Convert HD-DVD to DVD

Since I couldn’t find SQUAT on actually doing this with a Google search, I’m hoping this will help someone/anyone who – like me – picked the wrong side in the HD wars and now has a stack of discs which are becoming more useless over time.  My goal is simple, use my Xbox-360 HD-DVD drive and my computer to convert my stockpile of HD-DVD’s to a format that doesn’t rely on hardware which is generally useless these days.

Software needed:

• DVDFab HD Decrypter (version 3.0.96) – This version is OLD, the ability to rip HD-DVD was added in 3.0.96, and subsequently removed later on.  This version should be easy to locate if you know where to look.
• FFMPEG / GUI4FFMPEG (latest version of both).

I’m doing this on my Windows 7 Home system with a quad-core i7 CPU and 4gb of RAM.  The first disc I ripped was V For Vendetta, a personal favorite.  Once you’ve installed DVDFab HD Decrypter, use it to rip the FullDisc to your hard drive.  This bit could take up to an hour.  Once complete, fire up gui4ffmpeg, and locate the movie files.  They’ll have an EVO suffix and probably run in the 7-8gb range.

Open the first EVO file in ffmpeg, and pinpoint the video/audio streams you want to use.  In my case, V had 2 video streams in the file, and many audio streams.  I used the first video stream and the 3rd audio stream.  These can be specified by using the “-map 0:0” options to ffmpeg.  That specifies the input streams you’ll use.  For example:

D:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe” -i “D:\HDDVD\FullDisc\DVD_VOLUME\HVDVD_TS\PEVOB_1.EVO” -map 0:0 -map 0:3 -target pal-dvd -b 6000000 -aspect 16:9 -s 720×576 -acodec ac3 -ab 448000 -ac 6 -mbd 2 -qmin 2 -async 1 -y “D:\HDDVD\MPEG\V_1.mpg

That line is from the batch file I created in gui4ffmpeg.  What it does is take the source EVO file, map stream 0 (video) and stream 3 (ac3 stereo audio) to a pal-dvd formatted mpg file that I specify.  Note that if you have separate EVO files, ffmpeg will not combine them automatically. You need to dump each individual source file to a separate MPG file.  Since the output is MPEG2, combining them is easy once this part is done.  Converting the files will take over 2 hours, so find something exciting to do elsewhere.

Once you’ve converted the EVO’s over to MPG’s, you need to combine them into a single MPG that you can then convert to XVID, burn to a DVD, or do whatever you want with.  If you’ve got Cygwin on your system, you can simply use the ‘cat’ command to combine the files, ala:

• cat file1.mpg file2.mpg > file3.mpg

And you’re done.  Once your file is in that format, you can do whatever you like with it.  I realize I’m not that great at giving instructions, but had I found this information to begin with I wouldn’t have wasted a few hours figuring out how to do it in the first place. 🙂