New guide - needs testing and comments

[handler55]

I've written a guide for a 1-pass conversion from DVD to DivX5, specifically for fitting onto 1 CD. Please check it and point out any comments or mistakes. Hopefully this will be useful for some people. Once you have this method working, it should be easy to change various settings to use 2 pass compression, Ogg Vorbis files, etc.

The guide is located here (http://geocities.com/dvd2divx1cd/).

[MaTTeR]

Set the minimum bitrate to 64kb/s, maximum bitrate to 256kb/s.
Limiting LAME to a max of 256kbps isn't usually advised. In fact, you should look into using something along the lines of --alt-preset 112 or something close to that bitrate in order to fit on one CD.

Of course Vorbis would be the much better alternative if your goal is 1CD. You will save some space and the quality should sound better than a comparable MP3.

This is just my honest opinion;)

[handler55]

Decided to go with CBR 128kb/s in the end, just for the sake of speed. I'll do an alternate version at some point with settings for 2-pass DivX and VBR MP3, for those with the luxury of fast computers.

[MaTTeR]

CBR? Eeek:devil:

[handler55]

Really that bad? It just encodes about twice as fast as ABR or VBR.

[MaTTeR]

Well it seems your more focused on speed than quality.

Do a listening and a size test to see the differnce. Are you really concerned about the extra few minutes that the --alt-presets take to encode the clip? For me and most others on the board, quality is priority and speed comes last.

[theReal]

Please convert this into a guide for 2-pass encoding! :)
There are enough inferior rips out there on the web, nobody should make one-pass one-cd rips anymore.

"Select 650MB in ‘Total Size’, and press 1CD"
If you don't have time and cpu power, make it two cd's at least (and 700MB, maybe...)

"Under the Advanced Parameters tab, set Performance/Quality to Fast."
Oh please, what cpu are you aiming this at? P166 MMX ?? ;)

IMO you should at least add a disclaimer that this guide is only for high speed ripping and will therefore result in inferior divx movies compared to when following doom's guide.

[PeterTheMaster]

i agree with
Insert DVD in DVD player.
and
Open Nero, and burn the final AVI file to a CD.

How can you dare posting stuff like that to this forum?
have you ever read any of the guides here?
I wonder why you dont suggest to use flask.

[handler55]

Well, it works for me - I never said it was groundbreaking quality, just basic and speedy (it's a Celeron 466 in fact, and I haven't got 2 days spare to back up a DVD). :)

To PeterTheMaster, please could you post the URL for your start-to-finish guide to ripping and encryption, maybe I could learn something.

Here's a version with 2-pass DivX (no tweaking though), and --alt-preset ABR: http://www.geocities.com/dvd2divx1cd/hiq.htm

[PeterTheMaster]

i was talking about doom9's guides.

to save time and diskspace i use vstrip to get the video and the ac3 file i want.

to achieve best sound quality i then use besweet.

for noticable better video quality i use the pro features of divx5.

if the .avi is only some mb off (i always aim for 716800kb) i reencode the sound again. this way all my videos are between 716000 and 716800 kb and look and sound really good.

[theReal]

This is much better, I think - it provides some quality this way, but I found three little things

Why do you list all programs on their own, plus the executable of gknot? It's so much easier to install the gknot package, then you have the right versions of every program in its place and working in a few seconds (Smartripper, DVD2Avi, VirtualDub, VobSub, Avisynth, MPeg2Dec, Nandub).

When you decode to .wav from DVD2Avi instead of demuxing ac3 (I also do it that way, unlike the doom guide says), then you can highlight "normalize" in dvd2avi and don't need the normalize.exe at all (but maybe you already tried that and the normalize.exe method is better in combination with DRC? I'm not sure about this)

One more ;): You write "Move the slider to the start of the credits, and press Set Credits Start." This is good, but it's worthless unless you save two .avs files with Gordianknot and encode the credits part with a fixed high quantizer (I always change it to bilinear resize manually in the avs script, then encode it at quant 31 - the result is a very small credits file but it's still readable). After you got the credits part, you can add it to the files list in the bitrate tab and change the number of total frames according to the remaining movie part.

[handler55]

I listed all the programs on their own because I wasn't going to use all the programs in the GKnot package so I installed them individually, also this way gives links to all the web pages of the software, and it's easier to switch a program this way. You're right though, I'll add a link to the whole package as well.

There's no information about how DVD2AVI does its normalization (though it can't be that difficult), so I decided to leave it to a dedicated program.

The credits get a bit complicated, I'll just take that bit out.

To PeterTheMaster, I was being slightly sarcastic ;) - instead of changing my guide to reflect the way you do everything, maybe you could write one of your own, for experts...

Thanks for the help everyone.