Help - Encoding a b/w movie

[cappellopower]

Hi there!
This is my first post here...

I'm trying to encode Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE, which is black&white 640x480, and I've got a couple of questions about it:

1) What are the best settings (for DIVX 5.02 PRO) to get good results from a b/w dvd? I tried with my regular settings (had great results with movies like Snatch, Fight Club, Reservoir Dogs, Mars Attacks etc.) but the encoded movie looks bad.

2) I know that the best way to crop a video and avoid green border lines is to crop it by 16 pixels (or its multiples) a time.
Anyway, many of the movies I've encoded needed different values and no green lines appeared at all. Have you experienced problems in cropping at different values?

3) DVD2AVI is a great program but I don't use it to do the entire encoding process due to the lack of a cropping utility. Is there a way to get a "plugin" or something to crop the video when using DVD2AVI?
What I usually do is to rip the vobs with SmartRipper, extract the audio track with DVD2AVI, encode them in MP3 with CDex, merge audio and video, encode the whole movie and crop it (DivX 5.02 PRO - 2 Pass) in VirtualDub.

Thanks in advance,

CappelloPower

[UncasMS]

as to cropping:

i stick with gordianknot 026b + divx 5.02 and it never failed so far.

neither, btw, did the 2 passes for the quality.


what exactly was it you were not pleased with?
can you provide a screenshot?

black and white did not make a difference in terms of using gk for me so far - you may, however, need to use a little MORE bitrate than you normally would!

some sort of a noise filter for your video might be helpfull to smooth the picture and additinally make the material more compressible.


in this case i'd suggest to tick this in gordianknot:
- little noise
- put noise filter before resizing




if you want to take a look at my gk+ divx 5.02 guide, go here.

http://www.atlandide.net/~uncasms/en/index.php?page=gordian

[cappellopower]

Well, I think I'll try my method first (with a little more bitrate) and then, if it doesn't work, I'll surely give your guide a try.
Anyway, quite a good work! I'm very curious about GK, I've a crush on those "all-in-one" rip packs!

Thank you very much,

CappelloPower