Fairuse Wizard settings - looking for rules of thumb

[JamesNG]

I'm a relative newbie when it comes to converting DVD to AVI. I use Fairuse Wizard and am happy with it. I convert my DVDs to AVI which I store on networked hard drives and stream to a media player hooked up to my TV.

While I am able to get satisfactory results with Fairuse, I always wonder whether I'm using the best settings for my purposes. That, coupled with a desire to just know more about the whole area, has caused me to wonder whether I should tinker with the Fairuse settings. But Fairuse has no manual and I'm finding it hard to locate information that will provide help on how to set things.

I want good quality, but I don't want to waste hard drive space. I convert to XVID and don't really want to convert to anything else. To date, I look at the length of the movie (something Fairuse shows you) and I then select a file size that is 10x the number of minutes (e.g., I would pick 900MB for a 90 minute movie). Then, if AC3 sound is available, I add 50MB to the 10x minutes computed size. (If only mp3 sound is available, I don't add anything). (Note that I don't burn these to CD or DVD so there's no reason for me to use sizes like 700MB, etc.)

I'm now wondering if there aren't other better rules of thumb I should be using. For example, should I pick a size and frame resolution that results in a compression of less than 100:1? Or, should I pick a size that results in a bits/pixel greater than .25? Should I force a size that would give me a resolution of 720x480 (before cropping)? Or, should I ignore file size and simply enter a "2" in the "quantizer" box?

Thanks for your help and insight. As I said, although my current rule of thumb usually results in pretty good quality (as far as my eyes can tell), I'm interested in learning more about this and I hope that the responses to this post will help me in that regard.

[Almost Human]

I settled in on using FairuseWizard two years ago, and have been very pleased. Like you I was using a rule of thumb not unlike yours, but I was getting mixed quality results. Earlier this year I started selecting the quantizer value of 2, and keeping the AC3 sound track intact. I cannot tell the difference between the pressed video and my Xvid video on a 32" TV. The resulting size vs. original size ratio varies greatly from disk to disk due to the original encoding. One 6Gb (movie only) file compressed down to 1.7Gb, another 4.5Gb movie compressed down to 2Gb. Cable movies recorded are very difficult to get decent compression with, being around 50% for OK quality.

I store my Xvid movies on two 500Gb drives.

[JamesNG]

Before posting my original messsage (above), I saw somewhere (and now cannot find it) that changing the XVID codec in Fairuse would permit you to use a quantizer value of 2.5 (instead of having to pick either 2 or 3). Can anyone shed light on that or provide additional details? Values in the range of 1.7-2GB per movie are a little higher than I would prefer - but if I could use 2.5 that might reduce them enough to be palatable for me to follow the prior poster's advice.

[RabidDog]

I always go for bits/pixel of greater than 0.2 and try to keep the AC3 soundtrack. I think longer movies compress better, 10mb per minute is quite a good rule of thumb. ALso I use divx, rather than xvid because of the other tools available, and its faster on my system...
Autogk is as good as Fairuse and allow more tweaking. GK allows everything to be tweaked.