What Divx5 setting did you use to convert DVD to divx?[READ]

[WLJ101]

what is your setting in Divx5.05 for ripping DVD to Divx? What setting do you think it keeps the quality and make a small size movie?

I am really confuse the guide in doom9.com.

What "variable bitrate mode" do you use?
What is the right "encoding bitrate"? 1000? 1300?
do you check "GMC" and "Bidirectional Encoding"?

Or you have a better code for encoding DVD other than Divx?? Please tell me and help.

Thanz

[EddyH]

Well currently, I've been doing my first rips with XviD, the quality is quite fantastic (well... on live action stuff anyway, animes are just-good-enough), though it does some BLOODY WIERD things with fade ins/outs and the CPU demand is rather high on playback. Still, it's good enough, especially as I was only using 1-pass quality based, fairly impressive (Q=91, B frames at about 133% quantiser, all the other settings turned up to 11)

For comparison, having a go at doing the same film, same filters, with DivX 5 instead. I haven't got the pro version so can't use GMC, quarterpel, bidirectional (xvid is basically tweaked d5 pro anyway so i used them there - maybe the source of wierdness).

Doing a quite simple 2-pass VBR.
640x272, 25fps, cropped, resized and aspect corrected from PAL 16:9 / 2.35:1 anamorphic DVD, 115 minutes. 1.2 Gamma brighten and ~10% contrast enhance, level 4 (of 64) sharpen after resize.
650kbit average rate (LOTS of "quiet" (and dark!) stuff with some HIGH-action scenes mixed in), slowest mode, max psychovisuals (hm), extended the quantiser to 2/20 min/max (may alter to 1.6/16), and extended the rate control period and amounts a bit, and shortened the reaction time, to really let the vbr stuff play (8000/8 frames, 25% change, etc).
It's only 2/3 thru the first pass now, I'll let y'all know how it goes. Quality should be acceptable, I've seen many many div3, 4, 5 movies that were probably chucked out with far less exacting setups at similar resolution and they always looked perfectly fine, save for a few dark places.

[EddyH]

DivX version is... acceptible. Not 100% stunning but i have most certainly seen worse. Four stars out of a possible five and a half. Quite happily watchable full-screen on the computer and maybe on a medium-large TV. Certainly not as great as the XviD but avoids the wierdness and is more compatible

The original 2nd pass came out a little small, and as it encoded fantastically quickly (compared to xvid, mpg), did a second 2nd pass, upping the bitrate to 650 kbit/sec average, which eventually gave a 699mb file with maxed-out vbr audio
Think it only worked because theres just so much dark bits and people-sitting-around-talking in between all the fast paced ass kicking tho..


For more general material, if you're prepared for a little bit of suck, budget for 128-160k audio (see if you can aim vbr towards 135-140?) and 2-pass it for all its worth to fit into 702-720mb, at 640 wide. Drop to 576 or 512 wide to improve the compression at the expense of a little resolution.
Or up it to a full 704/720 wide, 192k sound, and use two discs.

Turned the logfile and hinted MV on, psychovis to max, lowered the max quantisers a little, raised the max bitrate and also how much variability the bitrate had, quicker response but longer averaging period. Set the first pass bitrate to a reasonable guess at what would fit a CD with audio and overheads, then let it get on with the heavy analytical stuff.
Later encoded a 2nd pass (much faster) with the same bitrate and other options. Came out a little small and not 100% great so upped it by a few percents and lowered the quantisers further still (again only fractionally). Came out at just the right size and of a decent quality.
Having bi-directional frames, custom matrices, and being able to lower the rate for credits, like in XviD, would have helped even more, but i neither fancy ads, paying for the codec, or cracking it.

That any help?




== What i really want to know myself is, what setting in XviD causes it to misinterpret crossfades and fades-to-black as motion, and therefore do really odd morph-style transitions (or for credits, an odd in-fold effect) rather than a simple, gradual replacement of one picture with another, or darkness. Something in the motion search setup? Super-wide? The VHQ mode? Quarterpixel? GMC? Hmmm. If only that one setting could be nixed, and it didnt result in a huge bitrate spike, XviD would be a clear winner over Divx5 all the way. ==

[WLJ101]

thanz for you two's info...

but it seems that there has not much expert in this forum... all i see are questions more than answer here.

So is there any good guide that explans that what are all the fuctions and how each different setting works in divx??

WLJ!O!

[Bigfoot1a]

Aah... Another DivX expert ! 8)

Did it also. and with good results. see root off dvdrhelp.com : on the how to article. A good explanation to use Divx in combination with the use of Tempenc is given.

Main problem now is to convert the Mpeg data back to write it on dvd !
Nero needs to have VOB & Ifo's to handle it.

But how do you change or create the video object file from a existing mp2 ? The use off Vobeditors and all that stuff looks very complex..

I am not able to do so.

One large source of a certain movie was recalculated with the provided Tempenc setting. It generated a huge MP-2 file with excellent quallity
on sound and video. Than you 1st problem occurs
If you use Nero ( to me it is 5.5.9.14 ) to write a dvd on a Sony dru500
The system reports failures concerning the lenght of the data stream.
Large files > 2 Gig's must be written using the UDL 1.2 or higher
If you do so it just generates an dvd with a root and 2 directorys
Audio_ts & Video_ts and off course the large mpg2 data stream on it.
Thats not usable for the dvd players !

What to do then ? cutting the large file into smaller section wont help,
because Nero still needs the Vob an ifo files.
By my understanding now , the ifo contains the information for the player, wich stream is to used with some small extra's into it. what exactly i do not know yet ! and the stream is the vob file ( converted mpg2 data stream ?? )... Know you see my problem....

Whats going wrong to me.... WHo off the masters can help out.... ??

[FulciLives]

Hello

I am a big fan of the DivX format. I have backed up many DVD discs to the DivX format. If you don't have a DVD-R drive it is the best alternative. Now that I do have a DVD-R drive I find that I have no need for DivX creation. However, if stand alone DVD players begin to support DivX playback (and I understand there are some USA models in the works) then I can see myself going back to it ... but only for dual layer discs since single layer discs can be copied bit-for-bit with DVD Decrypter. Also I think DivX would be great for backing up TV shows (or whatever) that you record from a capture card since DivX encoding takes a hell of a lot less time than mpeg2 DVD encoding.

Anyways ...
For optimal quality do NOT use ANY of the so-called PRO features. Do NOT use quarter-pixel, do not use GMC, do not use psycho visuals etc. However, you can use B-Frames safely. Using B-Frames will give you better compression with almost no loss in quality (at least no loss that the human eye can really detect).

For optimal quality always use the 640x480 resolution. If the movie is WIDESCREEN then it is best to cut off the top and bottom (the black area). This will give you a height otherthan 480 but that is OK. You aren't making the picture worse in fact you are making it better because you will not be wasting any bits recording the black. The black will be added back upon playback and the aspect ratio will remain A-OK.

As for what bitrate to use ... well that depends on the movie. Each movie is different based on aspect ratio, running time and the actual content of the movie. The more motion in a movie the higher bitrate you will need. For instance an action film will need more than say a drama with people just sitting around talking. Hey can you tell what kind I like better

In order to determine the best bitrate you should use Gordian Knot and do a compression check. I thought the guide on doom9 was pretty clear on how to do this? I will tell you one thing though ... very few movies can be made to fit on a single CD-R and still be of DVD quality. When I did DivX I almost always used 2 CD-R discs. If you want your DivX to look as good as the DVD (or at least close it never will be AS GOOD) then get used to doing a 2 CD-R DivX.

As for sound I would either convert the AC-3 to MP3 (192kbps VBR for CD quality audio) or keep the AC-3 file. If you are gonna keep the AC-3 file then mux the video and audio together with AVIMux. Only use Nandub if you are muxing with an MP3 audio file.

Keep these pointers in mind while following the guide on the doom9 website and you can't go wrong.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

RELATED LINKS:
doom9 website

ONE FINAL NOTE:
DivX currently has different PROFILES that you can pick. For best quality use the HOME THEATER choice. That will give you a back-up that is very close in quality to the original DVD (along with the pointers I gave above). If you really want to make it SUPER great try to make the bitrate high enough so that your file is near (but not over) the 2GB file limit of the AVI file format that DivX uses. This will require 3 CD-R disc or you could put two movies on one DVD-R disc. I swear the quality will be so close to the original that any difference in quality is so slight as to be almost unnoticable by the human eye. Of course not all movies need a bitrate that high and almost all movies look damn good at the 2 CD-R file size (about 1.4GB).

[EddyH]

well the different divx settings are really very simple.... shouldnt need too much explanation. simpler than tmpgenc

your constant bitrate (ugh), constant quality or aimed-for 2-pass slider controls the amount of data used on the film. further to the right means better quality but bigger file.
to do it as 2-pass, where it analyses the film and gives appropriate amount of data to each part (rather than using a constant amount per frame in CBR, wasteful and ugly, or using constant level of compression which is not -quite- a perfect solution), select 2-pass (first pass), click for it to make the Log and MV Hint files (but not MP4), and let it run... then do it again but select as 2nd pass, and away it goes

enabling the mp4 output is for if you're running it in some way that doesnt involve, eg, virtualdub. most of the time ignore that setting and just save the AVI in the normal way.

suitable bitrate for your film on an 80m cd is (deep breath):
CD capacity (79.9x60x150x1024) = 736,000,000-ish (702mb)
divided by film length in seconds rounded to, say, the next minute... example a 2h 11m 37s film, thats about 7920secs
so 736million over 7920 = 92930bytes/sec.. times 8, divide 1000 (or just divide by 125) = 743 kbit/sec.
so 740 to 750kbit overall for both vid and sound would work ok... say you use 128kbit mp3 sound with that... then.... your video needs to be an average of 620kbit/sec
(which is a bit low, you may need to make the resolution less for it to look good).

Other options: Psychovisual enhancements. Not too sure, but it doesnt make the video look any *worse*. Possibly the equivalents of lumi/chroma masking, chroma optimisation/motion, etc in xvid.

Greyscale: Encodes the film in black and white... good if you have a black and white source, as it wont have spurious colour bits (esp in dark areas..) and saves a certain % of the data, about 20% if i remember right. (Annoyingly the only b/w divx ive ever seen was encoded in colour mode.. grr!)

Encode speed. The slower it goes, the longer it is taking to make sure the video looks good. Divx is a fairly quick codec, quicker than MPG even, so Slowest shouldnt take too long unless you have a really slow PC.

Maximum bitrate - say you want to play the video back on an 8x CD drive, which has a total transfer rate of 9600kbit/sec.. you wouldn't want your VBR video to peak any more than about 9400, so that it would still work ok with sound. (Extreme case, really - leaving it as the default 10,000kbit/sec should usually be fine, the video should never be so complex it needs to go that high.. that's more than DVD's maximum!)

Maximum quantisers for I-frame and P-frame. The quantiser number is like a measure of how much the codec compresses the picture, the higher the number, the less data is used for a certain complexity of picture. Generally you'll want it lower for Index frames (which store a whole pic) than P frames (which only store differences - so smushing isnt so noticable). Again the default values are usually ok.

Rate averaging and response periods: cant say im an expert on these, but from the name anyway, if it goes up 25% for an action sequence, that's how long afterwards the deficit has to be made up, and how fast it responds to quality changes. May not be the best idea but i lengthen the averaging period and shorten the response time.

GMC, Quarterpel (if you have xvid or divx pro): GMC supposedly makes panning shots (landscapes, other large moving backgrounds) far more efficient. Quarterpel supposedly makes movement more accurate. Can't say i had trouble with them in the past before GMC & 1/4pel came along, and enabling them didnt make much wildly noticable difference. Pans were still a bit data-hungry, motion has never seemed that "off".. except they may be the source of my crazy-fade woes.

B-frames: Very good things. Basically more-compessed P frames that somehow have data predicitions for both before and after themselves. No, I don't know the technical details of how it works (like, how it avoids temporal blurring), but it works well. You may not want the quantiser to be very much higher than the P-frames though, maybe 33% further, to retain the very best quality without much bitrate sacrifice/overbalancing between the two types.
Especially good with very jerky but regular animation (or a low framerate source), if you can time them to coincide with periods of no motion... or was that the P-frames... ack. I'm all confused.
(if you cant get them to coincide it may actually be better to turn them off, such as TMPGEnc does with low framerate source/output)

Any good?



PS I used single disc, with 128kbit sound, as a bitrate example above. Obviously this wont be stunning quality on all but fairly short films with simple soundtracks unless you lower the video resolution and use mono mp3 ... but, it will do for most situations. After all if it's quality you want, you still have the original DVD. You *are* making a legal backup, right?
In general a 2-CD encoding (split it at a scene boundary, for the love of pete, not exactly halfway.. makes life SO MUCH EASIER for the sake of moving your split point 30-60 seconds one way or the other.) will look so darn close to the original (and sound that way, if you use VBR, 192kbit CBR with a good encoder, or AC3) that 3 discs is just overkill. You may even be able to get away with full DVD resolution (cropped to the letterboxing!) rather than 640, with Xvid / Divx Pro..

(all the ultimate quality IT MUST BE 2 DISC OR ITS RUBBISH freaks can bite me - i also make single disc xVCD backups )

[FulciLives]

Hello

I think EddyH gave mostly good advice. However, if you want to make your DivX now with the HOPE of it being compatable with stand alone DVD/DivX players (which are in the works and should be out late this year or early next at the latest) then do not use quarter pixel and do not use gmc. You can and should use b-frames (bidirectional encoding). You CAN use PyschoVisuals but most experienced DivX users set it to none or off. It can MUCK up the picture. If you want to use it try the LIGHT setting. Any more than that will degrade the image.

If you are doing a DivX from a DVD then keep the AC-3 otherwise use MP3 but try to at least do a 160kbps if not 192kbps. Going over 192kpbs is probably overkill ... at least for the MP3 format.

One last note ... as tempting as it is to copy the DVD resolution (720x480) you should use 640x480 instead as this is considered FULL SCREEN for the DivX format. Remember, DivX uses square pixels whereas DVD does not. The 720x480 resolution is not a square pixel accurate resolutioin.

And I really HATE 1 CD size DivX files. It's mostly garbage. If you want your back-up to retain DVD like quality go for 2 CD size.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Bigfoot1a]

Uhh... Sorry FulciLives

And I really HATE 1 CD size DivX files. It's mostly garbage. If you want your back-up to retain DVD like quality go for 2 CD size.

That's yor opinion. On wich i disagree ! Sorry !!!
I'm not an expert. But the Divx movie fromm 771 Mb, Starwars 5
The Jedi fights back is in use to me. and i am using TempGenc to recreate the Mp2 stream, to write it back with Ulead dvd factory to create the version on dvd. Wich tremendous good results.
The computer needs a lot off time even on a P4.1.5 Ghz but the result is good enough to me. Here in Europe there seems to be no dvd's available with the original Starwars movies from that time.
I use them for home purposes of-course.... And with success.

Greez Bigfoot

[Gazorgan]

LMFAO, 2 funny you guys. There are no 1 CD backups at 640x480 movies that don't look like crap.

I'm an XviD fan (current XviD build looks a LOT better than DivX pro 5.04 does in side by side, same bitrates). If you want full screen (640x272 widescreen or 640x480 standard) you absolutely have to go 2 CD's. Don't tell me you can pull those resolutions at 500kbs bitrates. Can't be done. It's like doing Gladiator in SVCD on 2 disks.

I like to hit an average bitrate of 800-1000, with peaks over 2000. I have some 2 CD backups you really can't tell from the original DVD whne played on the computer. AC3 sound included (5.1 sound really eats the bitrate) on some backups.

[Bigfoot1a]

yep ! Indeed you are correct about that.
Ive learned a wise lesson. Dont argue with the masters if Xvid.....
What i ment to say that a DivX ore Xvid what ever you want seems to be a very good alternative to download and use it as video-source for your Dvd. The main problem seems to be converting it, and last but not least put it back on dvd. That's hard to find out for a newbee.... :P :P

Normally spoken, most of all the moviefreaks download some stuff on a p2p network like E-mule or Kazaa ... etc etc.. lost of the stuff is always
in an ordinary en bad extrapolated avi format. it is vieuwable on a local pc. but nothing more. If you write it back after some recalc work with TempGenc an Virtual dub. to write an Svcd, ( most of the time its just Vcd ! ) you have poor quiality video on your dvd players.
That why i choose for DivX.
I download a nice starwars movie and instructed TempGenc plus on the DivX stream. The result was an Huge video stream, with was not usable in Nero. By now i know that you have to do something more.
re-create the Mpeg stream to an dvd layout using vob and ifo's
and my result at home is a very good starwars movie on ( as you where saying an good release on 2 dvd's ) sorry for the mistake.....

Have you got any hints, tips for DivX to DVD ?...
Thanks Biggadieefootah !!!!!.....