Your Opinions

[Scarpad]

I'm building a video server to host all my TV DVD's. I'm going to be using Xlobby as my front end. I was just Ripping the disk to the Hard drive and was planning on going from there. I have about 500GB available on the server, but even that amount will go fast. So I started thinking about the various ways to get the size down with transcoders and such. Then it was recommened I take a look at Divx encoding and using XVID and GK. In your opinion will the quality be decent to be viewed on a 30" Widescreen set? I won't be using the server with my 65" set unless the quality is good enough and then I may start serving Films.

I appreciate your opinions.

[Soulhunter]

What do you mean with TV DVD's ???

For DVD movies, if you dont want to loose "any" quality but want to drop the filesize...

I like to use XviD with BVOB's 1/1/1 or 1/1/0 with MPEG matrix @ Fixed Quantizer 2 & a 1024* resolution !!!

Ah, dont forget to use a decent denoiser to gain compression and prevent this "floating wall" effect... ;)


Bye

[Scarpad]

Originally posted by Soulhunter
What do you mean with TV DVD's ???

For DVD movies, if you dont want to loose "any" quality but want to drop the filesize...

I like to use XviD with BVOB's 1/1/1 or 1/1/0 with MPEG matrix @ Fixed Quantizer 2 & a 1024* resolution !!!

Ah, dont forget to use a decent denoiser to gain compression and prevent this "floating wall" effect... ;)


Bye

Well by TV Dvd' I mean DVD's of TV Series.

Thanks for the Technobabble.

[manono]

Take it easy there, Scarpad. I didn't think that your intended meaning of TV DVDs was at all clear, either.

And if you do a little research on his "technobabble", you'll come to realize that the information that Soulhunter gave you will allow you to produce XviD (or with similar settings, DivX) avi's good enough not only for your 30 incher, but for the 65 incher, and for a projector displaying to a 110" sceeen.

But yes, even regular ordinary settings and resolutions will be more than good enough for the 30" screen. A widescreen movie encoded to 640x272 or thereabouts, at top quality, and including the AC3 audio, will ordinarily take up 1.5 to 2 GB or so.

[Scarpad]

Well I've been reading up and I understand the setting he's alluding to.. getting GK and other apps to make viable divx files is where I'm hitting a brick wall.

[manono]

Hi-

What seems to be the problem? Have you been following Doom9's Guide:

http://www.doom9.org/gknot-main3.htm

Or for even more detail, try the DivX5 Users Guide (thanks DigitAl56k):

http://www.divx.com/support/guides/DivXGuide51.pdf

[SeeMoreDigital]

"Your opinions" eh....

Bloody marvellous!

I've generated many 720x576 anamorphic encodes with it and at the right bitrate it can look very good indeed.

2pass (or 3pass max) encoding is a must if you want to save on disk (or disc) space.

Bloody marvellous!

[Scarpad]

I set the Target file size to 75% and it is prett big should I be using one of the CD settings? Or Specifying a size, or using percentage. I'd like good performance but I guess I'd like the file to be at least half the orignal size. Can you get it smaller and still retain a good quality.

Also my copy just got done, no Audio, I chose the AC3 track playing in one player says I might need to DL a new Codec that the data type is Tag8192....any ideas?

[manono]

Hi-

Some tips maybe; what resolution are you using? If the TV series are fullscreen, then a fairly low-res of 512x384 will have even more pixels than a widescreen movie at 640x272. So if you're using 640x480, or something big like that, then the filesizes can get quite large.

So, one way to get it smaller is to use a lower resolution. Fullscreen at 512x384 looks fine on my 43" HDTV, and a heck of a lot better than regular SD cable. It's not DVD quality, but should be fine on your 30" set.

I don't know about the original quality of the DVDs you're encoding from, but as Soulhunter mentioned earlier, some judicious filtering can work wonders to get the file sizes down. For starters, a light spatial filter, such as Undot, and temporal smoother like TemporalSoften can help quite a bit sometimes. I don't know how you're generating the .avs, but GKnot has both of those filters.

And you didn't say if you're R1 or R2, although from the way you write, you sound like an American. So, I hope you've already done your research on the correct way to use DVD2AVI for your purposes, and already know about such things as Force Film, IVTC, Deinterlacing, and the other stuff you'll need to know to encode successfully. Maybe this will help:

http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm

And lastly, if all that seems a bit too much to research, then AutoGK can make great Quality based encodes. From your posts, you may be using it already (you have to tell us these things, for us to be able to help effectively). I'd still suggest limiting the resolutions, though, and maybe lowering the Quality percentage to 65%, if you want to get the file sizes down to manageable proportions:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64266

As for the audio, most likely you don't have an AC3 Filter (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/ac3filter_0_70b.exe) installed. To boost the volume, after it's installed, go into Configuration, and set the Preset to Loud.

[Scarpad]

Thanks for the Suggestions I am R1 using AUTOGK to do the encoding.
I think I'll experiment a little with the resolution. I was keeping it on Percentage and I'll try going down to 65%. And the Audio Codec did the Trick, Thanks