Which XviD tool?

[pdontthink]

Hi all,

Long long ago, I became fairly comfortable with Doom9's advanced (Gordian Knot / Virtualdub) MPEG4 conversion guide. It's been a while and I was looking at the no-brainer Auto GKnot guide and it looks like a lot less trouble.

I'm not sure that all the guides have been updated recently, so I figure the best place to ask is here:

Is using the advanced (GKnot/Virtualdub) guide worth the effort any more? In my case, I am specifically interested in converting only small clips to XviD, so I can probably just turn up Auto GKnot's quality to maximum, in which case I'm not sure I will get discernible quality difference by going through all the work with the advanced guide.

Opinions highly appreciated.

[Ranguvar]

I say try one and see :p

Personally, I couldn't go without doing it the super-complex way. It satisfies me, being able to control all the itty-bitty options. Plus, I have fun (:o).

If by maximum quality you also mean high bitrate, I'm guessing you usually won't see a difference. But the lower the bitrate you target, the more of an advantage you'd see by tweaking. And going the advanced route also lets you control filtering on the source (deinterlacing, color correction, cropping, sharpening, denoising, degraining, resizing, etc. etc. etc.)

Of course, I don't use either VDub or GKnot usually :p Avisynth and xvid_encraw (sometimes through MeGUI) for me. DGIndex if necessary. Then AVIMuxGUI to mux. LAME to encode audio. MP3Gain to increase audio volume.

[weaver4]

IMO: If you want great quality that is easy use autogk or avi.net. If you want to control everything use MeGui.

I have to admit that I am not one that likes the "super-complex" way because DeInterlace (TFF, BFF) and IVTC and fps is just more pain than I wish to bear.

[pdontthink]

Thank you both for the opinions. I gave AutoGK a try, and using the target quality adjustment, I set it to 100%, since I am only encoding small clips and the bitrate, size and general quality it worked out were much more than adequate. I think the manual process will always be better when you are struggling for the most you can get out of it, but that's not quite as applicable/important when you're not fighting disc space because it's a small clip. AutoGK did an impressive job.