Hello, I am total noob to this, and there are so many options out there. I and nearly done with a media project and have some questions as far as what would be the best method for getting my DVD backups to a smaller file size and maintain video quality. Basically 4.7gb it way to large to shuffle around the network for my media library that i am feeding to all my rooms. And most importantly I need the video quality to be great quality for my 42 HDTV. I have heard of converting to DivX, and was looking at the DivX5 steps on the home page. But before I got to far involved with that, I figured I would ask if this would be my best option.
I did a lots of video encoding for years and from my experiences.... It depends if you watch via DVD player(capable to playback mpeg4 ASP), you will most likely to stick with Divx. If you only watch it on computer monitor or output it to your HDTV. Then XviD and X264 can be your choice. The biggest advantage is they are open source and legal & free for non-commerical usage. Technically speaking, Xvid was better than Divx almost everything except for better DVD player compatibility. However, the development of XviD has been slowed down and now everyone just working hard with their new toy - X264. This made the Divx started to catch up Xvid to some points. I would like to vote for Divx6 over Xvid if go for some really high bitrate, I find it better in terms of speed or quality to my videos. If you do low to medium bitrate like 1000 - 2000k(most ppl work within this range), then Xvid still superior to Divx no doubt. If you just don't care the slow encode/decode speed, I prefer X264 for the highest quality with smallest file size.
