I have been trying to find the best program to convert my House DVD's to Divx/Xvid, and I'm not satisfied so far. I've used AGK, Handbrake, avi.NET, and FairUse Wizard. All to convert 43 min. DVD episodes to 350MB avi files. I know the file size I want is a little small, but I don't want to take up much space. AGK and Handbrake produced similar results. Not great. I found avi.NET to produce a much better file when using the "HQ" option, but I think I can get it better. FairUse was just confusing...the only reason I think I didn't get a good result with it is because I didn't use the right settings for the result I want. Can somebody help me with that? I've heard FairUse is basically the best you can use right now... Or maybe you guys can recommend me another program? BTW, on DRF analyzer, the average I get for an episode converted to Xvid w/ avi.NET is 2.855. DRF1&2 = 37.2%, DRF3 = 40%, DRF4 = 22.7% How is that? I'm not really sure about the scale these numbers go on.. I really don't care about speed at all...and I think I have a fairly good processor for encoding anyway.
fairuse is a little confusing when dealing with episodic dvd's, even I have problems doing it. The one episodic dvd I did, I ended up encoding the same episode 2 times but at the end I got decent quality. The other program that I have used for episodic dvd's is dr.divx 2.0. It gave me the best quality, even better than fairuse. But it also has a slight learning curve. Also A new program I have been trying out is avidemux 2.43. I've been testing it out on editing avi's, but it can also convert VOB's to avi. You can do the 2-pass conversion and set the file size you want. It has a large preview windows where you can choose the exact section of the dvd you want to convert. http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/screenshots.html
Thanks. I'll try both avidemux and dr. divx, but....didn't they discontinue dr. divx? EDIT: I found a beta version of dr. divx released in february that works w/ vista, but when I try to input my .VOB file, it says that file format is undecodable by dr. divx...
I've use dr.divx with windows xp, I'm not sure how it will behave with vista. The times I used it it recognize my vob's with no problems and I was using the latest version your using. One idea I have but might be more time comsuming is to use dvdshrink and backup each episode into an iso seperately. Then just use fairuse to batch process them all at one time. Fairuse will still have to analyze each one seperately (whether they are all on one iso or seperate ISO's). But this might give the results you want, also you might want to try the h264 codec, when I compress my avi's to 700mb it produces the best quality(where it's noticeable when compared to xvid). I used to compress to xvid but have started using h264 more lately.
