Batch conversion of large numbers of DV-AVi to Xvid/Divx

[snehne]

My apologies if this is a FAQ -- I did try to search.

I have about 30hours of home video footages that have recently been captured to hard drive with WinDV, which broke the recordings into segments based on time code (nice). So I have about 5000 dv-avi files, of ~400GB in total.

I'd like to compress them into ~60GB in Xvid or Divx format. Ideally I'd like to create a profile that specifies the audio/video encoders and encoding rate, frame size and rate, and have all 5000 files converted using the profile automatically. I don't want them joined though.

I have tried AutoGK and AVS Video Converter. Both support batch mode, but not what I can use:

AutoGK does not seem to allow multiple input files in one click. Also, It does not seem to allow the setting of bitrates. But in any case clicking 5000 times is not an option.

AVS conveter has almost what I needed -- using "split" "batch mode", and having multiple files loaded, they will be batch converted to the same profile. But for some reason AVS decides to limit only 35 files per batch. So there are still way too many clicks.

I suspect that command line based tools, such as VirtualDub, would be able to do what I want, wiht a script, but I have zero knowledge on how to write such a script

So are there other tools, or wrappers/script-generators of virtualdub and such, that will do/allow such batch conversion?

Thanks a bunch!

[Baldrick]

Maybe ffmpeg would work fine(avi xvid) and with a gui like WinFF maybe you could load all and convert. If not you can make a manual batch file with a for loop and ffmpeg command line.

And I guess you know that you will lose a lot of quality, especially if your source is interlaced and xvid/divx wont be that good for editing.

[snehne]

Thanks for the tips. I understand the quality loss, but as the source is from a consumer grade minidv camcorder so the actual resolution is not too great to begin with.

I do have a question along this line though -- yes the original is interlaced 720x480 in non-square pixel, and when compressing to Xvid I would turn it to non-interlaced 640x480 square pixel (do I have other choice?). Suppose in the future I want to convert some to a DVD; in addition to the quality loss from re-encoding the Xvid data into MPEG2, would the pixel shape play a role as well (My understanding is the DVD uses 720x480)?