Problems following DVD -> Xvid Gordian Knot tutorial

[dchakrab]

Hi all,

I'm following the tutorial, trying to learn a little about DVD decryption and compression using codecs in general (total newbie). Initially, the process had errors in the middle, because it couldn't find one of the programs it needed...i fixed this by renaming the program file to the path name it was looking for, and now that works fine (this was in the Robot4Rip stage).

Now, getting to Gordian Knot, i'm setting up everything exactly the way the tutorial says to (the simpler tutorial, located at Guides -> Xvid -> Gordian Knot). The program seems to run ok, but the resulting file is 300 megs, and i can't seem to figure out what's wrong with it. I've done it over from scratch three times, resetting everything each time to the settings in the tutorial, and the result is always the same...a 300 meg file. I've spent hours on this...what am i doing wrong?

Suggestions, comments, ideas, all appreciated. Did a search but didn't really find any problems that seemed related to mine, apologies if this is a repeat post.

Dave.

[starwarsandrisk]

how long is the original clip?.....

[dchakrab]

What do you mean? It's a DVD rip, so i'm assuming the original file was several G when Robot4Rip ripped it to my hard drive. It's a full-length movie, and i was setting it to "2 CD" mode, the idea being to get approx. 1.4G as my final product, split into two files.

Can try it again and give you specific files sizes, if you tell me what stage of the process and which files to check.

Dave.

[starwarsandrisk]

i stoped using gordian knot a while ago when i finally learned what to do with all of the different tools.... so maybe posting in the gk forum might give you a better answer than i can give you... but heres my try

take a look at the final file.... whats it look like.... if you tell me i might be able to tell where in the process things went wrong

[dchakrab]

The 300 mb final file won't play in media player or ATI's file player...media player encounters an unknown error and does nothing, while ATI's fails to open the file. That's the only file in the project directory that could be the output file, i'm assuming, since all the other files in there are much smaller. The rip is 6 files, 5 of them 1G and one of them about 200mb...i think that's what it was set to rip them to, a series of 1 G files. Could that be the problem...maybe it's only converting one of the ripped files, instead of the whole set?

Ideas?

Dave.

[ammck55]

Starwars asked a valid question; until you mentioned it, we had no way of knowing that you were doing a full length rip. Same book, different page....

Have you come across this link (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24584) in any of your searches? Acaila (retired Moderator) and other knowledgeable hands have offered advice and help in that thread.

Between this thread that we're currently in and the one you've posted to in the GKnot forum on roughly the same topic, you should get this sorted before the weekend's over. :)

ammck55

[starwarsandrisk]

alright... well... r4r should be taking them all... those are the vob files... they are what a dvd player uses.... video object files... they contain the mpeg2 video and the ac3 audio..... what dvd2avi does is index all of the frames(i think) and do some field config(really all i know is that it makes it project and it indexes the vob files).... it also demuxes (takes it out of the vob file) the ac3 audio.... then r4r uses besweet to compress the ac3 to an mp3 or ogg..... then gordian knot makes an avs script from the d2v(learn to do this yourself it makes thing alot easier with encoding) and uses vdub mod to encode the avs script to avi..... somewhere in there..... somethings gone wrong... i would try each tool one after the other to troubleshoot the problem

[dchakrab]

Thanks. Didn't want to directly double-post there without waiting to see if this was the same issue as the OP for that thread was having. Will do some more reading and see if i can make any progress.

Oh, and i definitely know StarWars had a valid question...i asked what he meant as in which file's size he was asking about, since i see a series of files in both "rip" and "project" folders, none of which are making sense to the video-newbie at present.

Edit: overlooked that thread initially because it deals with Divx encoding, though on second look it seems relevant to Xvid work as well (which i'm using). Will attempt to learn the lingo and make sense of it this weekend, and hopefully have new and interesting errors for you guys to help with soon.

Dave.

[manono]

Hi-

Do you have a log file for that rip? I'm thinking that you muxed the audio with the first pass dummy file (which would explain why it doesn't play). Are you sure that you ran the full 2 passes on it? And if the audio (AC3?) size is close to the final file size, then that's probably what happened.

[starwarsandrisk]

:rolleyes: DUH!!!... why didn't i think of that..... of course.... make sure that besweet has transcoded the audio into something else... and make sure the avi file is the second pass.... you have to start out with one pass... calling it "two pass- first pass" in the configure dialogue (when you go to encode it will ask you for some xvid pref's.... do that. .. when you can click on the first pass tab) then click on the second pass and make sure that it says "two pass- second pass"....... then it should set up the job for you..... hope this helps....