High quality divx rips

[Scamper007]

I have been divxing DVD's for a few weeks, following Doom9's great, easy to follow Divx5 guid. One thing i have noticed is that some movies come out looking better than others..Men in Black 2 for example came out looking fantastic, where as Scarface came out looking not so good.

I only, except for cirtain movies, such as Lord of the rings, do 1cd rips.

I was wondering if you people could help me out and tell me the names of other Movies also encode well.

Thankyou

[Arky]

Well, off the top of my head, there are at least 5 things which would have an influence on the quality of the rip.

1) Firstly, and most obviously, the duration of the source movie will directly affect the amount of bitrate you can allow for your re-encode, so shorter movies have a greater chance of allowing good results for you.

2) the quality of the DVD source - if it is grainy or encoded at a low bitrate, then your re-encode will suffer because no MPEG codec will function efficiently with noisy sources - it simply can't discard as much information because everything is moving on a pixel-by-pixel level. This might explain the difference you experienced between MIB and ScarFace - ScarFace is a much older film and thus is probably noisier in terms of source-picture quality.

3) If the source is very detailed, then this will present more difficulty to your MEPG coded because the bitrate has to be stretched around more, whereas simpler images mean the bitrate can be allocated more effectively to only the complex areas that really need it, and the simpler areas will demand less.

4) If the source is fast-moving action footage, then again this will place great strain on the MPEG codec, because this requires (as with a noisy source) a great deal of bitrate. Since you do not have much bitrate available, the image quality will obviously suffer.

5) If the source footage is quite dark, then this will invariably lead to a poor re-encode, because MPEG compression is inefficient with darker material.


SO, you can draw conclusions from all of the above contributory factors: Look for films which (as much as possible) do not fall foul of the above factors.

Since I rarely do RIPs, I am not best-placed to offer you specific recommendations, but I'm sure others will do so. I have never re-encoded it, but I suspect that Shrek would be a good one to try because it is nice and bright, and because it uses an extremely clean source. A Bug's Life should also be good, for the same reasons (in fact, A Bug's Life is a direct digital transfer - this came BEFORE Attack Of The Clones, depsite what the marketeers tell you! Of course, it isn'tlive action.like AOTCs is, but...).

All the best, and Happy Xmas!


Arky ;o)