Converting to divx question

[perdomot]

Just starting to mess around with divx and wanted to find out what a good bitrate would be for a standard 2 hour movie. I plan on ripping multiple dvds to a single dvd. I understand that the more time or movies I try to fit onto the dvd, the lower the quality will be but I would like to maintain a good image quality, vhs at least, so if someone can point me to a general starting point, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[redwudz]

A good starting point would be a bitrate calculator.https://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=1#1

How low of bitrate you can tolerate depends on what you plan to watch the video on. Lower bitrate=lower quality.

But, I have seen quite a few decent quality XVIDs with ~2hr movie on a 700MB CD. A couple of XVIDs presently on my HD are 800-900Kbps and are very watchable.

[celtic_druid]

They want to use DivX though.

Bitrate depends on resolution and overall compressablity. I would suggest that you base the bitrate on the size of the first pass or run a compressability test to get an idea.

The lower res, lower motion and less noise. The more compressable it will be.

[perdomot]

Thanks for the info. I think I got the multiple movies bitrate figured out but what about fiting just one movie onto a dvd? Got a dvd that I can't use DVD shrink on but I could rip the vob files. Does Divx have a maximum bit rate you can use like mpeg 1-2? Thanks again.

[celtic_druid]

Depends. ASP @ L5 goes to 8000kbs. DXN's Home Theatre profiles only go upto 4854kbs.

Not sure what DivX's unrestricted max is.

Also the ISO filesize limit is 2GB's. If you go larger, you have to burn UDF.

[spectroelectro]

No easy asnwer to the question of what bitrate you should use for divx. It's program-dependent. You should use short (30 second or so) snippets and try various bitrate encodes. Also, if you intend to play your divx videos on your computer, xvid is a better encoder and freeware to boot, so you might as well go with xvid for comptuer playback. If, on the other hand, you intend to play your divx files on a standalone DVD player that supports divx files, you'll want to take care that the flavor of divx you encode into is supported by the standalone hardware player.

It's not obvious to me why you want to use divx, though. If your goal is simply to save disc space, you can do that by transcoding the ripped VOB into half D1 352 x 480, which is part of the legit official DVD spec. Any DVD player should play a half D1 file. You'll lose no visible quality, and the file size will drop by half. Half D1 mpeg-2 might be the way to go rather than divx for cramming 2 movies onto the same DVD.