Quality issues from divx/xvid to mpeg-2, to dvd

[chandiv]

I've been searching everywhere for some help with this. I have no problems extracting the audio from the avi's and using TMPGEnc to convert to mpeg-2 but I think somewhere in the settings, something is affecting the quality. The bitrate for video is set as high as possible keeping the size to 4.6gb. The problem is after I use TMPGEnc dvd author to create the dvd folders, and it's on disc, on 2 out of 3 different movies I've converted they have been significantly worse quality than the xvid resolution. In one case, the avi file looked like worse quality than the dvd I burned using the same avi!! I don't see any consistancy really. Maybe I don't have the right system down, but if anyone can suggest a good procedure, or settings to look into messing with, it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Vejita-sama]

Several things:

1) Divx files are a crap source to encode from. They are highly compressed (ie. data has been removed from them and once removed can not be re-created).

2) The resolutions are normally very low, what resolution did you encode the MPEG2 stream to? Encoding a 320x200 divx file to a 720x480 MPEG2 will not look good. You should encode to the nearest or lower DVD resolution (720x480, 352x480, 352x240).

3) PC vs. TV

Basicaly you can not re-create a DVD quaility movie from a divx source. A 150~500MB divx file from a 4-8GB DVD just does not have the information to to converted back to a 4.3GB MPEG2 file. GIGO

[dansleethmovieman]

I agree with the above. However, I would suggest using Virtual Dub and convert the Xvid into a Hufyuv .avi file first:

Open your file in Vdub
Select Video/Compression
Choose Hufyuv from the list and click OK
Under Video again, select Full Processing Mode
Then File/Save AVI and give it a filename

It adds a little time on top of your usual DivX/Xvid to DVD conversion, but the results look good and fewer software applications have problems with this format that DivX/Xvid...

By the way... it will give you a huge file and if your using Tmpeg as you encoder from the avi to DVD, use they system video and audio setting as the other gives you m2v formats and this looks awful on my machine.
That