how do i convert divx 3 with ac3 to divx 4 with ac3

[ian glover]

I have just bought a sigma xcard and it will only play divx 4 or higher. My question is how do i convert my divx 3.11 films with ac3 to divx 4 or higher still keeping the ac3 audio. I'd appreciate it if somebody could guide me through the process as i can't find anything on the web to tell me.

Many thanks in advance.

[wee haggis]

i think Virtualdub will do that.

[kayfam]

ian glover,
You can do the conversion in VirtualDub as wee haggis suggested just remember to select direct stream copy for the audio. One thing you might want to consider though is how much of a quality loss your willing to live with. Remember you going to be converting from one lossy format to another and that's just that more information that's going to be tossed. If you must press ahead I suggest using the DivX 5 Pro codec and select 2-pass with GMC and bidirectional encoding enabled. Hope this helps...

[ian glover]

Thanks for the reply, but does virtual dub support ac3 transfer? Or do you or anyone know of a better way of doing it?

[DreamTFK]

Use nandub for the ac3 audio.

[ian glover]

Thanks again for the replies. However could someone guide me through the whole process step by step for both the video and ac3 extraction and re multiplexing back into the divx5 codec. Thanks.

[banjazzer]

The processes are straightforward, if time-consuming. However, choosing the correct bitrate if you intend to convert a one-CD DivX to another one-CD DivX may prove difficult without first doing some test encodes. Even then, you can get things wrong. If you want to do this, first you will need to extract the ac3 audio, so you know what filesize you are aiming for with the video part. Then I would do a 2-pass encode with DivX 5, ignoring the audio, which can be recombined with the video later. Are you sure this is what you want to do? If so, we can provide the instrux. 8)

BTW, if you sacrifice the ac3 audio, you will be able to encode the video at a higher bitrate.

[ian glover]

Thanks banjazzer. I've been playing around with virtual dub and divx 5 and can now convert it and keep the ac3 audio. I use the 2 pass filter and although the video quality gets a bit worse it still isn't as bad as converting divx to svcd which i normally did so i could watch the films on my dvd drive, plus now i get to have excellent ac3 sound which i didn't get with svcd.

I just hope someone brings out a hack for the XCARD to allow all versions of divx to play.

Appologies to Baldrick for posting same post in two different sections.

Thanks again everyone who answered for giving me a good idea of what to do.
8) 8) 8) 8)