DVD > Divx Back up process critique

[creechrr]

My current process for converting DVD to Divx is:

DVD Decrypter > DVD2AVI (Huffy) > VirtualDub (final deinterlacing - Divx 5.0.3)

Any suggestions to speed up the process and keep as much quality as possible. File size is not a major conern.

Thanks.

[theDruid]

I'm not expert on this - I've only done it a few times myself, but for what it's worth... I've found this method very quick and easy, and I've been impressed with the quality:

SmartRipper -> FlaskMPEG -> avi plugin/DivX5

The latest Flask (0.7839) has settings for deinterlace etc.., and you can also set it up to do 2 pass, which is good. It also has all the settings for crop, letterbox, iDCT, resizing algorithms etc..

Quality is subjective as always, but I just did a DVD backup with 2-pass VBR on DivX5.0.5 and I was really impressed with the quality (so much better than most DivX files I've seen).

I'm not sure about normalising the audio, but I understand you can do that with vDub now directly in the avi.

I used to use Flask to do DVD->VCD with the panasonic plugin, but then I was won over by the DVD2AVI->TMPGEnc method.

However, the newer versions of Flask have really impressed me, and it now seems a really useful app for converting to MPEG4 (DivX/Xvid) as well as MPEG1/2 formats.

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Gazorgan]

Read the guides.

I use 2 methods, depending on the Audio.

1) DVDDecryptor > VDUBMOD > XviD
I use this for AC3 audio. VDUBMOD reads VOB files.

2) DVDDecryptor > DVD2AVI > VDUB > XviD
I use this one with the VFAPI plugin for the saved project. It extracts the WAV audio in the process.

Both processes take less than 15 minutes (that includes the ripping), not counting the actual DivX/XviD encoding time.

You can freely substitute DivX for XviD. Anything involving Huffyuv is way, way too much work.