How to get good quality?

[khendon]

Hi all

I'm about to rip and encode the movie Braveheart. What I want is as good quality as is possible. It really doesn't matter if it happens to take up to 3 or even 4 CD's, since I'm primarily making this movie for my own usage, not to distribute it somehow.

So, I'd like to know what method would be best to use if I really don't care about size? I've read a huge number of guides, but they all focus on making 1-2 CD movies, and that's just not good enough since this movie is 3 hours long. There has to be a huge difference between putting a movie that's 90 minutes long on two CD's and putting this one on two CD's.

So, what's the best way of doing this? Should I use Gknot or Nandub, Divx3 or 4 and so on?

I'm not asking you to write me a full guide :)
Just to share some thoughts, since many of you know these things a lot better than me.

[BluDChyLD]

i recommend using DivX 4 myself (but ive never tried DivX, just went to 4). You should be ok putting braveheart on 2 cds. I just encoded titanic into a 2 cd rip and the quality's great. To be honest, if the movie compresses well and you take the time to crop and resize you can get a 2 hour movie looking good on just one cd. But anything over that is pushing it...

I take it you know how to crop and resize? If not check out doom9's guide. Also take time to do a compressibility test to get the optimum res for you bitrate, and use soft bicubic instead of bilinear :) (i think it looks better). And DEFINETLEY choose 2 pass encoding over single! It takes twice as long but gives much better results :)

[jggimi]

as good as possible = straight from the VOBs into an uncompressed avi. No codec. Codec = "compressor / decompressor" and the best possible quality, of course, would be neither.

I believe that an avi can be as large as 4GB, assuming you're not using Windows 95, 98, or ME. You could therfore cut your movie in half. If you have Windows 9x, you could use Smartripper to rip into separate vobs of specific size and create many uncompressed avi files.

In the simpler NTFS (NT, W2K, or XP) filesystem environment:

DVD2AVI can be used to select starting and ending frames with the [ and ] buttons.

Use DVD2AVI to create 2 d2v project files and associated ac3 files. What, you don't have an ac3 sound card and lots of speakers? Well, then, you could always use GKnot to encode an mp3 for you. Maximum quality setting in Lame 3.91 would be "--alt-preset insane", I think. However, it's probably easier just to use the normalized wav file that Azid creates. You could use Gknot to start Azid.

Then build two little avs files that contain only:
LoadPlugin("\<whatever>\<whatever>\mpeg2dec.dll")
mpeg2source("\<whatever>\<whatever>\<file>.d2v")
and for each half, open in Nandub, direct stream copy, and mux the appropriate audio.

Disclaimer: I've never tried it. Proceed at your own risk. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Some settling of contents may occur during shipping. All models over 18 years of age.

[khendon]

Thanks all. I think I'll go with GKnot, 2Pass, Divx4 and see what happens. The idea of using uncompressed .avi's would be nice, but that movie is >6 gigabytes, so... well, it's a little bit too much :)