Encoding for Hard Drive Playback

[raymondh]

I am using GKnot with Divx 5.02 (not pro) and ripping and encoding my DVD's to my hard drive for TV playback. I am using my file server as a media jukebox and once the movies are encoded I put the DVD away for storage.

For the most part I follow the guide and do 2-pass encodes with AC3 and keep the resolution the same as the original (I think). I always shoot for a bit rate of 1800 and the movies come out to about 1.5 megs.

The process takes about 4-hours and the quality is good (some jaggy's).

My question is this:

Since I'm not interested in moving the movies to CD's is what I'm doing the best use of encoding time? Should I do 1-pass instead of 2? Is 1800 bit rate a good target?

Any other guidance would be very helpfull

Thank you!

Ray

[jggimi]

If filesize is not a concern, you might be happier with a 1-pass, 100% quality based encoding, and turn of Bi-directional encoding (B-frames).

Here's a link (http://www.doom9.org/divx5.htm) to Doom9's guide for using Gknot with 2-pass encoding in Vdub; you can modify the procedure to do a single pass instead.

If size is truly no object, you might also try eliminating the resizing filter from your .avs scripts. You'll need an .avi player such as BSPlayer -- one capable of changing aspect ratio to 4:3 or 16:9.