DVD to Divx - "video quality" question

[spooky]

I have a question, I have seen several divx movies or episodes of shows that were ripped from a dvd & they looked excellent, even when you watch it in fool screen. Now, I have tried to get the quality the same when I rip a movie or a show but for some reason my rips look good when original size but when watching in full screen I get the blocks all over the screen. Why would that be? I use DVD2AVI, HeadAC3 for audio conversion, I fake the AVI & then use V-Dub to encode into Divx 5 & Lame MP3, I used the same resolution as the movies i have seen & other resolutions but I just can not get it right.
Any ideas?
Should I use some other tools to get this done?

[Conquest10]

what bitrate do you use for the divx files?

[FulciLives]

Hello

Well first of all you should use a resolution of 640x480 as this is considered full screen for the DivX format. If the image is widescreen you can crop the black from the top and bottom so your height might not always be 480 but your width should always be 640

So assuming you are using a high enough resolution the next setting is the bitrate. If you set the bitrate too low then you will not get very good quality. I like to use GORDIAN KNOT when I create a DivX because it has a decent way of determining what quality you will get at a certain bitrate

If you want to see just how good DivX can look try encoding something using the 1 pass quality based 100% setting. The results will stun you I am sure (the quality is nearly identical to DVD assuming that is your source). Of course that will create a HUGE file but you don't need to use that high of a bitrate for excellent quality.

There is no single best bitrate setting as it depends on the movie ... that is why GORDIAN KNOT has a compression test. However in general you should probably never go below 1,000kbps if you want excellent results. For full length movies I almost always go for a total size that will fit on 2 CD-R discs as limiting yourself to the size of a single CD-R disc will most likely result in less-than-excellent quality due to the limited bitrate you must use to make such a small file.

Some other tips ... don't use any of the so-called PRO settings ... this includes GMC and Q-Pel although B-frames (bi-directional encoding) will usually help compress better with no visual loss. I also would turn off (I think the setting is none) pyschovisuals.

I usually do the multipass thing with 3 passes total but I have found that some (though not many) full feature films can be done with 1 pass quality based at 100% (or the next highest level under 100%) and still fit across 2 CD-R discs.

Since you are doing episodes I would suggest that to get excellent quality you are probably looking at getting no more than 2 (maybe 3) half hour episodes per CD-R and probably only a single hour long episode per CD-R

To fit more than that on a single CD-R disc you are either not using a high enough bitrate and/or resolution which will keep your DivX files from looking as good as they can.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

*** EDIT ***
You can find a great guide to using GORDIAN KNOT on the doom9 website.

[spooky]

Fantastic, I will give it a try & see what will happen, my problem always has bee that after encode the video looks good in the resolution I encoded it in but when I go to watch it full screen that is when the quality goes to hell.
I appreciate the help, I will give it a try.

[Robert Simandl]

If you're willing to pay the fifty bucks, DivX has a new program out called "Dr. DivX" that automates the whole process. I was kind of surprised to see it convert my 720x480 mpeg-2 down to something like 500x384, but the picture quality was excellent.