Divx Codec and movies to boot

[stevenscott]

I was looking for some info on some SG1 episodes, and low and behold I found lots of goodies. I found the Codec works well with MS Windows media Player and Avi files.

http://www.sg1archive.com/ins.html

http://www.sg1archive.com/s4.html

http://www.divx.com/download/divx.php

[stevenscott]

I would like to take AVI movies and render them into a Divx files that are only the size of the Divx files from my first post. About 45 mins in 20 MB files. The quality of those movies in playback is really great in my opionion with such high compression in that Divx Codec. Does anyone know how to acheive this? Everytime I try to make files, they end up being huge size files with lousy quality the more compression I use. I like these specificially, as they are exactly the kind of result I would like to acheive. To see the movies and files, you would have to see, download, and watch them from my previous post, the SG1 movies. For thosre those that do not know, they are from a Sc-Fi show on Television, and are being made avaialbe on a website for either download, or through streaming downloads.

[TnT]

Heh, I used to kinda chat with these guys on IRC #sg1central or something like that.

Anyways, to see the avg bit rate he used and audio compressiong just open up one of the vids in VirtualDub and go to File Information. Dunno if Trinium is using DivX 3.11a or the new DivX (http://www.projectmayo.com) now. The DivX files he has available are all DivX 3.11a, though.

[mikiem]

Hi

Check out digital-digest.com for all sorts of utilities, tutorials, that sort of thing. Sure you can find what you're looking for there.

mikie

[TnT]

D'oh that's what I forgot, I was going to put a link to www.digital-digest.com/divx in my post, but forgot.

[Sciascia]

www.doom9.org is the place to go in my opinion. It focuses on ripoping, but most of the info applies to all digital video. There is a program called nandub out there that is modified version of Virtual dub. It is without a doubt the best DivX encoder available. It does 2 passes. First pass creates a stats file and the second pass encodes the video by switching between high and low motion DivX codecs depending on your threshhold settings. I made a few copies of my own DVDs to take with me on business trips. I can fit a whole movie on 1 CD and it looks quite impressive (considering the size). There are a few tips to follow though.

1. Crop any black borders off. This eats up data for each frame that could be used for active video.

2. Resize it to a smaller resolution (not too much). There is a reason, but I can't think of it off the top of my head. It does help though. Use Precise Bicubic and make sure that it is a multiple of 32 both ways (H and W).

3. Try to use IVTC (24.936 fps) if the source is from film originally (99%) of movies. This gives each frame of video more data, meaning higher quality.

4. Whatever your source video is it has to be as clean as possible. (@#%$ in equals @$#% out)

Hope this helps

[Indiana]

Sciascia, have you tried the new Divx4 beta? Really impressive and much better than the old low/fast-motion DivX;-) codecs for low bitrates. It really gives astonishing results at rates as low as 1000KBps, besides it has VBR (variable bitrate) and a two-pass encoder to make better use of the VBR.

[Sciascia]

Indiana

No I had heard mixed reviews about it. How new is the beta version? I've been on the road for the last 3 months so I am a little behind on the news.

I downloaded one of the episodes to see it and they did do a pretty decent job for the file size. I captured straight from the tuner on my G400 with the same settings and got the same results. It is 320*176 at about 12 fps so it is definitely small. For the size it is definitley watchable though I prefer a little better quality. I don't think that you can beat 30 minutes of video in a 20 M file with anything else though.

[Indiana]

Well, I played a bit with it and I think it's really MUCH better than the previous version (which I found to be worse than Divx;-) fast-motion and soo slow).
The new Beta is much faster (comparable to Divx;-) now) and the constant-bitrate encoding gave great results when converting a DVD at 720x576 at a low bitrate (1000KBps) so that the whole movie would fit on one CD, while still maintaining the full resolution.

The results I got from the VBR were VERY mixed, though (and mostly worse than constant bitrate encoding) - but then there are so much parameters to play with with DivX4.

[stevenscott]

Hi again,
I have been testing various programs, captures, codecs, and I am not a coder, or programmer, but have quite a few codecs and programs. I have some knowledge of computers, one of my degrees is in electronic engineering. But, I was looking for a way to put movies into a cpmpression like Divx, and found that it is coming along pretty good. I found that I can take some movies and attain similar results, but stil they are not as good as what the people did who put the SG1 episodes in Divx format.
I have a Matrox Marvel G400, and like I said quite a few programs. While time consuming, very time consuming, I am still working on taking movies (movies from either a TV, VCR, or a digital movie camera) and from the capture into AVI files and converting them into MPEG, Divx,...and using programs like Virtual Dub, etc..etc.and more programs...I was wonder if anyone would like to communicate a bit more on our finding and tests in compressing these into various formats. maybe we could use ICQ too compare our findings and see if we can help each other comapre and test, and see what works best. And, take a few notes. While there are lots of websites with files and notes, it might help to actually talk with others. I would prefer that people with similar computer equipment comapre notes because it would be to hard to compare with other opertaing systems and equipment.

Like those of us with Matrox Marvels and Win98, even with W2k
might be close enough to help each other. It's all just a thought. While having a few hand notes, I was thinking that maybe even just making a small easy chart on the programs, settings, times, etc...

Any ideas?
Thanx.

my ICQ #363514

San Diego

I Am around at most hours. (day and night)

[TnT]

I've been playing around with DivX4 beta. So far it is has been better than previous versions of DivX. I encoded an episode of Futurama with CBR and the video came out in a little bit better quality and smaller size than slow-mo ones I did of The Simpsons. I then did a two-pass VBR and a CBR of a Conan O'Brien clip. The two had comparable quality, but the VBR was much smaller in size.

I wanted to do some more testing with the Crispness (they have default at 0, and I put it at 100, cause I don't really know what it does) and changing the bit rate with VBR to see if quality and file size change much. I wanted to, but couldn't cause VDub crashed (divx.dll was the cause), and I didn't want to deal with it anymore. So that is the only problem I've had so far, the beta seems to be very unstable. It has caused MPlayer to crash a few times, and VDub multiple times. Hopefully the next version will be more stable and compress faster. 466 Celeron + DivX4 + a couple filters + 320x240 = 2-4 fps compression

[Nethermancer]

Open Dixv CODEC

You should download the beta 2 from www.opendivx.com as they put some P3 only code in the first beta causing crashes on Celerons. Actually 4.0 is very stable and fixes all the problems before (too dark etc) and is about 3 times faster even with the overhead for bicubic resizing. Using huffyYUV for the initial capture I can get 2 episodes of Roswell onto 1 80min CD in superb picture quality. I'm still fidling around with the 2-pass option to get the best results.

[TnT]

The link doesn't work, but the most recent OpenDivX release I know of is an alpha released 3/4 months ago. It didn't have 2-pass encoding or any of the good stuff of this beta release.

[Indiana]

TnT, try http://www.divx.com/features.php.
There you'll find the new DivX4 beta2. But don't expect miracle on your machine. While the new beta is at least 2 times faster than the old 3.x ones, it still only gets only about 12-15 fps (768x576) on a TBird 1333.
But since this is not really meant for realtime encoding the quality is much more important and there this codec shines - although it seems some work is still necessary with the two-pass encoder.

[TnT]

Oh all right, thanks. Speed really isn't an issue, cause I just encode things overnight, but it'll be nice to eventually upgrade and encode faster .

Also, note to anyone that doesn't know: OpenDivX and these DivX releases aren't exactly the same thing. For more info: http://forums.projectmayo.com/viewto...c=2431&forum=3