HandBrake

I went through many different DVD rippers for PC and recently for MAC (I have just got sweet MacBook 2GHz..).
Each application excells in some features and is a looser in other...

I finally tested HB and thought this might be THE ONE...

But , as I ripp a lot of music DVDs and have them played in a pub (with no desire to turn the volume knob up and down all the time) , I do really miss features like:

1. ADJUST VOLUME ( -3 to +12 dB)


2. SELECT MORE TRACKS AT ONCE FOR BATCH PROCESSING or create CHAPTERS TO INDIVIDUAL FILES .

On a PC I ripped a few seconds, opened it in an audio app with Peak and RMS meters. I could see how many dB I could go up before clipping. Then I would go back to the ripper, adjusted volume and batch ripped the DVD.
The volume levels on music DVD are not always quite the same for each track, but one can get pretty close.

If I dare to ask for a super duper sound feature, then I would imagine the ripper TO SCAN EACH TRACK finding its PEAK and ADJUST VOLUME so the audio peak reaches the full scale 0dBfs. Than start ripping the track etc.



P.S. It still surprise me ( not only on this forum),that everybody cares so much for the picture but not so much for the sound..

Re: audio volume, what would actually be really awesome (and, amazingly enough, exactly as easy to implement) would be compression/limiting. (I say exactly as easy, it would of course require a few extra controls in the UI, but nothing you guys can't handle.)

The great thing here is that Compression is built into OSX as an Audio Unit. They're pretty easily accessible, at least in Obj-C (I don't know about in C, I don't use it). I guess what I'm trying to say is that you don't have to write it yourself, so that's a bit easier.

If we only ran on OS X, you'd be right. Fortunately, we're multiplatform - which means we do need to roll it ourselves.

Rodney

" [quote="gormster"]Re: audio volume, what would actually be really awesome (and, amazingly enough, exactly as easy to implement) would be compression/limiting. (I say exactly as easy, it would of course require a few extra controls in the UI, but nothing you guys can't handle.) "
....................................................................................


Thanx for the audio interest.

The compression and/or limiting would really make this app stand out of the crowd. This could be a paid extra Pro option for Mac for now, if it can be implemented without too much troubles, as mentioned.

Anyway at least a feature to add (subtract) a few dB would be very usefull, not to mention the audio level batch normalization..

Molti

There won't be a "Pro" Version. This is open source software.

The only chances of said feature happening, is if someone comes along and writes a patch that's cross-platform compatible.

There are two components to this.

The first is Dynamic Range Compression - this is built in to AC3 and DTS audio streams, but code must be written to interpret it and act on it. There are several levels of DRC possible, but "normal" is the generally-accepted setting.

Second is audio normalization, which applies to all audio streams, and must be done after DRC to bring up the overall max gain to 1.0.

These are the patches that are needed and have yet to be written.

Rodney

rhester wrote:There are two components to this.

The first is Dynamic Range Compression ...

Second is audio normalization...
These are the patches that are needed and have yet to be written.

Rodney

I have just read the Sticky: "README before suggesting a feature " and found out that the VOLUME NORMALIZATION may appear in HB v.1 .
That would be great, but might probably adjust the normalization to wrong level in case, where the audio gets some error sound spikes during ripping process.
I still think, that to be able to set the volume a few dB more manually before converting some low level sound DVD track (or all ) may help the overal sound volume leveling , even if a few peaks get over 0dBfs.

Anyway the Normalization would help great way in most cases and I hope it will gets to some updates soon.

molti wrote:Anyway the Normalization would help great way in most cases and I hope it will gets to some updates soon.

Again:
"These are the patches that are needed and have yet to be written."

molti wrote:[snip]

2. [snip] create CHAPTERS TO INDIVIDUAL FILES .

This would be a HUGE HUGE time-saver. Yes, the queuing allows one to get the job done to separate files, but it takes 3 or 4 mouse clicks and a filename edit, by hand add the chapters to the queue, each with their own unique filename. It is VERY VERY time-consuming and tedous for the user to set this up for a DVD with dozens of tracks.

One example is the increasing number of "live" and "in concert" DVDs, with chapter markers delimiting each song. I don't always like every song on the DVD, so I'd prefer to have the chapters written as individual movie files -- and it would be so easy for HB to do this so that the end-user need not do so much pointing / clicking / editing by hand.

Alternatively, does anyone know of a utility that will read a movie and split it into separate movies at chapter boundaries, keeping the same base filename and just appending the track number to the output filename?

leon wrote:Alternatively, does anyone know of a utility that will read a movie and split it into separate movies at chapter boundaries, keeping the same base filename and just appending the track number to the output filename?

This would almost certainly require re-encoding of the content unless x264 scene detection is working particularly well and you get lucky with the I-frames. In short, no, there isn't one.

Rodney