How can you get the best quality AND lowest filesize?

[Viper187]

Ok, I ripped Sacrifice and when I encode it to MPEG2 with TMPGEnc it looks great when played, but it's 2.79GB. When I encode to MPEG-1 it doesn't look that good no matter what settings I use. I'd like to get under 2GB if possible. and no, I don't wanna burn it anytime soon. I just wanna watch it on this 19" monitor whenever I want and/or use the S-video Out on my card to see it on my tv. Would DivX give better results? If so, what program is best for encoding?

[Toogy]

I must ask, if you don't plan on burning anytime soon, why do you care about the file size that much?

[ddawson24]

I found that the picture quality in Divx is much better especially when watching on the pc. I had the same problem that you did at first. Divx gets you better picture quality at 1 gig or less for the file size. I used the angel potion codec and flask mpeg and it worked fine. And it only takes about 3-4 hours to convert a Dvd to Divx

[tonyp12]

DIVX (mpeg4) will look better and will be a smaller file.

But you could not later burn this as a VCD without
re-encode it back to mpeg1/mpeg2.

First:
mpeg1 and mpeg2 at the same settings
will have the same picture quality.

In tmpgenc startup wizard, select svcd(ntsc)
Encode mode: Non-interlace.
Motion search: Higest (very slow)

1.5hour movie should be 1.6GB

You could later split this in half and put it on two CDRs to
play in your standalone DVD player.

[ya_jai]

If you wanna keep file in your computer then I'd suggest to go with Divx format. With Divx you will have quite smaller filesize (half when compare with mpeg2) with decent/very good quality. But disavantage are, you have to re-encode if you wanna burn to VCD/SVCD, you need some codes to encode and play Divx, Not all player can handle Divx very well (cannot rewind or fast forward).