how can i reduce blockiness when converting dvd to avi??

[museique]

Help!!! Been converting my dvd collection to avi using divx dvd ripper 1.7. i have be using an xvid codec. my bitrate is usually 700 to 900 depending on the length of the movie. i have set my codec to encode the dvds at a slow speed and i have worked out the dimensions and bitrate perfectly BUT with some movies especially when there are water scenes (or like the beginning credits of the first x-men movie) i always end up with the picture going all blocky??

as far as i know im doing everything right but can anybody help me in reducing the blockiness in some parts of the movies?? is there any software out there that can help?? or maybe im missing some crucial part when im setting things up to encode??

i usually convert my 2.40 movies with the dimensions of 640 x 272. and if its a 2 hour movie i set the bitrate at 800.

help! help! help !

[GMaq]

Hi,
Quality is all about bitrate, Resolution size is important as well but quality mostly depends on how many bits per pixel you have. Your bitrate of 800 or less is too little bitrate spread over too large a resolution. Storage media is cheap these days so there is no need to be stingy with bitrate, Try a movie at 1000-1250kbps 2-pass and compare. If you must use so little bitrate you are going to have to use a codec like x264 which can give higher quality than DivX or XviD at the the same bitrate.

[jagabo]

If you don't need files of a particular size forget bitrate and use Constant Quantizer (constant quality) encoding. Pick the quality you want and the bitrate will always be exactly what's required to give that quality.

With 2-pass VBR and CBR encoding you know the size the file is going to be but not the quality. With 1-pass CQ encoding you know the quality but you don't know the file size.

[jman98]

At your bitrate, you're trying to fit one movie on one CD-R disc. There's not really anything you can do to make this better. The solution to your problem is to use a higher bit rate. Your choice is either to burn to DVD or split the movie into chunks and burn to 2 or 3 CD-Rs. To give you an idea., I have some high def TV captures of 720p material that I encoded to Divx and used bitrates of 3000 and they look terrific. However, files with this kind of bitrate can't be burned to CD-R - not enough space. The only other ugly option would be to use much much smaller resolutions and that will make the low bit rates you are using go further. Maybe something like 320x136 would improve your quality.

[FulciLives]

You got the resolution correct ... always use a fixed width of 640 and let the height be whatever it is (i.e., 480 if Full Screen or something less like 272 if 2.35:1).

So you got that part correct BUT you need more bitrate.

Every movie is different but you are better leaning towards 2 CD size encodes than 1 CD size encodes and you can either split it across 2 CD discs or leave it as one file and burn to a DVD disc.

I find autoGK to be the best way of going from DVD to MPEG-4 AVI. It has a 2 CD size preset and if you use that it will split the file into two parts. If you want one big file then pick the CUSTOM SIZE and pick 1401MB or 1399MB and you will get one long file (1400MB is exactly 2 CD size and even in CUSTOM SIZE mode it will split it into two files so that is why you need to go 1 MB up or down to get a single large file).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[museique]

hi. thanx for the reply

where and how do i get a x264 codec?? been downloading from places and all im getting is a .x264qtcodec-1[1].0.0.dmg file which seems to do nothing on my computor....

does the x264 codec work on windows xp??

where can i download and install this??? do like the sound of this codec

ta ta ta ta