[vorbis] Transparent Video Codec

[Corey Miller]

        I'm planning on building a media file server, from which I can host 
media files to several set top boxes connect to my television.  My plan 
is to have a huge collection of music and many emulated games, and 
movies.  The idea is to just have a stripped down file server with a 
large and hard drive, fast network connect.  So from any system in my 
house I could have access to all of my media.  What I wanna be able to 
do is play all of my media over the network.... and a lot more.  Have 
it send the audio to a computer (or just have the server play it 
itself) that would be plugged into my audio reciever so it would go 
through my whole speaker system, and either play the movies on this or 
yet again have another computer that would act as sort of a set top 
box, just to play movies off of it, onto my TV (and through my speakers 
of course :) .)  It also would be useful for doing something like 
syncing for my portable players, like my laptop, so I could have a 
portion of my media onhand wherever I go :)

        The reason I'm bringing this topic to this board, even though I know 
it's offtopic, is because I need to store all of these media files, I 
need to know which codecs to use for what purposes.  Since I'm for 
various purposes I'm considering the use of many ogg related 
technologies for the codec, I posted here because this was the most 
general ogg list.  I apologize if I should have sent this somewhere 
else, and if there is a better place for this message, please tell me 
and I'll send it there.  I've decided to definitely encode my music 
into the Ogg Vorbis format, and my audio books using speex.  Currently 
I only have the budget for a single big hard drive, I was going to get 
a 250 GB one.  (Later as my collection expands I'm going to add another 
hard drive)  Due to this large hard drive capacity, I obviously can 
sacrifice in many cases disk space for high quality.

        Since I have decided on the audio codecs to use for this project....  
I will also need to store video, I want to be able to access any one of 
my DVDs without actually having it on hand or having to put it in.  I 
want to be able to store all the movies from my DVDs (hey! a legal use 
for DVD ripping!) on that hard drive with the music.  I've done the 
math and the listenning tests and with my hearing, -q 6.5 is close 
enough to archive quality for me.  And with the large size of the music 
collection I am building, I have decided to allocated about 50 GB of my 
hard drive just to holding that music.  The videogame roms take up very 
little space themselves, so I'm going to include their space on the 
hard drive in that 50 GB, which leaves 200 GB just for movies.

        What I was wondering is if anyone could make comments or suggestions 
on what I've said so far and help me with the video codec.  I really 
want to have high enough quality video so it looks practically 
transparent (identical to source).  Since 200GB will be dedicated to 
these files, and my collection of DVDs is currently at about 26 and I 
expect it to rise once I have finished this project, so I was hoping to 
hold up to 50 full DVD size movies in this 200 gigabytes, which leaves 
about 4GB a movie.  What codec would be best at compressing something 
to about this size and having the highest quality outcome?  Could 
Theora do this?  Would the old fashioned DivX AVI files be best?  Are 
there any better codecs for this?  How could would Ogg Tarkin do at 
this?  What I'm looking for is the best most modern codec that's good 
at near transparent compression.  But, I'm pretty sure most compression 
formats these days (like ogg vorbis, even though it's an audio codec. 
for example) attempt to achieve the highest quality at low file sizes, 
so the best quality to size ratio is achieved at lower qualities.  What 
I need is something that could look spectacular in that file size range.

        I looked ALL over the tarkin list and I still can't find what sort of 
compression to quality ratio it's expected to give or even an estimated 
date for it to be at a decently workable and stable point in it's 
development.  Tarkin, depending on what you guys say, is my top choice 
at the moment for the video codec.  So I'd definitely like to know how 
tarkin would do at compressing full DVD size movies to somewhere around 
4 GB? Come to think of it, how big are standard uncompressed DVDs?  If 
they're the size of most DVD-RAMs, 4.7GB, then I'd definitely not have 
a problem, and could look for any nearly lossless video codec.  Being 
4.7GB seems kind of unlikely to me, and I'm gonna guess 8.5 GB for a 
standard commercial video DVD.  With the special features and audio not 
on it, I'd guess it would be down to 7-7.5GB, which wouldn't be hard at 
all to get down to about 4 GB.  As I was saying, all I really want is 
the most modern and best way to compress video, make it a little 
smaller but lose practically no quality.

        I'm working on making a great entertainment system and this would be 
the center of it all.  Since I won't even have the place to put this 
thing until maybe late July, I won't need to finish this project until 
maybe late August.  My point is I do have time to wait for things like 
Tarkin to be improved upon before my actual implementation of it.  But 
I would really like to be able to decide on exactly what programs, file 
formats, etc. I'm using right now.  If I could decide on those soon I 
could begin writing all of the little apps and scripts I'm going to be 
using for this.  Like a simple graphical program to select what you 
want it to do, scripts for encoding all of my music and movies (things 
to make it easier, like when I run the script, it would encode an 
entire CD into Ogg Vorbis format, then eject that CD and ask me if I 
wanted to stop or insert another CD, so I could make my collection in a 
fast and troublefree manner.  Plus I was hoping to write some scripts 
to see what are most popular songs at the time being and things like 
that, then I would write something to sync it up to my laptop, and send 
the maybe 200 most popular songs and and any other songs I specifically 
ask it to to my laptop.  And a similar script that would encode into 
MP3(until it get vorbis support!) the most popular songs and any I ask 
for and send them to my nomad jukebox (this would take a while, the 
kind thing I'd run overnight, heh).   But I've just been rambling on 
about what I'm going to do, I should stop soon because all I really 
need is info on the best video codec for my purposes and 
comments/suggestions/criticism on my plans.  And if you think this is 
completely offtopic, say so, and tell me where I should send my 
question.  And for the love of god if your going to tell me it's 
offtopic and not tell me where I should send it, make sure no one else 
has done the same yet, the last thing we'd need is like 20 e-mails 
comic in that just have "Offtopic" in the body, lol.

        Note--If during this e-mail I sound like my IQ is just above zero, 
don't blame me, mainly because just above zero is a lot more sleep than 
I've gotten tonight, and it's 5:20..... ugh, I need to be ready by 
6:30.  Insomnia is not fun :(

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