Digital Cam to DivX, or a better solution.

[DarthJoJo]

I have several of my son's soccer games on tape that I want to tranfer to CD using DivX. They were recorded on a Sony Digital Cam (1394 output). I'd like to save them to HD and then shrink them to fit on one CD using DivX. I haven't found VCDs to be visually satisfactory and would prefer DivX. I've tried Virtual Dub and find it to be a pain-in-the-@$$ to use. I'm not married to DivX and am open to suggestions for other CODECs.

FYI: AMD XP 1.4GHz, 512M RAM, 60Gig HD, decent capture card, Win98SE.

All helpful replies are welcome.

DJJ

[Denman007]

Are you looking to play these on your DVD player or just on you computer?

I've found SVCD to be pretty close to DVD quality for playback on my DVD player. Since you source is DV, you should be able to get a nice picture too.

Maybe someone else can help you with DV->Divx. I've only gone the other way, Divx->DVD.

Have you tried the walkthrough with VD?

https://www.videohelp.com/avi2divx.htm

D

[DarthJoJo]

Denman007:

I (and the other Soccer Dads) are going to play these discs on computers, so DVD Player compatibility is not much of an issue.

SVCD seems to make very large files that use more than one disk. I want to limit these games to one CD each. I've seen DivX put much more than an hour of video on a single CD with acceptable quality (for this purpose).

In using Virtual Dub I've run into several problems, one of which is it won't read its own captures from my DV Cam. Maybe this is a Win98SE problem, but VirtDub doesn't address it in a useful way. AT least not one I've discovered yet.

I wish there were a simple Capture-to-HD program for Win98SE and a simple Convert-to-DivX program to use with it.

<sigh> DJJ

[bugster]

One of the issues with DV is that it is interlaced and divx does not (at least AFAIK) support interlacing.

Have you considered Windows Movie Maker and the WMV codecs? At higher bitrates it can produce video as good as divx (IMHO) and there are no codec issues as WMP will download them from the MS site if not already installed.

Movie Maker 2 is a free download from MS too, tho not sure if it is available for 98.

[DarthJoJo]

IDK about the DivX interlacing issue; guess that's another thing to look up.

I've got WinMovieMaker2 on my laptop, but need to purchase a 4-to-4 Firewire/1394 cable to attach my DV Cam. Not exactly a Wal-Mart item. I have been using my desktop PC which already has a 1394 cable but no Movie Maker 2. MM2 requires WinXP, my desktop PC is a Win98SE machine.

Ahhh, personal computing... I just *love* how it has uncomplicated my life!

DJJ

[Denman007]

DJJ,

I assume you tried this...
https://www.videohelp.com/avi2divx.htm

Can you capture with something other than VD? Maybe try DL a trial version of some Ulead software and go from there.

Maybe I'll give it a try myself. This conversion is something I've never done, but I could see a need for it in the future.

I'll try capturing from my MiniDV using Ulead VS and see if I can get a nice Divx file under 600 meg as a final result.

D

[DarthJoJo]

DJJ,

I assume you tried this...
https://www.videohelp.com/avi2divx.htm

Can you capture with something other than VD? Maybe try DL a trial version of some Ulead software and go from there.

Maybe I'll give it a try myself. This conversion is something I've never done, but I could see a need for it in the future.

I'll try capturing from my MiniDV using Ulead VS and see if I can get a nice Divx file under 600 meg as a final result.

D

I printed out avi2divx.htm first; it didn't explicitly cover the capture-from-DV-cam issue at all. I found a stand alone capture program that gave me a 16Gig .avi file which was playable by WinMediaPlayer and a few other programs, but not readable by Virtual Dub for compression.

Truth be told I'm very surprised that all this DV Cam to Divx (or whatever compressor one fancies) stuff hasn't been more clearly covered here or had more software solutions generated already.

DJJ

[DivXExpert]

try capturing with DVIO in the tools section. Transfer in mode2.

If this still causes an error. Please state the exact error.

[DivXExpert]

As far as codecs go. If your camera is really shakey, then go ahead and use DivX 5.0.2 Pro (With spyware dissabled of course). If its pretty steady, and not to much camera movement, then use DivX 3.11.

Both are fast and high quality.

For DV codecs. I use the one that came with my camera. DV Soft, by adaptec. And it seems to do very well. No problems editing with VirtualDub So far.

[DivXExpert]

BTW I prefer 3.11. Using GordianKnot (http://gknot.doom9.org) to encode should be easy. Follow this guide for setting up GKnot. http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/gknot-main2.htm