Austin Powers 2 poorly compressable ?

[SpEeDaMiGo]

I've got Austin Powers 2 to backup (DivX 3.11a, 700Mb, 128kbits MP3) and now I'm really confused. Is it possible I have to go down to 496x208 to get 65,6% in the compressibility test using soft bicubic (58.3% with neutral bicubic) ?? btw I used a temp smoother of 3
Is this movie really anything else than compressable or am I doing something wrong ?
What would you do in this case (go with this or a higher resolution, change filter, or whatever ) ?
I don't like to go with bilinear cause 1CD rips look already blurry enough sometimes (I watch them resized to 1600x1200 on my 21" CRT); even Doom9 recommends to go with soft bicubic at least.

Another question: What has got an influence on GKnot's suggestion for the resize filter ?
Lets say it recommends me neutral at 640, then I play around a little with the resolution bar, set it to 640 again and now GKnot wants another filter. This actually happens to me.

thanks

[Doom9]

1) austin power with all the bright colors is indeed pretty hard to compress

2) you can't always trust the percentages.. there are movies where they're way off.. it's just a general guideline

3) don't you blow up a movie to 1600x1200.. put your monitor into the lowest possible res (640x in pre-XP, 800x in xp) to watch the movies.. I know it's more work but the quality is better.. the more you have to resize a movie for playback the worse it will look.

[jrmillerUT]

try out bsplayer to play your Divx... you can change res while in the program as well as when you close it it resets you back to the res in which you started the player:)

[SpEeDaMiGo]

Thanks for the answers

I thougt this too, Austin Powers with its bright hippie colors ..

I've been using BSPlayer so far, but I've never made use of the resolution feature ... say, is there really a quality improvement ?
It's obvious that resizing twice decreases quality ... but most movies aren't encoded exactly at 640 ... i.e. most movies are resized twice ... thus what's the difference in resizing a 512 movie e.g. to 640 or 1600 ?

One of my initial question is still unanswered: what resolution and filter would you use or recommend in this case (going for 1CD) ?

Thanks

[Doom9]

thus what's the difference in resizing a 512 movie e.g. to 640 or 1600 ?

take a jpg image, and blow it up to 120% and to 300% in photoshop and compare the two.. you'll see what I mean

as for what to use.. that's something only you can answer.. each and everybody has it's own ideas on how good quality should be.. I'd probably go for settings that are way too conservative for your feelings for quality. For instance.. I'd never use any kind of smoother, and I don't like a bilinear resizing filter either.

and.. why do we encode at resolutions in between 512x and 640x? because of bits/pixel ratios.. the more pixels the more bits it takes to get comparable quality in a frame.. so the larger the resolution of the the video the larger it will be size wise which is obviously not what we want.. we want reasonable good quality at a certain size and we adjust the resolution to achieve that goal. And then since that resolution is not enough for fullscreen (try to encode a movie at 1600x1200.. it will prolly kill your cpu and increasing the resolution beyond what's on the DVD isn't really a smart thing to do.. unless it's only for unstretching an anarmorphic picture)

[elgan123]

It is possible to use 640*480 resolution in XP if you set this option in the 'compatibility' page of the application.

ie. right-click -> properties of the shortcut to, for example, zoom player.

Look for 'compatibility mode' and put a tick in the 'run at 640*480 resolution' box.

I normally use 2 shortcuts: 1 at 640*480 for movies encoded 640*xxx or less and 1 at 800*600 for those few movies that are encoded wider than 640*xxx.