Using MediaShrink

In my last post I described the functionality of MediaShrink.  It is by far one of the easiest pieces of software to use and does a great job of logically transcoding files based on the input type.  One of the killer functions of MediaShrink is it’s ability to identify if a VIDEO_TS folder contains a TV show DVD. It will output separate video files for each episode automatically using the built in logic.  Let me show you how easy it is to do that.

First, you need to rip a show to a VIDEO_TS folder. You can use a variety of ways to do this. I like DVD Decrypter.  Once you get it to your hard drive, you’ll have a folder with all of your VOB files in it.

From there, you obviously need to download and extract MediaShrink.  Once you extract it, you’ll see folder with a bunch of files in it.

Not the sexiest looking thing in the world, but who cares?  There are a few different ways you can use MediaShrink. There is a way to call it from the command line, but the far easiest way is to just drag a folder or file on top of either MediaShrink.exe.

Here, I’ve ripped the first disc of the first season of 24 to my hard disk and a I have the window for MediaShrink open. I then simply dragged and dropped the folder onto Mediashrink.exe.

The next thing you’ll see is this lovely terminal window that opens up.  It’s basically showing the logic behind the program. At this point you just watch it go.

For a TV Show DVD, you will eventually get a folder labeled (in this instance) “24_DISC1 COMPRESS” that will have the individual episodes separated out within the folder.

One of the other great functions of Mediashrink is to also take all of the audio tracks in English and put them in the resultant output file.  On a different disc that I encoded (Doctor Who, Series 1, Disc 1), you will see that there are three episodes on the disc. If I get Mediainfo to report out the streams in the first episode, you’ll see the main audio track and the commentary track.

MediaShrink is customizable.  You can edit the switches present in the “mediashrink.defaults.txt” file included in the root directory to change the bitrate, encoding quality and container format among other things.   Read the readme file to get details about how to use it.

Download MediaShrink

Tags: mediashrink, sage, SageTV, SageTV Add-In Feature, transcoding

Category: Windows Home Server