How good is GKNOT?

[lotan]

First of all I want to apologize if my questions were already answered - and I'm sure they were - but I didn't find those answers.

I have been encoding DVD movies for some time now using flask at the beginning - needless to say anything about their quality. DVD2AVI with nandub followed which gave me better quality but I wasn't really happy with it.
I read lots of guides and manuals for the different settings of sbc in nandub including doom9's ones and it was interesting to experiment with them but in the end all I wanted was an environment which would give me the best results within the shortest time. At that time I thought only the pros can achieve that with SBC.

Then came DivX4 (DVD2AVI & AviSynth). I liked the results of my first 2pass encodings very much, knowing that it wasn't perfect but rather good (a bit blurrier but overall quality was really good and the encoding was easy to do).

I realized the appearance of GKNOT and read much about it but I didn't really think about using it with DivX3 because I was happy with my DivX4 results and I thought SBC is only for the pros.

So finally my question is: After reading the latest comparison between the different DivX codecs, Doom9 concludes that SBC gives still the best results; so is it possible in the meantime - for a mortal user like me (with average encoding knowledge) - to get a real good encoding result for nearly every kind of movie using the current version of GKNOT?
Or should I continue using DivX4 and leave SBC to the pros like I did before?

Thanks for your answers.

[poopity poop]

My suggestion to you, is to learn DivX 5.0. Its sort of like SBC encoding(and by SBC I assume you mean frameserving using VFAPI or avisynth into nandub), but with less stuf to worry about, and will produce better results than DivX4. Other than that, SBC (nandub) really isn't that hard to learn. Even for advanced encoders, we pretty much leave most of the options the same from encode to encode, once you've done it a couple times.

[diji1]

Hi,

Gknot gives you damn nice SBC backups without needing to be a "pro" ( ... and there's plenty of ppl that claim that status that produce very average rips btw ) - i'd say it's exactly what ur looking for to get ...

... an environment which would give me the best results within the shortest time.

btw poop - hi there, i watched some kenshin episodes that i believe you had something to do with - great job man :), they was very "pro", many thanks.

[poopity poop]

hey thanks a lot, yeah I encoded them. But unfortunatly, we are our own worst critic, and I think they stink he he.
1. ep 1-17 are 400x300, too low of a resolution for the file size
2. ep 8-like...30some I had too high of settings on smart smoother and warpsharp.
3. ep 18-53, I used 512x384, too high of a resolution for the file size.
4. ep 30some-53 are pretty good.

If I had to do them over again, for 175mb/episode I would have choosen 448x336 as a resolution, and would have used 2-d cleaner optimized for speed, on settings of 4 for threshold, and X=2/Y=2. My settings on nandub I thought were fine for most of them, I tweaked them as I encoded the series.

I finished 53-57 but I'm not releaseing them because they are too high of resolution..and I think they suck...even though most people would say they rock. I'm going to be encoding for #psychlo-anime, because I feel (in my professional opinion), the people there know how to rip the best ANYWHERE on IRC (even on efnet). I'll be encoding at 512x384 with a file size of 233mb/episode. That way you retain the highest quality/filesize ratio.

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed my encodes, and if you want some more of my encodings, I've sort of switched over to SVCD encoding, and I'll be doing Berserk, and some of Kenshin as the need arrises for #psychlo-anime on DALnet.