Encode anamorphic DIVX? And best codec for 2GB movie rips? (1 Viewer)

[havocthief]

Basically I'm running out of HD space. Ripping DVDs works great, but when you rip a DVD of a TV series and it takes up 7GB..... you think to yourself, "maybe I should encode it as DIVX!"

So I was wondering, do the people here generally encode 16:9 material normally (640x400ish) or do you use all the available resolution; how does MP handle that?

Also, which is the best codec at ripping a movie to quite a generous size, say 2GB?

 

[elconejito]

Re: Encode anamorphic DIVX? And best codec for 2GB movie rip

Basically I'm running out of HD space. Ripping DVDs works great, but when you rip a DVD of a TV series and it takes up 7GB..... you think to yourself, "maybe I should encode it as DIVX!"

So I was wondering, do the people here generally encode 16:9 material normally (640x400ish) or do you use all the available resolution; how does MP handle that?

Also, which is the best codec at ripping a movie to quite a generous size, say 2GB?

What format are the movies in now? (i.e. what did you rip it to, MPG, ISO, or just copied the folders to HD)

I don't think you'll find a consensus on widescreen stuff as it really all depends on your preferences as well as the movie itself (some movies you don't want to miss whats going.

I normally encode everything with VirtualDubMod and Divx. I can keep a real rough conversion if its something i'm going to watch once and throw away, or spend the time on a multipass encoding with quality being a priority.

regarding MP, i assume you mean how does it handle a widescreen movie? You set the view by pressing "s" while the movie is playing and it shuffles thru normal, pan n scan, zoom, stretch, etc. Choose which one fits the movie best.

 

[aajkaarjun]

I use Auto Gordian Knot with a fixed width of 848 pixels (848/480 = 16:9) and an 80% quality CBR encode using XviD (no need for multipass VBR). This ends up retaining all "useful" resolution within a DVD and encoding at a pretty high quality. I also experimented with the "100% quality" option but the gain was really not much and file sizes increased significantly.

I use 848 pixels as a fixed width because an anamorphic stretch of NTSC DVD's 720x480 resolution resuts in 848x480 pixels on screen. AutoGK will trim off all excess black bars (for example, in a 2.35:1 movie) and compute the final resolution. This ends up maintaining all horizontal resolution from the original DVD.

Another thing I have recently started experimenting with is doing an H.264 encode using x264. The idea is that since I have to do a resize when I do my XviD conversion I may as well resize to my projector's final resolution, i.e. 1280x720 rather than do a resize to 848x480 once at encode time, and then another resize (in hardware) to 1280x720 at playback time.

 

[elconejito]

Divx isn't going to give you much if any improvement over Xvid. Xvid is the opensource version of DivX.

I would definitely do a multipass variable bitrate (either DivX or Xvid) and that should decrease the filesize considerably. Basically when you say "constant quality" you tell the codec to use up X # of KBs per frame whether it needs it or not. With a multipass VBR (generally 3 passes works best) the codec decides to use more KBs on frames that needs it and takes away from those frames that don't need it. The encoding time increases obviously, but the quality/size ratio goes way up.

I can only give you general tips if you use Xvid, but I can give you more specific info if you go with Divx (since I use it more often).

How many DVDs are you going to convert?

 

[havocthief]

I have 110 DVDs, which take up all of a 300gb drive.

I want to avoid having 3 hard drives (I have a small cube PC), so I am prepared to lose a little quality by converting all to Divx or Xvid.

 

[sprtfan]

I found this guide on videohelp.com I haven't had the chance to try it yet but it sounds like what you want to do. The description from the website:

Encoding DVDs to High Quality Movie Files with XviD and AC3

Copy your favorite movies onto your hard drive while retaining the amazing video and audio quality that DVD offers. Using freely available codecs and encoding tools you can archive your movies or simply compress them to watch whenever you please.

Link
http://www.bobsomers.com/articles/dvdmoviefiles.php

Tools used
VirtualdubMOD, VFAPI Reader, DVD Decrypter, DGMPGDec

He was able to reduce the size of a 2hr+ movie to 1.8 GB while keeping a high quality.

 

[elconejito]

110DVDs use up 300GB? So thats approximately 3GB per DVD (give or take).

How far down did you want to compress them to? Depending on the type of movie (cartoon, action, drama, etc) you can probably shrink them down to maybe 1.5GB each assuming a 2 hour movie or about half what you have now. Obviously, the final judge will be what quality level you are OK with as you could shrink it down even further, but that is the quality level I would set it for if it were me.

If thats what you want, I'll post some instructions tonite. Do you have access to the original DVDs? That will give you the best quality...

 

[havocthief]

Actually I made a miscalculation...

There are 50 DVDs. Some movies are 3.5gb in size, and perhaps a TV series is around 7gb, so it varies.

I'm not sure how configurable AutoGK is. And in the Divx folder I cannot see any encoder settings. AutoGK seems to do a two-pass when a target size is set and a one-pass when a quality is specified.

 

[jawbroken]

This makes sense. When you specify a size it does a two pass to get it down to the size with a variable bit rate, setting a quality on the other hand usually uses just a constant bit rate, so more than one pass is not necessary/useful in any way.

 

[elconejito]

Sorry I didn't get a chance to do this last night as I got home late from work. Will do it tonite...