Done my first DivX 5 Pro encodes...

[BluDChyLD]

I'm not one for getting DVD quality on my rips, I just like to have a movie that looks good and fits on a cd... I decided to do a bit of testing with DivX 5 Pro low bitrates.

I tested the following films -
Leon - The professional (uncut) - 133mins
Face/Off - 133mins
Devil's Advocate - 138mins

I used 2 pass encoding, with the bi-directional and q-pel features enabled. I also cropped the image using avi synth. The res for each movie was 416x176, using gknot's compression test (i had to use the DivX 3 one but results were fairly close).

The picture on each movie is very good considering the bitrate! And the file size was perfect on 2 of the movies, but leon fell short and about 630mb. I think this is because of the bidirectional option.

All in all i'm impressed with DivX 5 Pro, on long films like this DivX 4.12 would produce a rather noisy image, where as in DivX 5 the image is alot smoother.

Although I havent watch the films yet, skipping through them I see none of the artifacts that people have reported and the audio is in synch.
Hope it helps,
BluDChyLD

[dragoman]

Hi,

You said you got two out of three good rips using the bitrate calc in Gknot?

Which one, DivX 3 or 4? Also, why the low resolution?

dragoman

[BluDChyLD]

hi dragoman,
I used the DivX 4 bitrate calculator in gknot. Like I said, devils advocate and face off had excellent filesize (698mb and 700mb) but Leon was alot smaller. Maybe the bi-directional encoding worked better with it?

About the res, I always follow the compression test in gknot and aim for about 70%. But I never go below 416x198, anything else is too blocky. I used the DivX 3 compression test for it because of DivX 5 so maybe the it was a bit off...

I've never tried ripping at full res before, do you think I'll get better results?
Thanks,
BluDChyLD

[dragoman]

Hi,

Resolution is a tricky subject. Personally I encode at 640xXXX because

1) It looks decent, and most (if not all) movies can be encoded to look excellent at this resolution (if not 1 cd than 2)

2) Playback is smoother on my system since the less the playback filter has to resize the movie (for ex, it takes less processing to resize a 640x272 movie than it does a 416xXXX movie) therefore you use less system resources to playback the file.

I recognize that most people don't have this problem who have a 2ghz pc or whatever....however I'm stuck with my 800 Thunderbird until the forseeable future.

Also, personally I think the playback filters are not that efficient at resizing a movie, so the more it has to resize (the greater the difference between the source resolution and the encode's resolution) the greater the visual distortion it introduces.

That is why I encode at 640xXXX no matter what - I always get great results.

dragoman

[BluDChyLD]

thanks for the tip, ill look into it sometime :) The pixelly image is quite annoying but i'd rather that than lots of macroblocks. Ill try at a higher next time and see what it's like.

[Ellessar]

I used DivX5 Pro on Space Odyssey 2001 with the bitrate calc of Guardian Knot DivX4.I choose the final file size 1500mb(->1300bitrate) but after the long 8h of encoding (15fps average) the movie without sound and credids was 819mb.I dont know wat to do :confused: Now i am doing it again with greater resolution and bitrate.And another thing: DivX5 Pro is slower than DivX4:(