Trouble with Any Setting Other Than Single Pass

[djba]

Hi,

I am trying to work through lots of different settings using various codecs and have been unable to get a usable file anytime I use a "Two Pass" setting. The 2 codecs I am working with most are XviD and VP6. I have also tried with the basic version of CCE. When I say "a usable file" I am using WinAmp as my test player and a file is usable if WinAmp will open it.

I am also using #1 DVD Ripper and VirtualDubMod. Sometimes when I try to encode with a 2 pass setting I get nothing (no file, no error message) sometimes I get a series of error messages ... First Pass File Can't Be Read ... AVIStreamSetFormat(video) failed ... and sometimetimes it will act like it is encoding but produce a small (50 Megs) filesize or a large filesize (300 Megs) (all this is based on a 215 Meg IOB file of a music video as my test file.) In this last case, either WinAmp will not open the file or it will open it with a blank screen and normal audio.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

[killingspree]

hi and welcome to the forum!

first off, i have neither experience with #1 DVDriper, nor with VP6... but here's a few thoughts/refinement questions anyway:

-what are your xvid settings when doing 2 pass
-what is your frameserving method?
-if it is not Avisynth, check it out!! it's great!
-have you tried gknot/autoGK?
-what version of CCE are you using?
-have you seen these http://www.doom9.org/divx-encoding.htm
-i've taken a quick look at #1 DVDripper and honestly, it doesn't look serious to me at all. get rid of it, there's nothing you can do with it, you can't also do with freeware programs. also, did i see right that it requires you to encode in dixv 4.12?? :eek: - it also kinda looks like a ripoff, although of course i can't prove this from simply looking at the webpage. and i really don't have the time and energy to take a deeper look into this!

cheers
steVe

[djba]

Hi SteVe,

Thanks very much for the reply. I think one small part of your reply was the answer to what I have been searching for ... AutoGK. It works sooooooo well. I am one of those that doesn't need to tweak every setting so it is perfect for me and it gave me the best results I have gotten using any other combination of settings. The first setting I tried was "Unlimited Space, Maximum Resolution" .. I couldn't tell the resulting file from the DVD ... of course, the file size was slightly larger than the VOB ... grin. Next I tried "Custom Size" and set it to 125 Mbytes (the VOB file is 215 Megs) This gave me a file that was ALMOST as good as the DVD and the file size was only 65 Megs. (I was expecting 125 Megs.) I also tried the "Target Quality" setting of 75%. It produces a very good file too (about 100 Megs) but not really any better than the 65 Meg file.

The results brought up another question. The first file was 720 x 544, the second dropped down to 640 x 480, and the last time it was 704 x 528. I would have thought that the resolution would have a greater effect on the way the file looks but they are all very close. Is this to be expected?

Thanks again for the help.

[killingspree]

Originally posted by djba

The results brought up another question. The first file was 720 x 544, the second dropped down to 640 x 480, and the last time it was 704 x 528. I would have thought that the resolution would have a greater effect on the way the file looks but they are all very close. Is this to be expected?
Well, yes it is... since you are resizing all three of them to full screen resolution anyway and since you are not using really low bitrates to encode, the difference is hardly to be noticed! welcome to the world of mpeg4 :D
Anyway, the statement you made up there, isn't really accurate since those three encodes are not comparable. in order to compare the quality of different resolutions you'd have to encode all three of them with the same bitrate and then do a comparison. if then the bitrate is rather low, i'm sure you can see the differences, especially when resizing to full screen!

Thanks again for the help.
you're welcome ;)

steVe