The process of turning DVDs into something useful on Windows has been long, error-prone, and ultimately unsatisfactory for years; I’ve recently (this weekend) purchased a tool to make it much easier, although not as easy as it might be. I’ve been using DVDShrink to extract an image of the DVD sans CSS; I use settings that disable recompression in order that I end up with an image of the filesystem on the DVD.
I’ve used, over the years, a number of free and pay tools to make videos out of the MPEGs; they’ve always been fairly slow and not really designed with repeatability in mind. Handbrake is nice, but very slow; a 22 minute episode takes several hours to compress on my machine, which is just not tenable.
This weekend, I looked for GPU-enabled video transcoders; I found badaboom. By using my (super cheap) 8800 GT video card, it gets from 100fps to 300fps transcoding, depending on the source and target formats; the downsides to badaboom are that it isn’t scriptable and you may experience video artifacts if you use your computer while transcoding occurs.
Badaboom also has a Zune target, which Handbrake does not (and never will) have. This makes “copy the dvd to my zune” the matter of a few clicks and some waiting, instead of the incredible amount of dicking around required before.
Not limited to DVDs, it will transcode whatever video you have to whatever (h.264) format you want. I tested some MPEGs from my video camera; they compress nicely with a minimum of artifacting.
There are some silly bits, though. Badaboom will happily upscale content to insane sizes; a 640*480 MPEG from my video camera which comes it at around 2 gigs will be upscaled to 1280*720 and 7 gigs. You need to go to “advanced” and choose your target resolution to prevent such chicanery.
If you like to use your DVDs on portable devices, and you use Windows, and you own an nVidia CUDA-capable video card, Badaboom is worth the $30.
