DVDtoOgm

DVDtoOgm is far from the average video conversion tool. Devoted to perform high-quality transcodes of your MPEG DVD files into Ogg Vorbis videos, it offers you an overwhelming amount of settings, filters, and options for you to customize nearly every aspect of the resulting video, audio, and subtitle streams.

This is not a tool for all users – if you are an inexperienced user looking for a fast and simple MPEG to Ogg video converter, you may find DVDtoOgm complex and feel a bit overwhelmed by all the options and features that pack up its various windows. The interface itself is not the most user-friendly – clearly, functionality takes precedence over usability and visual aesthetics here. Organized in ten different tabs, the dozens of options available range from basic to highly technical. The first tab allows you to select the VOB files that you wish to convert, and it offers you three simpler and extremely helpful utilities – DVD2AVI, SubRip, and VobSub. These will allow you to create AVI files out of your VOBs, as well as alternative or forced subtitles, respectively.

Things get a bit tougher when deciding on the quality of the output video and audio streams. You will need to have some knowledge about bit and frame rates to make the most of the options in these tabs, but you can always let the program make most of those choices for you. Configuring the encoder requires also some patience – you can choose among DivX, 3ivX, and XviD as the codec to generate the video streams for the Ogg container, select the number of passes to perform, and check the level of compressibility of the input file. This tab includes also a number of filters to fine-tune the cropping, resizing, and denoising processes, among others. Besides, you have the possibility of creating your own customized filters here.

The possibilities are endless, and savvy users will certainly enjoy playing around with this excellent and comprehensive open source tool.