can someone suggest a good codec?

[dancray]

Hi

I am in the process of ripping some scenes from a DVD and I have gotten to the stage where the appropriate vob file is on my harddrive; but when I try to use DVD2AVI it asks me which codec I want to use to save as AVI...that is ok, except I have experimented and tried Huffy2.11, the latest DIVX and even MJPEG but the problem is poor quality of the finished avi.

There are visible horizontal lines (artifacts?) in certain scenes involving moving action (for example a pilot putting on his helmet is fine in the original vob file viewed in DVD2AVI, but the finished separated avi the pilot's helmet has visible horiz lines as he moves his head).

I played with the quality levels on DIVX ( I do not really know what I am doing but I raised the output video stream slider to 5500-6000 and maxed out the quality lever to 100%) and there was a slight improvement but nothing close to the original .vob

Is there a better quality codec that can I can choose or is available on the web; or even more appropriating tweaking of my existing codecs. It is rather disappointing that even Huffy (which results in massive avi files) still contains visually lower quality like the horiz lines than the originally decrypted vob file.

help?

thanks in advance

dc

intel pentium 3 500mhz
maxtor 20 gig udma 66
matrox g400max

[Dr Mordrid]

Sounds like interlace artifacts, probably due to using the wrong field order. DVD's are typically encoded as field order A while the Matrox cards use B.

Dr. Mordrid

[dancray]

is there a simple solution software wise? a feature I can enable?

[Indiana]

I would still suggest DivX4 (from your description it sounds as if you've used 3.11/3.20), a short clip of the quality that can be achieved when FLASK'ing can be seen here. (about 7.5MB).
And this was done even without using the two-pass encoder.

The following DivX4 values give good results for 2CD movies:
Two pass encoder, Performance/quality: slowest
Bitrate : 1200 - 1800 kbps (depending on movie length)
Max Keyframe Interval : 200 frames
Max quantizer : 6
Min quantizer : 3
Rate control averaging: 2000
Rate control reaction period: 10 (possibly higher like 50-100)
Rate control down/up reaction: 20 (again you might try higher values like 100 as well).
The most important values here are the max/min quantizer where you can set the maximum/minimum compression the program will use. So reducing max quantizer will give you better quality in fast-motion scenes, but at the cost of a larger filesize. Reducing min quantizer will give better still/slow-motion quality, but again larger files (and vice versa, of course).


Note: you CAN slightly adjust the bitrate for the second pass (if the movie is just a bit too long for two CDs...), but don't deviate from the first pass more than 300KBPs.

For audio I use mp3 at 128-160 KBps (keeps at least the Dolby Surround, if you want to have AC3, you'll most probably have to lower the bitrate or use 3 CDs per movie.

This takes quite a while (2*3-3.5 hours per movie here with the two pass encoder), but the result is imho worth it.