Suggestions for HQ DivX5 encodes for me? =P

[knight_inferno]

Hello ^^

It has been a while since i have browsed around on these forums, i came across a few today about getting higher quality Divx5 encodes. Now i have encoded many movies, first with flashmpeg, then i moved to (forgot the program name :p ) high-motion, low-motion combining. Then nandub, then gordian knot nandub for a looong time, then finally divx5. I changed to divx5 because i get really annoyed at the blocks divx3 has on walls and such..anyhow, i miss the nice crispness/detailed look that divx3 did give, and people are saying they can get nice looking "More Detailed" enocdes out of divx5, so lets hear it ^^

I normally just use Gordian knot and enocde through there ^^ (Pretty simple, easy..yawn!)..but i read that people are getting better quality out of doing 1-pass quality? I was suprised, but am willing to try :)
How do you get a good 695mb size by doing that? Im guessing you can't but maybe i am wrong? Please give me some settings to play with ^^

My encodes i want to test with (Since i just got them :) ) are

PAL DVD's
ALI (2hr 30min movie)
Zoolander (1hr 25min movie)

Looking at 2cd's for ALI and 1 for Zoolander (Willing to try ALI on 1 CD if someone wants to give me some suggestions? ;) but i dont know how excellent it would look...)

Suggestions please ^^

I don't want to turn this into a flame post from people arguing over different settings either :angry:

Anyhow, thanks for reading this "Kind Of" longish Message :)
Hope to hear your replies!

KNiGHT iNFeRNo

[SirDavidGuy]

For the blurriness:

FFDShow's "Unsharp Mask" filter, in use while decoding, will give a much crisper picture.

As for the other part, all of Doom9's and Everwicked's guides should help.

[theReal]

How do you get a good 695mb size by doing that?

Trial and error!
With a compress test you can see how big your movie would become with quant 2, then you have to try and see what you get with higher quants.

I don't believe you will get much better results than if you encode in two-pass mode with a really good compress test (70-80%), but you'll save the time for a second pass.

I only encode in 1-pass quality mode when I don't aim to reach a certain size but rather a certain quality (like when I want to encode a 45min tv-capture and I really don't care if it's 350MB or 450MB in the end, I just want reasonable quality and save some encoding time).

btw do you really think Divx 5 is that blurry??

[knight_inferno]

thanks for the replies!

When i said, Blurry, if i pull out a Divx3 and a Divx5 encode, and put them side by side, you can see (usually) that divx3 is sharper/more detailed looking, though you get those blocks! errg :) don't like those blocks!
And curiousity got the better of me when i saw lots of topics saying that 1-pass gives best results
actually i tried 1-pass quality based on ALI last night, Max quant to 8 and the slider bar (cant think of it) to 100% (2)....came out with a 2gb file, lol..damn i only want to go for 2 cd's :)
but it is like you said, hit and miss
though the quality is amazing! :)
I also havent been using GMC lately because people said it was buggy? What do you think of this? I guess it varies from movie to movie.

[Hiro2k]

Did you use B-frames?
Oh and the best quality 1 pass rips are done with max quantisizer 2, but those make Huge files, I hear most people put those on DVDr.
And yes GMC is buggy, i used it until one of my movies started having these weird effects. It was GMC because I re-encoded without GMC and it was fine.

[midiguy]

Originally posted by Hiro2k
Did you use B-frames?
Oh and the best quality 1 pass rips are done with max quantisizer 2, but those make Huge files, I hear most people put those on DVDr.
And yes GMC is buggy, i used it until one of my movies started having these weird effects. It was GMC because I re-encoded without GMC and it was fine.

the bug associated with GMC is only when you use the regular default DivX 5.02 decoder.. the problem does not exist with other 3rd party decoders such as ffdshow.. but I HIGHLY DO NOT reccoemnd using FFDSHOW.. it is still very much beta and has many problems (flicking and/or jumping on some areas of the video, and other problems).. also, its deblocking can't even compare to the deblocking of the regular DivX 5.02 decoder.. keep in mind that if you choose to use GMC and choose to use the regular DivX decoder, keep in mind that in th enxt version this bug with the decoder will probably be fixed.. the problem does not exist in the actual video file but rather in the decoder.. personally, I will disable GMC and use the regular DivX decoder.. if the bug is fixed in the next version of DivX 5, I will enable GMC again..

[fredthemasterofpuppets]

What is this bug with GMC ??? I didn't notice anything =(

[Hiro2k]

It's only noticible sometimes and certain movies. Strage artifacts. But I use FDshow for viewing my DivX and it solves the problem. I personaly like it.

[Teleri]

Where can I find FDDShow's Unsharp Mask filter? I cant find it on a websearch.

[fredthemasterofpuppets]

http://cutka.szm.sk/ffdshow/

just get the directshowfilter ffdshow.
it will replace divx5 and xvid dsfilters, and in the filter configuration there is an option to enable the Unsharp Mask filter.

[Teleri]

Will this pretty much cancel out the blurryness? I've noticed that when viewing some subtitles ( green on black background ) in fullscreen that the xvid is pretty clear whereas the Divx5 is downright criminal. Thanks for the reply, if you could answer this last question I'd be even more grateful.

[fredthemasterofpuppets]

don't know !
just try, if you don't like it, you can disable the filter in the options of the filter, or simply uninstall it ^^

[theReal]

(...) in fullscreen that the xvid is pretty clear whereas the Divx5 is downright criminal.If it's so bad, I guess there must be something wrong with the fullscreen display (for example overlay problem with graphics card soft-/hardware, something like that)

[midiguy]

what resize filter are you using? DivX 5.02 isn't THAT blurry for me.. I always use neutral bicubic resize in avisynth and the picture looks sharp enough for me! but yes, generally, DivX 5.02 is less sharp than XviD and SBC, but I guess that is the price you pay for macroblock-free video. and it isn't such a big deal for me.

[Teleri]

Plain Bilinear, it only becomes an issue when I am using text on a black background, say,,, on the space underneath a letterboxed video
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TextHereIsBlurry