Ripping old TV shows

[Simon514]

Hello!

First post here.

I have ripped season 01 of The Golden Girls and Will & Grace last year or so, and just now, I start watching it and it looks awful. Especially The Golden Girls who are full of pixels and just plain wrong. I watch my daily dose of Golden Girls on Disney+ (looks fine there) but I will cancel mu subscription soon hence why I will rip all seasons.

Will & Grace, there is some sort of weird quick wink almost every time they change scene/camera angles If that make sense...

I can't remember for sure but I think I ripped with VLC but it says mkv format, each episodes are around 930 000 ko. I dunno what that means, I am just giving you the most infos. I am watching through PLEX on a FireTV.

Now, I think I remember reading somewhere that with DVDs or old TV shows in 480 or something you had to have some sort of special settings or something amongst those lines... Am I crazy here or have I really read that?

I will use MakeMKV from now on and re-rip it all but I would like to make sure I am doing it right this time around.

I have watched a few how to videos and it looks easy enough but, again, am I missing something with old TV shows?

Thanks!

[dcoke22]

The video on DVDs is lower quality than what comes on a standard blu-ray. And for older shows, you're limited by whatever the studios chose to put on the discs, which might not have been the highest quality that was available.

In any case, MakeMKV will make a faithful copy of whatever is on the DVD without altering the quality. Your best bet it to just put the files MakeMKV produces from the DVDs directly onto your Plex server.

[segfaulted]

I have ripped season 01 of The Golden Girls and Will & Grace last year or so, and just now, I start watching it and it looks awful. Especially The Golden Girls who are full of pixels and just plain wrong. I watch my daily dose of Golden Girls on Disney+ (looks fine there) but I will cancel mu subscription soon hence why I will rip all seasons.

Will & Grace, there is some sort of weird quick wink almost every time they change scene/camera angles If that make sense...

The first thing that I can think of is the combing effect from interlacing.
Can you take a quick look at this wikipedia article ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video

On that article, they got an example showing the man with his arms up, and another example with the car tires. The effect should easy to notice if you view the pictures at full size. Can you confirm if that's what you meant by "full of pixels and just plain wrong" with the video?

[Simon514]

I have ripped season 01 of The Golden Girls and Will & Grace last year or so, and just now, I start watching it and it looks awful. Especially The Golden Girls who are full of pixels and just plain wrong. I watch my daily dose of Golden Girls on Disney+ (looks fine there) but I will cancel mu subscription soon hence why I will rip all seasons.

Will & Grace, there is some sort of weird quick wink almost every time they change scene/camera angles If that make sense...

The first thing that I can think of is the combing effect from interlacing.
Can you take a quick look at this wikipedia article ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video

On that article, they got an example showing the man with his arms up, and another example with the car tires. The effect should easy to notice if you view the pictures at full size. Can you confirm if that's what you meant by "full of pixels and just plain wrong" with the video?

There you go. 2 seconds it does that, 3 seconds it doesn't, then again, then not and so on...

Doesn't really matter anyway as I will re rip the whole thing. I just wanted to make sure I did it the right way this time around.

Is there a guide and/or video for settings and how to rip TV shows especially?

Thanks again!

[Simon514]

Okay, I didn't remember seeing those pixels last year when I did it so just for fun I switched to my GoogleTV Chromecast (the white one with the remote) and, low and behold, no more pixels... Granted, the image is still a bit jerky, most probably because of interlacing indeed but it's most probably the difference in processors/chips between the GoogleTV and the FireTV that is the cause.

Well, in this instance, the new FireTV Stick 4K MAX that I bought just last month seems to have worse processing power than my 2 years old GoogleTV Chromecast...

Anyway, the Golden Girls pixel mystery is solved. Sorta.

[pneumatic]

[Deleted]

Reason for deletion: I missed the bit where OP says they used VLC to "rip" the DVDs

What Radiocomms237 writes below seems correct.

And screen recording software usually uses a very short keyframe interval which is consistent with the macroblocking in OPs screenshot and it pulsing in severity every 1000ms.

OP should use Makemkv to rip the discs instead. The resulting files will be perfect carbon copies of what's on the disc as per dcoke22's comment. Also known as "DVD remux".

[Radiocomms237]

From the first post:

~ I can't remember for sure but I think I ripped with VLC ~

If this is the case, and as far as I know, if you used VLC Media Player then it would be a screen capture rather than a rip.

That's a whole different ball game to ripping the actual files using MakeMKV!