HBO logo crashes my set-top DivX player

[rohan]

First off, although I'm sure everyone says this, I AM backing up DVDs I legally own.

The problem I'm running into, is with the HBO logo at the beginning of each segmant of an HBO TV series. When I use AutoGK on a fixed size setting (say 1/6th DVD) the result plays just fine on my TV-top DivX/XviD player (a Philips). In fact every other encode, full movie or otherwise plays fine as well.

However, when set to a quality like 80 or 90 in AutoGK, the fuzzy "white noise" HBO logo freezes my DivX player and causes the picture to be strangely distorted every 5 seconds or so for the rest of the video.

I'm guessing that what happens, is that the HBO logo takes a LOT of bitrate to encode at 80 or 90 quality (makes sense if you think about how compression works) - so AutoGK probably alots a TON of bitrate to the first 10 seconds of the video in order to keep the HBO logo at 80 or 90% quality - then that somehow overloads the player for the rest of the film?

Thoughts?

[len0x]

Yes, that's exactly what's happening. Even the rest of the movie can use quite high bitrate. There is an option "bitrate spike control" (during installation) that works only with DivX at the moment and only when target size is used instead of target quality. When XviD 1.1 is released that option will be available for it as well.

[jggimi]

Home Theater Profile (used with Certified players) cannot be used with quality based encodings. From the DivX User Guide (http://www.divx.com/divx/divxpro/guides/), page 45:1-Pass, Quality-based mode is not explicitly unsupported by DivX Certified devices, however the Video Buffer Verifier is disabled in this mode and there is no guarantee that the video stream produced will not exceed the capabilities of the certified device.

[rohan]

It would almost be a good idea to have a "reverse credits" option - to specify difference settings for the BEGINNING of the encode instead of the end.