good divx resolution

[MAIOF]

hey all... i 'm in the military and want to back up my movies to divx so i can put them on my xbox for when i go overseas so i dont lose/ruin the originals.....

i was wondering what is a good resolution (for both wide and full screen movies) that'll look good (no squares/blotching/blurs) but wont be above 700mb (750mb for some long movies)

i use between 650-800kbps (i dont know tooooo much about this.... just that higher looks better.. but bigger....)

i haven't messed with divx much.... but i'm using dr divx... easy to use...

any and all help would be apritiated.... like a good compression/resolution ratio or something....



thanks,
maiof

[Baldrick]

what is your video source? dvd?

[lantern]

Fairuse Wizard will give pretty good results if you are going from a DVD. The newest version puts a very small watermark in the film if unregistered. If you can find version 1.0 it doesn't have the watermark (I don't think it does), but you cannot pick your filesize it was limited to 700 MB.

[live4ever]

Tell us how many movies you (or you want to bring with you) have and the size of the HDD in your Xbox - this will us a better idea of what bitrates etc. to use.

[junkmalle]

What size TV will you be watching on?

[MAIOF]

sorry... i left some stuff out....
i'm going from DVD, i have about 85 DVDs, but i'm going to probably only do about 50-65 of them.....
it's a 250GB HDD, but i only want about 80-100GB for movies...

and i'll most likely be watching it on a 24-40inch tv


thanks much,
maiof

[Soopafresh]

AutoGK should do the job without too much trouble. Just uninstall DAE from your "add/remove applications" in Control Panel as soon as you've installed AutoGK.

[SCDVD]

I use Fair Use Wizard and find that the movie resolution is quite acceptable with a 700MB file size for the output movie. 700MB is a handy size because it will also find on a CD.

[junkmalle]

You'll find that each movie will require a different bitrate to maintain quality. Since you don't need your files to be exactly 700 MB to fit on CDs I would recommend you use XVID in single pass Quantization (constant quality) mode. Pick a quality level you're happy with and encode at that.

There will have to be some compromise -- you won't be able to average 700 MB per movie without some degredation in quality. In my experience, a Q value of 2 is pretty much indistinguishable from a DVD source, even looking at enlarged still frames. But the bitrate will be way to high for you. At Q=3 you can see some loss of quality in still frames but it's very difficult to see them at normal playback speeds. At Q=4 you can see minor differences at normal playback speed. That's probably the range (you can use decimal values) you'll want to consider to get somewhere around 700 MB per movie.

Make sure XVID is set up to use B-VOPs. That will get you better compression without much loss of visual quality.

As to frame size, if you're watching on a standard definition TV (ie, not HD TV) resize all the widescreen movies so that 1:1 pixel aspect ratio gives you the correct picture aspect ratio. For 16:9 material you'll probably want 640x360, very widescreen movies (2.25:1) should go to about 640x288. You might encode a few special movies at 704 or 720 by whatever.

If you find a regular 4:3 movie is going to take too much space with a 640x480 frame size, you can try cutting the resolution down to 512x384 or 480x360. At those frame sizes the loss of clarity on a normal TV is barely noticable on most material.

[snitzle_iii]

btw arnt dvd rez only like dvd resolution is up to pal/ntsc 720x576/480 pixels? i thought it would be higher http://www.googlism.com/what_is/d/dvd_resolution/

[steve2713]

I'd say use AutoGK and set the resolution width around 600, a little lower for longer movies and a little higher for shorter movies (maybe 640 for a 90 minute movie). I don't have that much experience with XVID/DIVX conversions, but I was very impressed with a couple of XVID conversions of a 100 minute movie to XVID with AutoGK. I set the resolution to 640x### and 700mb output size, and 128kbps audio. Incredibly close to the original DVD in most scenes (I used 2 pass as well).

[celtic_druid]

Compiling with #define FAIRUSE_PRO should sort out any watermark, etc. issues with fairuse.