Divx questions

[verbal]

My PPC is on the way and I'd like to rip a couple of my dvds so I can watch them on it. I've read the guide on pocketmatrix and I have a few questions..

When ripping audio cds, I know some cdroms do it better than others. Is it the same case for DVDs? Or do all dvdroms do it the same? Got any recommendations for good, but cheap, dvdrom drives?

In your experience with ripping DVDs for viewing on a PPC, what are some of your recommendations? What kind of 'habits' should I get into aside from whats mentioned in the guide on pocketmatrix?

[GingerTommy]

After wasting hours of effort on my first attempts at encoding DVDs, my advice would be to start small - rip and convert a couple of minutes worth of video and play around with the VirtualDub/DivX settings before tackling a whole movie.

This way you get to find a quality/size balance that suits you (which may be different from the guide's author).

Also, settings that work great for one disc may be terrible on another - we'll see you back here when you get letterboxed movies, interlaced TV shows, etc. :wink: It's routine once you get the hang of it.

Another tip is to perform at least three passes with the divX codec (I use four and get superb results). You can set this up in a VirtualDub job and if you uncheck the divX error prompt (for overwritting logs) it can do all your passes overnight.

Good luck, there are plenty of people here who will help solve any problems you encounter.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Is your question with regards to differences in the actual DVD discs or DVD drives?

For drives, there shouldn't be any difference in ripping quality. A faster drive would be nice, but your real bottleneck will be your CPU when the final conversion occurs.

Interesting advice from GingerTommy... I've never tried 4 passes. My movies are all 1-pass and look fine, though there's always room for improvement I guess. Definitely do your experimentations with small portions of video. The ripping of the DVD to your harddrive (often the first step) is not that big of a deal. You should be able to do that first step in its entirety (if you make mistakes later in the process, you can always start from the VOB files already on your harddrive)... most of your configuration steps lie in the final step of VirtualDub, and that's where you probably want to limit your final video to a small portion (say 30 seconds to a 1 minute of film).

...and yes, as GingerTommy said, your settings for one movie will not automatically work great for another. Movies with large amounts of fast movement (action flicks / fast-beat music videos) tend to require higher video bitrates and possibly smaller resolutions for fluid playback. Animation flicks can be ripped with larger resolutions and smaller bitrates (and even reduced framerates) for fluid playback.

Good luck.