encoding black and white movies (help!!)

[Mugatu]

I am trying to convert a black and white movie i have ripped to an .AVI file but i am having trouble attaining the desired quality. i have seen ripped black and white movies in much better quality before so i know it's possible. i ripped the movie from my DVD, but the part of the movie i want is in camera angle 1. camera angle 2 contains the director's commentary. i could not find any way to select camera angle 1 in gordian knot/dvd2avi, so i used DVDx. The quality was not what i would have liked it to be. i am using the XviD codec, and i selected the greyscale option. To be more specific as to the quality, it seemed as if it wasn't using enough shades of grey. Movies in color can get away with this, but when you're watching a black and white movie that is completely greyscale it should be able to use many shades of grey in order to achieve decent quality. Everything else seems fine (i.e. framerate, resolution, sound, size, etc.) Is there any way in Gordian Knot to select camera angle or is DVDx my only choice? How do I make XviD use a larger greyscale palette? Any advice is appreciated (keep it somewhat simple, i'm still learning).

[manono]

Hi and welcome to the forum-

Ordinarily a Director's Commentary is just a different audio track played over the same video. So angles aren't involved. But I'll take you at your word. But this doesn't have anything to do with DVD2AVI, but with your decrypter. So open the DVD in DVDDecrypter. The default will be the longest version. And you're saying that only the Director's Commentary is in that one. So look around for another version. It may be equally long or slightly shorter. If you don't find one, then go into the Streams Processing Tab and see if there's more than one audio track in there. Also, the Streams Information file that DVDDecrypter creates when decrypting will tell you if there's a different audio track in there besides just the Director's Commentary. But I'm not 100% sure that I understood that portion of your post.

As for not having the full range of grays; about all I can suggest is to make sure that you are using 32 bit color on your desktop (right-click the desktop-Properties-Settings). In the offchance that XviD's Greyscale option is responsible for that, rather than enabling it, just add:

Tweak(Sat=0)

to the bottom of the .avs and that will also remove any color information.

[Mugatu]

i'm sorry; i should have been more specific. It's not just the directors commentary, but it shows handwritten pages from the screenplay as well. The audio and video for this is intertwined with that of the movie itself. That is, the .VOB files contain both the movie as well as the "Director's Commentary" (or whatever it is). So if you were to watch the .VOB file itself, it switches back and forth between the movie and the various elements of the "commentary." i am led to believe that the "commentary" is stored as camera angle 2 because when i told DVDx to only encode camera angle 1, i was able to isolate the movie itself. Once i figured that out, my only problem was that the movie didn't look very good because it wasn't using a very large greyscale pallette. Everything else seemed fine (resolution, framerate, etc.) i hope this helps.

[manono]

Hi-

i should have been more specific.

Yep. Set DVDDecrypter to rip in IFO Mode (Mode Tab at top-IFO) and not File Mode. And just playing the vob files tells you nothing about what audio streams are in there. Anything can show up. Consult the Streams Processing Tab or the Streams Information file afterwards for that.