Problems ripping and encoding panic room to Xvid

[Ingram]

I have the PAL version of Panic Room. My problem is when I rip the disc, then run it through dvd2avi and save it as a project file it creates an ac3 file that reads as being 3_1 channel. Now I found this odd since its meant to be 5_1 channel.

Now onto the larger problem. I follow the guide on the site and I have done so for heaps of dvds. I have the job mastered. But Panic room is giving me troubles. I set all my rips to be 1400Mb in size, but panic room only comes out as being 995mb and the bitrate is appalling. I dont know why it wont stick to the bitrate I assign. I've searched the forums and found another guy with the same problem but no-one seemed to know.

Does anyone have any idea how I can do it?

[Gazorgan]

Some MPEG4's will be a lower bitrate because that's how they encode. I've done some at 6000 Kbps just to see what the 'best' filesize is. Typically a DVD9 comes in around 2 GB (which is what I would expect).

Doesn't panic room have a lot of still scenes in it? What resolution are you using?

[Ingram]

I don't really think that matters. I have done heaps of rips before and this is the only one causing me problems. I've done fight club which is another dark film (and from the same director)

640x256 is the res I use.

I do believe its some kind of copy protection on the disc perhaps?

[Ingram]

After a few minutes encoding on the second pass the bitrate literially drops from whatever I set it down to 130 or something which is too low. I guess there is no way to do it

[zodiac]

fight club is also 2hrs 19mins.
the first pass will do what you set the bitrate at.its the second pass the bitrate will change.
you can try to raise the resolution or try divx.

[manono]

Hi-

Panic Room is one of the more compressible movies I've seen. It's dark and static. I did it for 1 CD at 704x304 and MP3 audio. But if you insist on using 2 CDs, then raise the resolution, don't use B-Frames, use the MPEG Matrix, use the AC3, and do it in one pass with the quantizer set at 2. It can't get any larger than that, and I bet it still won't fill the 2 CDs. See http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24584 for more information. It was written for DivX, but it applies equally well to XviD.

I do believe its some kind of copy protection on the disc perhaps?

Nonsense. You saturated the codec.

[Ingram]

fight club is also 2hrs 19mins.
the first pass will do what you set the bitrate at.its the second pass the bitrate will change.
you can try to raise the resolution or try divx.

Funny, I ripped that the exact same way I do with everything else and it came out perfect.

As for panic room if I lower the motion precision I get another 100Mb added onto the file size and a bit more bitrate... I'll try what you suggest if my current attempt now wont work. (I'm using dvd2avi to compress to a 6000Bitrate file using divx low precision mpeg4 codec... Seems to be working.)