Converting DVDs for viewing on a tablet, while inlining captions

Previously, I  described how to convert HDTV videos for my EEE Pad Transformer.  Now, I'll go over something a bit more difficult.

My wife and I have some DVDs of Bollywood films that we enjoy watching.  Aaja Nachle, Om Shanti Om, 3 Idiots, Billu, among others.  These films are mostly in Hindi, but there are English subtitles available.  As we don't understand Hindi, we watch the movies with the subtitles.  The Android media viewer that comes with the tablet doesn't have a way to select subtitles from an alternate video stream.

Now, I wanted to make files of these movies that I could watch on the Android tablet.  As noted in the previous article, the resulting files have to be H.264 Baseline profile, and under 2GB in size.

Here's how I did this.  Note that this procedure required no less than 70 GB of free disk space to hold a large intermediate file, as I wanted to avoid artefacts introduced by running through multiple codecs, so I used a lossless intermediate state.

First of all, I used the MythTV option to rip a perfect copy of the DVD.  That gave me a file, say 3IDIOTS.vob.

Next, I used mencoder to inline the captions directly into the video stream:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg:aspect=16/9 \
    -vobsubid 0 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=flac \
    -o 3idiots 3IDIOTS.vob

The output file, 3idiots, was, as noted, huge.  It consisted of a lossless jpeg video stream, with the subtitle 0 track overlaid on the video stream itself.

Next, the file had to be converted to H.264 Baseline.  In this case, I decided, rather than setting a qmax, that I would set a bitrate.  That way I could be certain ahead of time what the final size of the file would be, though at the cost of increased trancoding time.  To get a fixed bitrate, it is necessary to run ffmpeg in two passes, once to collect statistics, and the second time to generate the file itself.  Here's how this is run:

ffmpeg -pass 1 -i 3idiots -vcodec libx264 -vpre fast \
    -vpre baseline -b 1400 -acodec libfaac -ab 64k \
    -ac 2 -ar 44100 -threads 3 \
    -deinterlace -y junkfile.mp4

ffmpeg -pass 2 -i 3idiots -vcodec libx264 -vpre fast \
    -vpre baseline -b 1400k -acodec libfaac -ab 64k \
    -ac 2 -ar 44100 -threads 3 \
    -deinterlace 3idiots.mp4 

The "junkfile.mp4" file can be deleted.  The H.264 file, 3idiots.mp4, came in at 1.8 GB, and was of quite acceptable quality to view on the tablet.