After my unfortunately experience with Handbrake, I went looking for another product that could do encoding. I tried out a few, and was starting to lose hope, until I came across MeGUI. It has everything I need, and way more than I wanted. It totes itself as the most comprehensive GUI based encoding software out there. It’s probably right. It looks like it has a ton of great features.
More in this series –
Sometimes I feel bad using a program like that and just doing the 1 button press presets, but that’s the limit of my knowledge in this area. I’m not doing anything fancy anyway, just ripping my DVDs to put on my media center. So – downloading MeGUI. You can find it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/files/
Installing is just a matter of unzipping and running the executable. Nothing special so I’ll skip going over it in depth. Once it’s installed, open up and it’s time to start encoding. I’m making use of the One Click Encoder, you can either hit Ctrl+F1, or under the Tools Menu select “One Click Encoder”.
In the new window that opens, we need to pick our source. If you have a media file you can select file, since we have VOB folders, we’re selecting Folder.
It can take a few seconds for the presets to get calculated. But shortly everything will fill in. I always rename the output file since it usually is filled in with something like VTS_01_1
You can mess with the presets by clicking on the config button, but I never have so you shouldn’t need to bother. Click the “Go” button on the bottom right to get started. A status window will open and things will start happening.
Now you can go back to the main window and repeat the process as many times as you want to queue up encoding jobs. MeGUI keeps a list of tasks and runs through them sequentially to provide finished products. To take a look at the job log, open the main window and click on the Queue tab on the top. It gives you a nice overview of what’s happening, when it happened and what’s going to happen next.
NOTE – At first you won’t see any output files, MeGUI creates those jobs after it’s done the initial scans, so if you queue up a bunch of jobs at once you won’t get any final output until it’s done the initial scans on all the other jobs. So don’t be concerned if your files don’t appear right away, they’ll get there eventually.
I have run in to a few problems with MeGUI. At one point it was shutting down “Couldn’t access protected memory” – which I think meant something was corrupted. I re-copied the movie folders and it worked eventually. I’ve also had various errors where there is missing (or extra) data in the audio stream that might cause sync errors (only once so far has it cause a sync problem) and negative time codes on subtitles. None of which prevent the final product from being produced, but show up as errors or incomplete jobs in the job queue. You just have to delete those manually, not a big deal.
If you do get errors, check the Log tab, it will give you more details. You can also read the raw log at the install directory of MeGUI under the “Logs” folder.
Happy encoding! If you use a different program drop me a line, I’m always looking to expand my knowledge. Any questions or comments, you know what to do below.