Has anyone done LOTR 2 disk DivX to single 4.7 DVD?

[Jakobud]

I got the screen DivX versions of LOTR, each one 700 MB. I am trying to convert them to MPEG2 to burn both onto a single 4.7gig DVD, but I am having troubles. Has anyone done this successfully? If so, please can you give me some help?

Jakobud

[Malcom]

Yes.

What are you having trouble with?

Here's the process I used:

AVISynth to Vdub to do 3:2 pulldown and convert to 29.97 fps (had trouble with pulldown.exe for some reason!)

Vdub saves new interlaced 29.97 fps movie as segmented AVIs, each 8000 frames.

Repeat for second DivX.

Cinemacraft Encoder -- select all the AVI segments (from both of the divx's) and encode as one. First run with VAF only for VBR optimization, this creates an analysis file. Set parameters under "advanced" multi-pass VBR -- I think I used avg 3.2Mbit, min .5Mbit, max 9.2mbit. Set bias to 0 to allow bitrate to vary a lot instead of trying to stay constant. Try to make the whole chart green background.

Check DVD Compliant in Video settings, go into quality and set top slider to 20, disable noise filter, go to matrices and select MPEG standard.

Then encode. It took 20 hrs on my duron 1Ghz, resulted in a ~4.1BB (dvd-r is 4.7 billion bytes not 4.7GB) MPG2 file.

Used nandub to extract VBR audio to MP3. Used WinAmp to convert to WAV file.

Used DVDit PE to compile DVD folders and convert audio stereo AC3 (10 to 1 compression! major space savings).

Used Prassi DVD to burn onto DVD-R

Also did some little things like add chapters every 10min or so, and a little menu in dvdit. Also did a little audio synching in Vdub before going to cinemacraft -- I chose the first segment for each half of the movie, told Vdub to use the proper wav file, and then modified the WAV file slightly (adding a little silence padding or trimming slightly) to improve audio sync. Same thing for the second segmented AVI.

Combined the two WAV files into one in Sound Forge before feeding to DVDit.

The quality is okay, A-... will tie me over until I can buy the collectors edition in November 02.