encoding black and white movies (help!!)

[Mugatu]

I am trying to convert a black and white movie i have ripped to an .AVI file but i am having trouble attaining the desired quality. i have seen ripped black and white movies in much better quality before so i know it's possible. i ripped the movie from my DVD, but the part of the movie i want is in camera angle 1. camera angle 2 contains the director's commentary. i could not find any way to select camera angle 1 in gordian knot/dvd2avi, so i used DVDx. The quality was not what i would have liked it to be. i am using the XviD codec, and i selected the greyscale option. To be more specific as to the quality, it seemed as if it wasn't using enough shades of grey. Movies in color can get away with this, but when you're watching a black and white movie that is completely greyscale it should be able to use many shades of grey in order to achieve decent quality. Everything else seems fine (i.e. framerate, resolution, sound, size, etc.) Is there any way in Gordian Knot to select camera angle or is DVDx my only choice? How do I make XviD use a larger greyscale palette? Any advice is appreciated (keep it somewhat simple, i'm still learning).

[SaSi]

I would suggest you change your tools.

Ripping with DVDx and Gordian Knot is more complicated than it should for a general-do-it-all tool.

Also, the xVid codec is not all that good - especially in greyscale mode.

If you are ripping from a DVD, use SmartRipper to extract separate streams, like the audio streams and the video streams. SmartRipper will give you video in the original quality. It also allows you to select the desired angle.

You can then use an MPEG encoder like MainConcept or Tmpgenc to re-encode in lower bitrate.

If you cannot succeed in feeding MPEG-2 to Tmpgenc and must convert to AVI first, download the hufyuv codec and use that one. Select Best compression for small (relativelly) sizes. A 3 hour film will take up 110Gb

The tool I would use to convert the original DVD files (.m2v and .AC3) to AVI is VirtualDUB - in the past I was using FlaskMPEG.

The above are general direction hints. Look at the tools, get the tools, get some guides on tool usage and post a question if you have a problem.

[ZippyP.]

I recommend DVD2AVI for processing the ripped files.