DV Home Movie Backup: Divx or DVD?

[Marlowe]

I did a search but didn't find the answer. If I missed it, please direct me to the appropriate thread.

Here's my question: I take a 1-hour DV of my home movies and burn it as a DVD. I want to re-use the tape (they're expensive and I go through a lot.) I was then using VirtualDub and splitting the AVI's and saving them across several data DVD's as a true "backup" of the unencoded DV AVI (thinking that I might want to edit later). This is impractical. Is the DVD the best "backup" of my home movies short of my solution of spanning data DVD's or keeping the original DV tape? Is there another solution? Could I make a high bitrate Divx file and save it to one DVD, or past a certain point is it overkill?

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

[Craig Tucker]

It depends how you want to view the disc. If you just want to watch it on your PC then divx is by far the better solution as you get much higher compression ratios for the same picture quality. But if you want to watch it on a standard DVD player then you have to encode to mpeg2 author and burn as a regular video DVD. If you are just backing up the video for archive purposes I would suggest using a high bitrate divx. If in future though you wanted to make a DVD from this divx you could expect more losses than making it directly from the DV tape as with each encoding process there are losses encurred. I think if it were me I would make 1 regular mpeg2 DVD for viewing, and 1 backup divx DVD that would be easier for editing at a later date. However what I actually do is make my DVD's and keep the DV tapes for my archive.

[Marlowe]

Thanks, Craig. Is DivX more editable than an MPEG? Is it truly a compressed AVI, in the sense that DV is? A one hour home movie with an audio bitrate of 192 will give me a video bitrate of 9603 for a DivX on DVD. This is usually what I get from a DVD. So, if I understand your post correctly, I may not get better quality, but I should have an archive that I can edit later. I understand that I would be adding another layer of encoding though.

[FulciLives]

When you encode to DivX use 1-pass quality-based at 100% quality (quantizer=1). This will give you the highest quality that the DivX format is capable of. Also do NOT use ANY of the so-called "PRO" features. That means no bi-directional encoding, no gmc, no quarter pixel and set pyschovisual enhancements to off/none. This will give you a GREAT quality file that can be easily edited in the future.

When I make a DivX it is usually from a DVD source so I either use the original AC-3 sound or compress to MP3 sound. I don't know if you can MUX a WAV audio file with a DivX video file but if that is possible (can anyone verify that this is possible?) then that would probably be the best thing to do (using the WAV file).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
When using DivX Pro 5.x you need to UNCHECK the PROFILES to be able to access the 1-pass quality-based encoding option.

*** EDIT ***
Full screen resolution for the DivX format is 640x480 ... if you need to then resize to 720x480 (NTSC DVD) or 720x576 (PAL DVD) it will look just fine. My understanding is that since DivX uses square pixels you should not try to encode at DVD resolutions (which are NOT square pixel resolutions) but resizing AT THE TIME of DVD conversion should be fine.

[Marlowe]

Thanks for the great info! I'll be starting my backups today.

I was worried about the "downgrade" to 640x480, but you eased that concern. I'll play around with a test Divx to see if it is editable like a DV AVI.