Great looking Divx converts to Ugly MPEG. What am I doing wr

[Monkeybone]

I have a great looking Divx that has a picture size of 640x272 at 25 fps. I converted it to NTSC Mpeg XVCD with the only size I could make it fit on the tv at 720x480(It gets too big for the screen at any other size). I rendered using TMPGEnc at best possible but the picture gets very pixelated with the slightest motion(not even high motion) Is there something I can do or should have done to get a sharper picture? It seems like such a shame to watch a beautiful image turn to digitallly poop...

[flaninacupboard]

right, using 720x480 in mpeg1 is not a good idea. open tmpgenc, and load your DivX. click settings, and in the advacne tab, select
source aspect: 1:1 VGA
video arrange method: full screen [keep aspect ratio]

and in the general tab, select
aspect ratio: 4:3 [525 line NTSC]
resolution: 352 x 240

it will now fit correctly on the screen, with black bars at top and bottom. BTW, i hope you're not trying to fit the movie all on one disc, as this is really gonna mess things up

[Monkeybone]

Thanks, I looked in preview and it all looks like its going to work. I'll start the render, all 12 hours for disc one. Thanks for the help, hopefully thiss all works. I appreciate the help and no it's not all going on one disc, then it would really look bad.
Cheers.

[lilsly2004]

i have the same problem but i am nottrying to convert divx.. im just converting avi's and the details are its 352 by 240
55 k/b sec
i dont know why it comes out very pixelated.. i reinstall my codecs thinking it was something with them but still nothing
please help

[flaninacupboard]

hmm, your problem is simple. 55k/b (kilobits or kilobytes, either way, it's not enough) you should use at least 1150 kilobits a second, or it will begin to look nasty and blocky.

[Monkeybone]

everything worked hunky dory, thanks flaninacupboard. That was until I got greedy and tried to push the envelope of my cd going from a bitrate of 1592 for my test cd-rw 650 mg to 1742 for a 700 mb 80 min disc....Can you say skippy. After that a rerender over night and splitting the bitrate difference to 1640 solved my problem...It looks beeeeeutiful, well as good as two discs can...Thanks for the help.

[Vejita-sama]

Most players will handle bitrates up to 2500kbit/s, then you can only fit 36min of video on an 80MB CDR. Also what method are you encoding in? multipass VBR will produce a better quaility MPEG then CBR but takes more time. TMPGenc suppers 2pass VBR (ie. will take twice as long) and CCE supports 2-5passes!

For most stuff that I like I use CCE and multipass=3, it takes 4x as long to encode but sometimes it worth it. For some I'll only watch once or DivX source (which will never look all that great) CBR or 2pass VBR is fine, IMHO.