I swear, it's a conspiracy... multiple encode problems

[bralex]

Every few months I get the urge to try this again, and it always fails, so I give up after a few days. I'm such a noob.

Here's what I want to do. I travel a LOT. My laptop sucks down juice bad enough without spinning the DVD drive; watching a movie is CRAZY, I can see the % battery life tick down about 1% every 15 sec or so. I'd like to take my dvd collection, rip, and compress to about 1-1.5 GB or so. I'll store them on an external HD, then cherry pick what I might want to watch on a given trip to xfer to my laptop.

Simple, right?

First, I swear I'm following the guides, step by step. I might be missing something not explicitly stated in the guides, or I might have mis-installed something. I'm new to this stuff. This go-around I've tried both GK and AutoGK, once each (each try takes a LONG time, and there's so many places to screw up!). The only non-default is I updated DVD Decrypter, since it kept asking and wouldn't continue until the popup was closed (grr, what's a queue for, grumble grumble). I've tried two tests, a Family Guy episode in GK, and Spirited Away in AutoGK. The machine I'm using is a SOny GRX670 laptop (P4 2.0, 512MB, 40GB HD, WinXP SP2) attached to an 80GB firewire drive.

The episode processed ok. I KNOW I messed up one thing - left the proportions to 16:9 instead of 4:3, so it looked pretty funny. Played fine in windows media player, but no audio, I don't know why. I may have missed a step; GK is very nice but has a lot of options, so I probably spaced something. I look forward to really learning how to use it best. Oh, I don't know what all might be helpful on the processing options. I'm using the Divx5 codec.

Spirited Away I tried to do in AutoGK. Japanese soundtrack, english subtitles. Divx 5 codec. I let it run all night, got a nice 1.2 GB .avi file at the end. WinMediaPlayer won't play it, says "ClassFactory cannot supply requested class", not exactly the most usable error message I've ever seen. I suppose it beats the totally blank one a friend was getting on every boot :) DivX player will start the file, but it seems to pick random frames from throughout the movie, and goes black after about 4 seconds. Each individual frame it throws out looks good though, I could keep restarting and maybe get the whole film eventually :P I don't know what it should look like in AviSynth, but it looks awful there - partial images, big blobs of green, etc. the AviSynth stops responding. Oh, start-to-finish on this was about 5.5 hours. This could be encoding problems, disk problems, player setup, I don't know.

If someone can help me I'd really appreciate it. I think I'm going to keep working with a Family Guy episode since it is so much shorter than the full-length movies. Related question - is there an easy/obvious way to string together these multi-episode disks into a single file? I can work with the single episodes, but I'd prefer lump them together.

From the doom9 web site, my processing times seem to be in line with what you'd expect, is this correct? I might try lesser quality just for my experiments. Please give me a hand!

Thanks,
Scott

(first edit - correct typos, probably missed some...)

[bralex]

Ok, followup note to my own post. Had the bright(?) idea of checking the player install by downloading a movie from the Divx website. Worked fine in both media player and divx player, but I had trouble playing from the firewire drive. Had to copy to laptop's main drive, so I'll be checking my hardware setup.

Scott

[jggimi]

Hello, and welcome to the forum.

First, I'd stick with AutoGK until you're successful with it. For one, it's easier than GK, for another, it usually produces very nice results without a lot of effort or knowledge on your part. Once you're ready to branch out into custom encodings, then you can move to GK.

I'm going to take a guess on your silence problem, since you did a 2-CD encode: install AC3Filter (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/ac3filter_0_70b.exe). Unless you specify MP3, AutoGK will retain Dolby Digital (.ac3) sound with 2-CD or larger encodes.

As to why DivX 5 doesn't seem to be working, there may be some rendering problem, or there may be trouble with the encoded file. Use GSpot (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Editing/gspot221.exe) to determine where the problem with the .avi lies.

Lastly, the easiest way to concatenate multiple .vob sets (episodes, etc.) is through the use of VobEdit (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Vobtools/Vobedit06.zip)'s Join Clip command. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of disk space. I'd wait on that until you are consistantly successful with single episodes or single movies, first, to reduce your processing complexity.

[Edit]I'm glad you've figured out what's going on with playback! You won't need GSpot, but you might want to have it handy, for future use.

[bralex]

I'm going to pin the problems on a firewire connection problem. I cleared some space on the main drive to work with, then I did a second attempt with AutoGK which worked flawlessly. WMP gives an occasional, very minor hesitation, DivX player works perfectly. Thanks for the help. I'll keep on plugging!

Scott