Loss of quality....DVD to DivX

[Calimalim]

Ok I'm ripping the DVD into *.vob files and put those together with DVD2AVI to create a D2V project. Everything's cool, quality still rocks. But when I convert D2V to Mpg with Tmpegnc the quality of it goes down the drain, I even changed the settings to HIGHEST QUALITY (VERY SLOW) but it was no different from the lowest quality?

Why do I have to go from DVD >> MPG >> AVI ? There's so much room for quality loss in there. If you've used DVD2AVI you'll notice that you can save the video as AVI and the quality is very nice.

Is there a way I can just combine the AVI with the WAV? Thanks a lot!

[Akai Rounin]

I'm Probably Not The One To Help...

...but I'm willing to give it a try. I noticed you said, "Why do I have to go from DVD >> MPG >> AVI ?" This seems rather strange to me really. Is your final project to be DivX or X(S)VCD?

If I understand the tutorials correctly (I'm very much a newbie too in this arena) the idea is that you 1) use Smartripper or something to rip from DVD >> 2) providing the VOB files on your hard drive >> 3) then use VirtualDub or something as a frameserver of a VIRTUAL (read, nonexistent) AVI file >> 4) this data is read and converted with TMPGEnc into the final MPEG1 file >> 5) that file is burned as a DAT to a VCD or two, depending upon encoding rates.

Similarly, if you downloaded an MPEG1 file from a website such as Anime Music Videos, it is probably already 352x240 VCD compliant. But if you wanted to edit a scene you could load the MPEG1 into VirtualDub, apply filters, then frameserve to TMPGEnc to create a new MPEG1 file, all without creating a true intermediate AVI file. The AVI fiilename you would load into TMPGEnc as a source is just a virtual pointer to the original data in the MPEG1 file you downloaded.

The AVI and WAV can be combined many different ways. You can do it in VirtualDub by loading the AVI, choosing "WAV Audio..." from the Audio tab and browsing to the source, selecting "Direct Stream Copy" under both the Audio and Video tabs, then simply "SAVE as AVI..." from the File menu. The resulting file would have all the audio/video content combined. But really, since these are temporary files anyway, why bother with that step? Just use TMPGEnc, select the AVI and WAV files separately, then create your VCD compliant MPEG1 file.

The Highest Quality Very Slow option of TMPGEnc is just for how well the output will be optimised within the bitrate settings that you choose. So if you choose constant bitrate of 400, the result will never be as good as a CBR of 1200 or 2500 instead. Try to LOAD one of the template files (.VCF, I think) and use that as a guide in TMPGEnc. I hope this helps.

Unta Glebin Gloutin Globin,

Akai Rounin, The Cyber Sage