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View Full Version : a few general xmpeg usage questions


dudley
10th January 2006, 03:56
first off, thanks in advance to any folks who provide helpful replies-- i appreciate them.

ok, so here goes, in no particular order:

1) does anyone have any advice about the best basic (and advanced, if necessary) settings to convert a .vob into a hi quality but reasonably sized video? is there much difference btwn .mpg or .avi? and in general what compression is most effective? i generally want to use the highest resoultion, which is around 700 x 400ish. i want high quality, but not huge file sizes.

the reason i ask is b/c i made one conversion of a 4min .vob excerpt into uncompressed mpg and it was 6gigs, larger than the entire original dvd itself! i am still not sure how this occurred.

i was running xmpeg fine for a few months but had to un/reinstall due to it timing out all vids at 29secs. in the times i used it last, i never selected a codec compression in the configure the plugin option, and i was getting quite good picture quality at a reasonable size, so i'm not sure why my current uncompressed attempts are resulting in such massively sized files.


2) in the above file the edges of the original picture were being cropped (crop black areas might have been enabled, but what was being cropped wasn't black), and i don't know why. i'd say about 15% both left and right were lost in the conversion, requiring me to manually increase the picture width.

3) i just tried a conversion to .avi using divx 6.0 codec but the picture quality was lousy. not so much a question here as my hoping that compression generally doesn't degrade the picture so markedly.

4) sometimes the picture will be all distorted, aking to a fuzzy or banded tv signal. since i am not going into the options and making changes, this is confusing.

5) in the bitrate tab, under parameters, there is 'desired final file size (mb)' which is 700 default. that's pretty small isn't it? i don't mind anything upwards of 100,000mb really, so is it recommended i change this? also, since some files are longer, 700 does seem to small.

sigh, such a newb here, i know. anyway, i certainly don't expect a point by point response, but a short dummies guide would be great.

thanks!

niann
11th January 2006, 17:42
1) Have you tried AutoGK or regular Gordian Knot?

2) The only thing I can think of is the encoder was trying to maintain the aspest ratio and crop the sides to match the top. Not really sure on this one.

3) It all depends on what settings you used, I have produced high quality encodes using Divx 5.1 and XviD both.

4) Again, this could be related to the encoder used. I have never used xmpeg so I cannot speculate as to the cause of picture distortion.

5) 700mb is what fits on one CD when you burn your files to CD. Thats why most programs offer that as a default. I don't burn my backups to CD so I play with the final filesize a bit. 100,000mb is 100GB... I don't think you want files quite that big... In any case I can usually get good quality at around 800mb-850mb sometimes if the movie is long I will take it up to 950, but very rarely do I find that a larger filesize is required.

Cheers!
-Niann