How do i get optimum video quality

[swordheart]

Hello before i start please be assured i own a shop bought copy of the firefly series £17.99 HMV ( and it is fantastic :p ).
What i want to do is put the whole series and eventually the film when its released onto 1 DL disc and i want to use every last byte of space thats available on the disc so I reckon 450meg for each of the 15 * 42 min episodes will leave about 1.5 gig for the film, I aint good at maths so it could be wrong. I have seen a xvid of one episode and it is a much smaller size ( 100 meg less with AC3 mine has VBR MP3 ) than the one i have done but there isn't much difference in quality, and mine has quite bad drop outs about 3 in the 1 episode i encoded with AGK. People on this forum always seem to recommend using GK instead of AGK, why if both are using the same subprogrammes ie dgindex, besweet would GK be better, surely the difference couldn't be so big in the final AVI.
If it is possible, which are the options in GK that make the final avi video better quality ??? Or where can i find out about them ?
+ How can u tell if an Avi is a xvid or divx encode.
+ how come the dark scenes are always so blocky ??
+ Is there a dictionary explaining all the terms that are used in this and other video encoding sites ( what on earth is muxing )
Sorry for all the questions but I am as u might have guest a newbie :thanks:

[CWR03]

You will definitely notice a better picture with GordianKnot than with AutoGK, if it's configured properly. It's a little difficult to learn, but it's well worth the trouble. Even with the default values there's some improvement over AutoGK.

Can you upload either a small segment of video or some screenshots of your "quite bad drop outs?" I would suspect a problem in ripping, but to be sure I'd need to see it.

To find if a video is XviD or DivX, open it with GSpot, or if you're using ffdshow open the filter while it's playing and select Info & Debug.

The dark scenes are usually blocky because they need less bitrate, which is one of the methods used in compression. A larger file will allow higher bitrate and less blockiness.

There are many guides on the main doom9.org page, most of which have descriptions of the terms they cover. ("Muxing" is mixing the separately encoded audio and video into one file.)

[swordheart]

Hi thanks for the info CWR03, its been very helpful, as for the dropouts i think the probs with the dropouts may be because i have been using my Philips 5100 divx dvd player to play the xvid files, I have noticed that sometimes the xvids will stop while the sound carries on as well but the same file works on my pc, I have read a guide for agk that mentions that divx files are a little softer than xvid files so i have used xvid but now when i try to use divx in agk I get an error window saying " unsupported version of divx found will use xvid instead " ????

[CWR03]

Was that a question? :)

Check the AutoGK documentation - you either don't have an up-to-date DivX codec installed or you have a too-current version that won't work with AutoGK.