Vob to Divx/Xvid using TMPGEnc Xpress

[SwornEnemy]

I've been testing the subject and yielding very poor results. In the past I've always fiddled with AutoGK and Divx Converter, depending on my mood. I never realized it till yesterday that I could convert a vob using TMPG, let alone convert it to divx/xvid.

Going into this my source material is about 90MB, 720x480, 2 channel, interlaced.

So I took a 90MB vob clip of a live performance and the first oddity was when watching back in the cut-edit section of TMP there were (I guess you'd call them) scan lines. During high motion sections of the video it was almost unwatchable. Under filters I see that de-interlace is checked and uncheckable..so instead of leaving it on the default of "deinterlace only when necessary" I switched it to deinterlace...and that cleared up the problem. (After 10 tries)

Now when I set the video output to use either the Divx or Xvid codec I am going into the advanced settings and usually I set the target quantizer to 3 or 4. For the audio I tried using that AC3-ACM codec and set it to 192kbps 48k 2 channel. Output settings are 720x480, 29.97 fps progressive....

So the end result, hissy audio (which I believe has something to do with the ACM codec) and the video is cropped funny. I am getting a noticeable thin picture and extra large letterbox bars. On my PC monitor it is not to noticeable, but when I stream it to my TV it looks horrible.

Note, in the past when I've used AutoGK and Divx I always get great AVIs from them. Although I have not yet looked into correcting the 720x340 (shouldn't it be 480) problem. But what I didn't like about those two programs was I couldn't tweak anything. I figured now I have paid for the TMPGEnc suite, might as well use it. Unfortunately the results aren't what I expected.

Any thoughts?
Thanks!

[yoda313]

Well I don't have the xpress version of tmpgenc but why not try virtualdubmod? You can convert to any avi codec you have installed. And it has plenty of filters available for it. Plus its freeware. Worth a look. (very flexible software)

[celtic_druid]

TMPGEnc has always been able to output avi. It isn't new to xpress. Doesn't mean that you should use it for that though. VirtualDubMod would be a better choice or just stick with AutoGK, FairUse Wizard, StaxRip, etc. if you don't want to deal with creating AVISynth scripts, etc.

AVIDemux2 is always worth checking out.