Converting avi or mpeg To DivX, Quality Benefit?

[Draven451]

Would this improve the quality of the film, because the compression is better? Any format noticably better? Thanks

[Mirror_Image]

DivX is a compressed AVI. Retail DVDs are encoded in MPEG-2 (at a bitrate approaching 9Mbit/sec with very expensive and nifty encoding hardware).

Every time you decompress a signal that was encoded with a lossy codec (i.e. MPEG-1/2, DivX, etc etc), then recompress it with another lossy codec, it doesn't get better. In fact, it gets slightly worse, and it can get noticeably worse.

It would be nice if I could improve junky downloaded files with some sort of "Holy Grail" template or set of encoding parameters. Believe me, I have some old DivX, VCD and SVCDs on disk that I would love to improve.

Certainly, people will always search for a way to use free (or pirated) software that will make junky video into good video, to "make a silk purse from a sow's ear", but it's just not gonna happen.