Virtual Dub Mpeg & Xvid settings

[steelborn]

Hi, I make dvd's from home movies and then put them on my laptop. I've been converting the vobs with VirtualDub mpeg and using the Xvid codec. I've experimented with different settings, but I still don't seem to get the quality I'm looking for. I was wondering what settings people have tried to get good results.

I'm including some shots of my current setup.

[celtic_druid]

Those look like devapi3 screen shots. First thing that I would recommend is updating to a 1.1 or 1.2cvs build.

[steelborn]

I downloaded the 1.2cvs of Xvid, but the screens look the same as what I posted. Are the codecs not being installed in Virtualdub?

[celtic_druid]

Well devapi3 used xvid.dll so you would have vidc.xvid="xvid.dll"
devapi4 uses xvidvfw.dll so you should have vidc.xvid="xvidvfw.dll"

You uninstalled the old build first?

Check your system folder for the above files. Also xvidcore.dll and xvid.ax.

[steelborn]

I uninstalled the old and reinstalled. Now my window looks like this. Do you have some setting suggestions?

[celtic_druid]

The default settings are generally speaking ok. You would want to do a 2 pass encode though, not constant quant 4.

[jagabo]

If you want a specific file size use a 2-pass VBR encode. If you want a specific quality use a single pass, constant quantizer encode.

If you encode at a constant quantizer of 2 you will hardly see any difference between the source and the Xvid result, even if you look at enlarged still frames. At 3 there will be a little macroblocking but it won't be visible at normal playback speeds. At 4 you might see a little macroblocking at normal playback speeds if you view on a large, high quality display and look very closely. The higher the quantizer, the more macroblocking you'll get, the fuzzier the picture will look, and the smaller the file will be.

Of course, you're starting with MPEG2 files so there's a little macroblocking in your source already.