.

I successfully converted episodes of IT Crowd using Handbrake 0.9.4.

I mucked around with a view different settings, but got best results by starting with the iPhone & iPod Touch settings and then ONLY changing the Width and Height on the PICTURE TAB. Everything else (eg Video Codec H.264 etc) I left the same as the iPhone/iPod Touch settings.

On the PICTURE TAB, I set:-
Width: 720 Height: 416


I don't know much about video encoding, so any suggestions would be welcome.

Is that windows?? Can you save that as it's own Preset and putting up your user_presets.xml?

Judging from that screenshot, the converted video is still CSS scrambled.
I haven't succeeded ripping some DVDs either. Not on Linux and even less on Windows.
Kathy, maybe your DVD is also such a tough copy-protected thing. This would explain the blocks you see on the video.

I've been testing on Handbrake 0.9.4 to find a good setting. Here are some more results. (Current Handbake on Win7 x64)

No presets used. based on Normal.

Picture: direct from DVD (720x576, 1.78:1). Anamorphic set to None. No cropping done. Keep aspect ratio and original resolution.

Video Filters: Nothing changed or edited

Video: H.264 (x264), Constant Quality (default)

Audio: 5.1 Audio channel, AAC/Dolby PL II (this is based on the new Wiki advice that AAC will decode using the DSP, AC3 is decoded using CPU). All default here: Sample rate 48KHz, Bitrate 160kb/sec.

Advanced: deselect B-frames and CABAC (Wiki advice)


Result: plays in KMplayer with mplayer, video runs ~ a few frames per second slower than audio as before. An improvement on straight AC3, but still no luck. H264 is a real problem, I don't see how people can use it with DVD quality sources unless dropping the resolution or cropping.

second run using MPEG-4/ffmpeg for Video, and there was an unacceptable drop in video quality. Back to Xvid? I'd rather not, but the best option so far seems MKV/AVI + Xvid + AAC.

I'm going to bed - work tomorrow, but hopefully one of these may help someone:

Tutorial with screenshots:
http://adubvideo.net/how-to/encoding...motorola-droid
Bear in mind the above is for the Droid, but the N900 has a similar resolution and the same principles will apply. [nb. replace the word Droid with N900 ]

Video Tutorials:
How to Rip a DVD movie with HandBrake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byZHx...eature=related

How to Rip DVDs With HandBrake-Windows Vista/XP [note: turn up the volume to hear the guy, it's very low]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmDvs...eature=related

If there's a problem with copy protection, use the free DVDshrink or DVDdecrypter to rip the DVD to your harddrive uncompressed and then use that as your source.

[note: there are many tutorials with screenshots on videohelp.com for these programs]

If it expects a disc in a drive and won't accept files, use your burning software to create an image. If you don't have any software, I would recommend the freeware ImgBurn. I find it better than any commercial software, and it is the one piece of software that doesn't screw up dual-layer DVDs. Nero messed up quite a few, which I verified many times with additional CRC checks afterwards.

Download and install the free Daemon Tools which will allow you to have virtual DVD drives on your computer. Mount the image file that you had created earlier, and the PC will see it as if you'd inserted a DVD into a physical drive. Use this as your source.

Personally - and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who wants an easy life as there are too many discrete steps - I would rip the DVD(s) uncompressed, then use something like TMPGenc or Super (both of which will queue multiple files) to encode to a DivX or XviD (avi) file, or Videora iPhone Convertor for iPhone standard compatible mp4s (which work great on my Blackberry Bold). The N900 seems to play Xvid/DivX/MP4 quite well in my experience, via TV out or not. For your tests, I'd stick to just an iPhone mp4 format for now until you can get it working.

Good luck!

And now a request for some help:
I bought a DVI to HDMI/DVI splitter, but I am getting no picture when I plug in the DVI to the GeForce 6800GT (old, I know) and the monitor's DVI cable into the splitter box, and the TV's HDMI cable into the splitter box. Or if I just try one in the splitter box. I had this problem with a previous DVI cable as well, but no problems if I use the Dell-supplied DVI cable direct to the monitor.

Any advice? PMs are welcome as it's off-topic.

Gotta order an SSD now and get to bed. I don't want to be wrecked again after staying up til 4am watching the Hurricanes get beat... but after the earlier game with Bowling Green, I don't want to sleep

I ripped Pixar's up from a HD source at 800 pixels and constant quality RF:16 and it plays flawless.