Need some help making avis

[myph]

I have been struggling to create some divx movies with some vobs, but have been having alot of trouble.

I have been trying to use gordian gnot using the tutorial, and try as I may, the divx always looks like crap. I put it for 3 cds, and it always looks bad.

I used virtual dub and was finally able to create a avi that looked pretty good, but no sound.

All I pretty much want is good quality, but size is somewhat important. 2 gigs max for each movie (just using the dvd vobs isin't really an option).

All I want is the original ac3 stream and the best divx quality I can get, within reasonable size limits.

I cannot figure out how to do a single pass rip using gnot, it's always greyed out, only "both passes", "first pass" and "second pass" is availabe.

Although all I mainly want is good quality, there is no point in going bigger then it needs to be by using single pass if I could get the same quality and slightly smaller size by doing dual pass.

I spent 15 hours ripping harts war last lastnight and today, and when I got done it had horrible quality.

I wish there was a much easier way to get really good quality divx rips.

Does anyone have any advice on how to accomplish this? I have messed with it off and on for over a year, I have the same 4 dvds worth of vobs on my hard drive for a year, I want to convert em to divx, it should free up about 15 gigs worth of space.

[OvERaCiD23]

3 CDs and still horrible quality? Something is very wrong here. To do a single-pass, create the .avs in GKnot, and open it up in VDub. Select "Fast Recompress" for the video, "no audio". Then select your compression format (DivX5), and set it up for a single pass, average quantizer 2 (this will yield maximum quality). That's it. You may receive a massive file, upwards of 2GB depending on the movie.

You should maybe read through the forums a bit, search around, and learn what you're doing instead of just following a guide and not having a clue why you're selecting things you are and such. If you've been trying for over a year to do 4 DVDs, maybe you're better off just sticking with purchased DVDs and forgetting about backing them up (not to be mean, but damn.....)

[Acaila]

@myph, could you please give us the .avs file and also the logfile that GKnot created. It seems something went very wrong with your encodes somehow, maybe with this info we can help you determine what it was.

[myph]

Thanks for the responses guys.

I tried using the latest xmpeg, and finally I was getting somewhere. I must have encoded the spiderman trailer about 15 times last night. Then I went to encode a full movie, and that damn program wouldint load any vobs after the first one. I downloaded the mism plugin, but it wouldint work for xmpeg (I guess only flask mpeg, but that one works:)

So... I downloaded the beta version of flask mpeg, and went ahead and messed around with that one. I only did a couple of conversions with the spiderman trailer and decided to go ahead and start ripping a movie and go to bed.

I woke up and sure enough, it had completed. It had excellent video quality, but the size was exactly 2GB, I thought it was kinda odd it was EXACTLY 2GB, but anyway, I checked it out, and it had uncompressed PCM audio. WTF! I though I chose direct stream copy.

I figured that sound had to be taking up half the size of the file it it was uncompressed. I used virtual dub to strip out the sound file, and now it's at just under 1GB. Perfect in my opinion.

Now I need to strip the AC3 file out of the vob files and join it to my divx. The problem I am running into here is that the flaskmpeg version I am using does not let you simply extract the sound like xmpeg does. xmpeg won't let me open multiple vobs at once.

I just downloaded a vob utility, hopefully I will be able to strip the ac3 from the vobs, then I will use the ac3 version of virtual dub to join them.

On a side note: What I would like to see is a program where, when you put in a dvd, it will pop up a box asking if you would like to watch it, or rip it. if you select watch it, it will open up power dvd and start playing the movie automatically.

If you choose rip it, then you simply run through a simple wizard.
1: 3 options for sound; mp3, ac3, both
2: if you choose mp3 or both then it will ask you what bitrate.
3: choose quality/size/time it takes (for video):

best quality period: (same size as the vob pretty much)
near perfect quality at about half the dvd size: (takes a long time)
bad quality, very small (less then a cd in size, very fast)
etc... maybe give about 6 different options.

4: rip it!
would go ahead and rip it, and when it's done it would add it to your "library" automatically.

the whole point of this was so I can have a multimedia server on my entertainment system which plays all my cds/dvds which have been ripped into mp3s/divx. I would use a remote or a wireless mouse to select music or movies.

Just some ideas that have been going through my head. Hard drives are so cheap nowadays that you can practically rip the vobs directly to the hard drive. I would much rather have 1.5 to 2 gigs per movie though, then 4 or 5 (just using the vobs). Maybe in a couple of years I will just start ripping the vobs themselves instead of converting them, right now I just don't have the money to go buy a big hard drive for a dedicated multimedia server.

[myph]

I been struggling to extract the ac3 stream for the last 2 hours, just realized I can just use DVD2AVI. My brain is becoming fried from doing this for so long.

[?¿öM¿?]

I used xmpeg with DivX4 for a while though I much prefer vDub, but there is a DVDmism for Xmpeg. It comes in the Xmpeg that is included with Equador's DVD-to-DivX Rippack I think. The file name is DVD.mism.xmpeg.

I don't think DivX 5.xx works well with Xmpeg though, so you might want to read the stuff on gknot on this site then apply it to DivX5 encoding. 2-pass encoding is the secret to good quality and Flask is rather painfull to do 2-passes with as it doesn't have a job list.