To reduce disk clutter, I have been converting my son's DVDs to MPEG-1 files. This way I can get from 3 to 5 movies on a DVD. However, it takes up to 1.5 hours to convert a movie.

Question 1

What hardware upgrade would allow me to considerably shorten the time taken to convert. I have 1.5 gig of RAM, and a 3.2 Gig Intel chip. I do not have any sort of graphic card. I use the one built into the mother board

Question 2

Occasionally I get a movie which after conversion, the voice is out of sync with the video. Without using excessive Geek-Speak, how can I eliminate this problem.

Paul

The cheapest and best solution IMO is to either buy and burn the files to external media (DVD+-R) or buy more storage space (hard drives).

If your going to continue "ripping" video encoding is most dependant on your CPU. MPEG-1 is very old and poor video format, use a modern encoder like MPEG-4.

1. Burn the DVDs onto blank DVDs. DVD burners are dirt cheap nowadays.

2. Don't encode them to MPEG-1, that's an insult quality wise. Encode them to XvID AVI with AutoGordianKnot (freeware). Absolutely brilliant software!

3. Your CPU is what goes to 100% usage when encoding video so if you're unhappy with the time it takes, either get a faster CPU or schedule the encodings for when you are not at the PC.

Just a question... you said your doing this to reduce disk clutter... wouldn't DVDs in their original packaging be non-cluttered? And I wouldn't recommend tossing out the originals. I'm hoping this isn't what you mean to do.

I'll go with what Jeremy said regarding the how-to. To add to #3, Intel's Core2Duo CPUs are currently the top performers when it comes to video encoding, although they'll set you back more than an AMD chip. Depending on what motherboard/socket your current CPU is running on, you might be able to simply upgrade the CPU and be done with it, but my hunch is that your system isn't C2D compatible.

Regarding the "out-of-sync" problem, it's due to the DVD manufacturers putting dummy frames into the DVD. They're ignored by your DVD player, but your computer tries to be smart, so it includes them. To get around this, download the program called DVD Shrink (it's old and no longer maintained, but who cares - it works). Once installed, make a re-authored DVD using DVD Shrink and save it to your hard drive - just the main title (nothing else). This will take a bit of space (~8GB max). Then use AutoGK like Jeremy said above to rip the movie. It's a one-two punch that always works for me.

AutoGK can queue jobs. Save yourself some cash by queueing (sp?) a few up and letting it run over night.