OT: How to compress my DVDs for portable player?

riredale wrote on 11/14/2007, 7:33 AM
I just got a really neat toy, a Sony UX-380n Vaio PC. It's just as functional and as powerful as a laptop, but you can hold it in the palm of your hand. They normally go for about $2k but they were selling for just under $1k, thanks to their lethargic behavior under Vista. First thing I did (naturally) was to rip out Vista and "upgrade" to XP. There's an active online community that has taken the time to ferret out all the necessary drivers for XP, since Sony won't help.

Okay, so to watch one of my DVDs on it I can literally just drop the VIDEO_TS folder into it and use an app like WinDVD to watch it. But that takes up 4.38GB. Is there a more compact way to watch the DVD? The reason I ask is because there isn't any DVD drive on this baby PC, just a 40GB hard drive with about 20GB of free space, and that space gets used up awfully quickly with 4.38GB DVDs.

I figure there must be something that the kids use to watch movies on their iPod or PSP devices. I don't want just video compression; I want the menu structure and everything, just like the original DVD.

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/14/2007, 8:30 AM
you could use vegas to render to a different codec. just put the .vob's on the timeline.
Chienworks wrote on 11/14/2007, 8:50 AM
How about something like DVDShrink that supposedly can put an entire DVD movie on a 650MB CD? That will cut it down to about 1/6 the size.

If you wanna go smaller than that you're probably looking at DivX or some other MP4 flavor. I use DivX at about 300kbps for my Archos with a 3" screen and it looks fine. However, there are no menus at all, not even chapter points. It's just a straight beginning to end file.