Best way to reencode movies

[billharrison]

Hi everyone. I have a good selection of movies I made. I encoded them at a high bitrate and sound quality and ended up with movies around 1.5 gigs each. I have decided to try to reencode them to get a smaller size to see what I can come up with and keep the quality up. Right now they are basically dvd quality still, with almost no imperfections. Should I demux the audio before reencoding? Or can I just fire up VDUB, and select the input, and put audio to stream copy? Let me know, thanks!

[manono]

Hi-

Reencoding them is not such a good idea, even if you wanted to do it for the same file size, much less for a smaller file size. The quality will degrade noticeably.

Just out of curiosity, why did you make them 1.5 GB in the first place-too big for 2 CD, and way too small for 3 CD. I would guess it was a mistake on your part.

I'd suggest getting some of the same DVDs and encoding them to a smaller size than before.

[billharrison]

Well at the time the game plan was just to store them on the hard drive, as I had plenty of drive space and TV out. Now I want to use them in a standalong player I built, and unless I copy them all over to another LARGE harddrive, I am gonna have to put them on disks

Thanks

[manono]

Hey Bill-

OK-I understand-I was wrong in my guess.

You know-stuff I encoded only 3-4 months ago and which I thought looked great at the time, no longer looks good to me. I reencode stuff all the time (from the DVDs) because of new software available, or because I've learned more.

You could take the opportunity to teach yourself XviD or DivX 5. I'd bet that within a year or so you'll be able to play them on a standalone unit. I really don't think that reencoding the .avis to save 200 MB will be worth it.

As for the original question-I'm assuming you're working with DivX 4 and CBR audio. You can't even load an .avi with VBR audio into VDub. So, I think I'd demux the audio and remux at the end-it may save some time overall.