Best solution for DVD to XviD/DivX for set-top DivX player

[Hooded1]

I am looking for suggestions to convert from a DVD-Video source to an .AVI format to play on my DivX-certified set-top DVD player. I have done a lot of reading here and elsewhere, and tried several different solutions, including:

• XMPEG
  CloneDVDMobile
  TMPEnc XPress 3.0 using AVI template
  Xilisoft DVD to DivX converter
  Total Video Converter

I've gotten varied results. Sometimes I even get AVI files which are as big as if not bigger than the original VOB's. When I do get smaller file sizes, the image quality is unacceptable. I have downloaded many XviD/DivX formatted .AVI's which contain 2 hour titles compressed to fit onto a single CD-R, and whose quality is perfect for my purposes. I cannot replicate this myself, though, even after weeks of playing with different encoders, looking for a solution.

I don't mind some minor artifacting or other evidence of video compression. Many of the files I've created are almost unwatchable, though. I seem to get one of two problems: either I get much too much pixelation during scenes with even minor amounts of motion, or I get choppy playback -- almost a subtle "strobe" effect or something like stop-motion animation, rather than fluid frames.

I have managed to create a couple of AVI's that look nearly as good as the original DVD when I play them back on my TV, but those are the ones where the filesize is nearly as big as or bigger than the original filesize. In that case, there's no point in doing the conversion in the first place.

Someone is doing this successfully -- I've seen DivX/XviD HDTV television shows or DVD-rips that look great with very manageable filesizes.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm getting very frustrated!

[guns1inger]

AutoGK would be top of my list, followed by avi.NET

[FulciLives]

The best in my opinion is autoGK

Some people prefer avi.net but I've had trouble getting it to run on my computer. It sounds like it is very simple but perhaps too simple. At least autoGK has some options for tweaking.

Then again my reponse about avi.net is based on what I've read since I've never used it.

In short give both of them a try.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Hooded1]

Wow. Within a matter of a few minutes, I got two suggestions, neither of which I have tried yet. Actually, I did download Gordian Knot, but was a little overwhelmed and never really explored it much. Looking forward to seeing how AutoGK works. Didn't know about it.

Thanks. I'll let you know how it goes.

[Hooded1]

Anyone have a recommendation for which codec (XviD vs. DivX) you use?

[FulciLives]

DivX will give you less headaches in that it tends to be more compatable with stand alone DVD players that play MPEG-4 files.

However both autoGK and avi.net are made to create MPEG-4 files that play on stand alone DVD players that play MPEG-4 files so if you use XviD instead of DivX you should be A-OK when using one of those two programs.

Generally speaking XviD will yeild better quality than DivX.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[manono]

For complete standalone compatibility when using AutoGK and the XviD codec, make sure you install AutoGK with the ESS chipset option turned on.

[FulciLives]

For complete standalone compatibility when using AutoGK and the XviD codec, make sure you install AutoGK with the ESS chipset option turned on.

What if you have a MediaTek chipset DVD/MPEG-4 player ala the Philips DVP-5140?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[manono]

He didn't say what he had, which is why I said for greatest compatibility install with the ESS option. There's also a MediaTek/Sigma Designs checkbox when installing AutoGK. There's only a slight difference between what happens when checking one box vs checking the other (MediaTek gets the custom matrices and ESS doesn't):

ESS-based standalones. MPEG4 players with ESS chipsets don't work with the matrices that AutoGK uses with the XviD Codec (you don't have to understand what a matrix is, just follow the instructions). Please choose this option if you have such player. Perhaps the problem will be fixed with a firmware upgrade, and perhaps not. But you won't be losing anything, or getting a movie inferior in any way by choosing that option. If you have such a standalone player, and your XviD videos play with corruption and/or smearing, try this setting. For both XviD and DivX codecs this option also enables Home Theatre profile which is a part of DivX certification for hardware devices and which enables control over VBV buffer. Most standalones have issues with high bitrate spikes that cause internal memory of the player to be full and do not accept more data for a short period of time. This causes pauses, skips and and stuttering. Both DivX and XviD support intelligent control of output buffer overflows so that this problem can be eliminated. Make sure to turn this option on if you experiencing such symptoms during playback on your standalone. Note that its not the only possible reason for having pauses and skips - users reported that by burning movies onto DVDRs instead of CDRs playback can be dramatically improved. Also quality of DVD reader in standalone players varies a lot and cheap reader can be a reason behind your problems as well (check out Doom9's hardware forum for related discussions)
MTK/Sigma based standalones. The difference to the previous option is only usage of custom matrices for XviD. VBV buffer control (in the form of HT profiles) is enabled as well by this setting.

If you are not sure which standalone you have, it's safer to activate ESS support, which is the most universal at the moment.

http://www.autogk.me.uk/modules.php?name=TutorialEN#2

[FulciLives]

If you are not sure which standalone you have, it's safer to activate ESS support, which is the most universal at the moment.

So if you use ESS mode it is still A-OK for a MediaTek chipset. I didn't know that. I kinda suspected that but I wasn't sure.

Good to know for sure.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Hooded1]

I actually have no idea what chipset I have, but I have two standalones, a player (Magnavox) and a DVD recorder (Phillips), which play MPEG-4 video. They are both listed in the "computer details" section of my profile.

I installed using ESS mode.

I'm very happy with the quality of my first DVD-->XviD .AVI rip. It took much longer than any other conversion tool I've used to date (a little over five hours), but the quality is much, much better.

I don't put the AVI's onto CD-R's -- I usually use DVD+-R(W)'s and put several titles onto a single disc. So I don't really need the files I create to fit onto a certain number of CD-R's. Therefore, I'm not sure what quality setting to use in order to get a balance of good compression and video quality.

For my first experiment, I just used the default 1400MB (2CD) setting for a 2-hour movie. The quality is perfect -- indiscernible from the original, to my eyes. I wonder how much smaller I could have compressed the data whilst still keeping similar picture quality.

Has anyone played with the "Target quality (in percentage)" setting in AutoGK? The documentation says that this setting uses 1-pass encoding, while the target-size encoding does it in two passes. Also, when I choose the Target quality option, I get a message warning me that certain aspects of standalone player compatibility might be compromised, so I'm not even sure if it's a good idea to try it or not.

Thanks again for the suggestions. I should have come here first -- it would have saved me weeks of frustration.

[FulciLives]

I know if you select the TARGET QUALITY (IN PERCENTAGE) option that you get a POP-UP WARNING that says ... and I quote here ... "some standalone compatability settings will be ignored in this mode!"

That doesn't sound like the greatest idea to me.

As for me I like to use CUSTOM SIZE set to 1390 which is just shy of 2 CD SIZE but as I recall if you pick 2 CD SIZE from the PREDEFINED SIZE option that autoGK will automatically cut the output into 2 files so that it will fit on 2 CD discs. Not what you want if you burn to a DVD since you can just go with 1 single file thus the reason I use the CUSTOM SIZE setting.

As for "quality" of the output ... I prefer to go into the "ADVANCED SETTINGS" menu and select a fixed width of "640" ... I use XviD instead of DivX ... and for audio I choose ORIGINAL and use the AC-3 audio but if you don't care about having 5.1 AC-3 and if the DVD has no 2.0 AC-3 then you can save a lot of space by using MP3 CBR at 192kbps. I would not choose VBR MP3 as that could cause issues and I would not use a MP3 bitrate of less than 192kbps if you care about audio quality. Remember though that while some movies only have a 5.1 AC-3 audio track some also have a downmixed 2.0 AC-3 audio track and generally speaking the 2.0 AC-3 is already at 192kbps so you should just use that instead of MP3 unless the only option is 5.1 AC-3 and you don't want it and need to save space then do CBR MP3 at 192kbps.

Oh and a note about the resolution. As I said I pick a fixed width of "640" because that is generally considered "Full Screen Resolution" for MPEG-4 i.e., you resize a DVD from 720x480 to 640x480 for MPEG-4. Anyways you can use lower resolutions and autoGK does have a Resoltuion setting called, "Auto" that you may wish to use instead as autoGK will try and pick a valid resolution that best fits the space you are alloting it. Often times that will be smaller than a width of 640. I suppose this is a "grey" area. I am of the opinion that you should always use a 640 width (the height will be 480 if the source is 4:3 or someting less than 480 if WS for instance a movie with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 will be 640x272). However you may find depending on the movie that there are not enough "bits" to go around and you can get "better" quality at a given size with a smaller resolution. However one has to realize that when using a smaller resolution that the more it has to get "blown up" on playback and that causes some loss in quality so ... that's why I call the resolution a "grey" area.

Also the total file size is a crap shoot to an extent. I find that using 1390MB is good for "most" DVD sources but for some it may not be "enough" and for others it may be too much. I've actually had autoGK output a file smaller than 1390MB (this is called an undersized output) because the "MAX" bitrate was hit before the file size MAX was hit. Sometimes I find that 1390MB is not enough space. I tried to do a 3 hour 5 minute DVD with 2.0 192kbps AC-3 audio and the comp. test reported 45% quality ... much too low. Actually this was pushing the final size up to 1900MB and to be safe you should never make a single MPEG-4 AVI bigger than 2GB. In the case of this 3 hour 5 minute movie I had to split the movie in two (which was easy as the movie had a "dead black" spot in the middle for where traditionally the first half ends and the second half begins ... was a 2 part TV series) and encode each half separately.

So there are all kinds of options as to how to do this as you can see but I find that for most movies 1390MB with 5.1 AC-3 works well and if you need more space to get up the quality percentage as reported by the compt test you can stop the process ... raise the MB (up to but not over 2GB or 2000MB) ... then start over. My understanding is that you want a comp test compressability rating of at least 75% to 80% for very good to excellent quality.

One final note ... autoGK also has a "SECRET" menu. It can be accessed by hitting CTRL-F9 but I am not going to go into the details of that now. I seem to recall that there is a guide that covers it ... I think at the autoGK website. In short there are too many options in the "SECRET" menu to cover them all here and since a guide does exist I see no need for me re-hashing it here. Most times you really don't have to change anything in that "SECRET" menu anyway.

Good Luck !!!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[manono]

Hi-

That doesn't sound like the greatest idea to me.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I believe the VBV constraints go out the window. That is, with the standalone compatibility option enabled and when running 2 passes for a specific file size, the max bitrate is limited, so you don't get those stutters or pauses during the heavy action. When encoding for 1-pass Target Quality Percentage, the max bitrate can go as high as necessary to maintain the same even quality. So, depending on how good your player is, you could very easily be back to stutters/temporary freezes when using this mode. The only way to be sure is to try.

As for me I like to use CUSTOM SIZE set to 1390 which is just shy of 2 CD SIZE but as I recall if you pick 2 CD SIZE from the PREDEFINED SIZE option that autoGK will automatically cut the output into 2 files so that it will fit on 2 CD discs. Not what you want if you burn to a DVD since you can just go with 1 single file thus the reason I use the CUSTOM SIZE setting.

When using 2-pass, if set for 2 CD or for 1400 MB (or 2100 MB) it automatically gets split. If you don't want it split, choose any different final file size (like 1399 or 1401 MB (or your 1390 MB)). 1-pass Target Quality encodes don't get split.

Anyways you can use lower resolutions and autoGK does have a Resolution setting called, "Auto" that you may wish to use instead as autoGK will try and pick a valid resolution that best fits the space you are alloting it.

Yes, that's how problems occur. If you pick a high-res (like 640, and maybe it's full screen, and it becomes 640x480, or it just doesn't compress well for one reason or another), and you don't allow for a large enough file size, it'll do all it can (softer matrix, softer resizer), but it can only do so much, and you may wind up with a lousy looking AVI, through no fault of AutoGK's. Unless and until you know what you're doing, I'd recommend the Auto setting. Your next paragraph addressed that question. One thing you can do is to check the log for the compress test percentage result. If it's too high or too low, stop it at that point, and start over again with different settings (larger or smaller file size, for example, or better or lower quality audio, for example).

And I'd suggest keeping far away from the Hidden Options unless you're real sure of what you're doing.

Nice long post there, FL.

[Hooded1]

So ... I have a problem after all. The video quality as rendered by AutoGK is superb and the filesize is more than adequately compressed -- but the video and audio are completely out of sync. I didn't realize this at first because I had the sound muted and was only really looking at and concerned with the video quality. By the end of the 2 hour movie, the sound is off by a good 10 seconds. What now?

[guns1inger]

Is it out the whole way through by the same amount, or does it drift out over time ?

[celtic_druid]

The MTK profiles also allow for qpel, they don't limit the number of consecutive bframes to 1 packed and don't force the disabling of N-VOP's. Probably AutoGK doesn't enable qpel anyway, but I would think that it does use 2 bframes, which at lower bitrates would give it an advantage.

Then again one of my VfW builds was broken, it forced a limit of 1 bframe for MTK profiles. Also my earlier builds didn't disable N-VOP's for HT profiles.

[Hooded1]

guns1inger: It drifts. For the first 30 minutes or so, it's pretty good. By the end of the movie, you can actually hear the sound completely cut out about 10 seconds before the video ends.

celticdruid: I have no idea what your post means. It might as well have been in a language other than English.

[manono]

celticdruid: I have no idea what your post means. It might as well have been in a language other than English.

Don't worry about it, Hooded1. AutoGK doesn't use Q-Pel, and only uses 1 B-Frame. Once you've installed with the ESS option, rest assured that the AVIs will play well in your player.

Asynch audio, eh? Are you using the latest Ver 2.36 Beta, as you should? A couple of versions before that one did have some audio synch issues. However, your problem doesn't sound like an AutoGK problem to me, but a decrypting problem at your end, possibly caused by copy protection. If this is a newish movie, particularly a Sony DVD, decrypt using RipIt4Me. Otherwise, decrypt using DVD Decrypter in IFO Mode (at the top, Mode->IFO).

Just how did you get the DVD onto your hard drive originally, this one with the bad audio? And maybe let us know the name of the movie, if you don't mind.

[celtic_druid]

What I meant is that MTK profiles allow for more than just CQM's over the HT profiles so selecting MTK instead of ESS could lead to a noticable quality improvement.