This is post has words like DiVX and MicroSoft in it...you have been warned

That being said:

I've been doing a lot of ripping to HiQ DivX lately (and yes, there is such a thing) for use with my Standalone Divx player and I have discovered something *very* interesting:

Things that play out of sync on the Mac do not necessaritly do this on Windows, my Xbox or in all Mac players.

What I've been doing is ripping DVDs to divx with the full original 5:1 intact, with the framerates ffmpeg detects...no audio resampling (bad, bad, bad) no framerate changes...no tricks.

Here's what I've found out:

VLC as a software player handles this properly. The trick is to make sure 0Sex is keeping the playback markers intact in the new vob. This is off by default for some reason.

Secondly, the *exact* same avi's play out of sync with Mplayer on OSX...guaranteed.

XBMP2, which is based on mplayer, plays these same avi files perfectly, even with postprocessing, full 5:1 surround.

Divx validator doesn't help, 3:2 pulldown, nothing. Of course quicktime doesn't do AC3 audio in avi, but with mpeg audio, same result.

I literally did this 10's of times. I've tossed out perfectly good divx rips, thinking they were screwed due to player issues.

I'm not sure how many of you out there are doing this, or if you've all convinced your self that svcd is the way to go, or whatever.

Incidently...out of sync svcd seems to be the inverse: broken in vlc, not broken in mplayer.

On the xbox, still ok.

I'm not sure what you can draw from this...just putting it out there to let you guys know that it probably *isn't* "you" but your choice of playback engine.

This is probably a contributing factor to the "But it works great here" posts we see quite a lot of as well.

My advice: try your results on as many different players as you have handy and see if your results vary.

And, heh, as usual...YMMV

-K