DVD conversion.

[tes1234]

Hi,

I just copied my whole American Pie 4 DVD to my HDD. Now i want to convert it to Xvid to fit in 700 MB cd. I tried using AutoGK but it took a lot of time like 3 hours (conversion still not complete) on my AMD64 with 1 GB ram....

Is there a way which can convert the dvd faster to Xvid ? VirtualDUB or anything ?

Thanks

[guns1inger]

All these tools use the same encoder at the backend, so changing frontends won't really help. AutoGK, for instance, creates an avisynth script to resize and process the image, then loads that through virtualdub in the background, to encode with the Xvid encoder. AVI.net is another alternative, but it works in similar ways to AutoGK.

Two things might speed it up a little.

1. If you have two HDDs, put the source on one, and the target on the other. Cuts down on thrashing the disc a little and might give you a few extra % of speed.

2. Try ffmpeg or mencoder to encode instead. I believe they support Xvid. However you probably need to use the command line to get the best out of them. Most of the frontends I have used produce noticeably lower quality than AutoGK.

[redwudz]

No, it's almost entirely dependent on your CPU speed. It doesn't matter much which program you use, if you use the same codec version. The codec is what does the conversion, not the program. But you can 'cut a few corners' in your encoder settings and maybe get a faster speed, but likely at less quality. AutoGK does a good job of optimizing the quality VS size.

What's important is, what does it look like after it finishes encoding? I would not reduce it to CD size if you want quality. About twice that size would give you much better quality. If you are crunching a 7GB DVD to a .7GB CD, it will take time.

[manono]

AutoGK will actually be a lot faster than his Virtual Dub proposal, as AutoGK uses AviSynth and its filters for frameserving, rather than VDub filtering. Plus, it's indexing the Vob Files, analyzing the source, running 2 passes on the video, encoding the audio, and muxing the audio and video together. The only real way to speed it up is to run a Target Quality 1-pass encode. But then you'll lose control over the file size. Or, as guns1inger suggested, you'll get a bit of a speed boost by encoding to a different hard drive. What's the hurry, anyway? Quality takes time.