Blockyness with lots of action

[candyman]

im starting to rip dvds to Divx now using divx4 low motion, riping with clad and then converting to avi with DVD2AVI, ive started to notice fairly major blockyness when theres a lot of action on screen, is this purely down to the bitrate? or would it be dramatically reduced if i used a more "round the houses" method?

[Echo147]

Lower the res. An average length movie cannot be compressed at the original DVD res of 720x---

Unless it's made for 2 CDs.

Personally I quite like 512x282, still looks great fullscreen, and packs to 1 CD without getting blocky

[Enchanter]

Use 2-pass encoding, which always yield better quality for most movies. Nandub can do 2-pass encoding with 3.11. Otherwise, you can stick to 4.x/5.x for 2-pass encoding, which can be performed using most encoders, like Virtualdub (The codec natively supports 2-pass encoding, unlike 3.11).