Any tips on ripping Cartoons to divx?

[Lanefair]

Any advice on ripping cartoons from dvd to divx? I mean because they have a lot less colour and picture complexity, you can get away with using much lower bitrates. But does anybody know just how low you can go?

I don't suppose there's any kind of bitrate calculator out there especially for this? Because if you set the bitrate for a cartoon based on the length of the cartoon, the avi file will always be much less because of the compression.

Cheers.

[Enchanter]

I rather disagree. Cartoons are generally harder to compress due to the solid colour blocks used on parts of them. Also, the edges of the characters, which are solid black, also compresses with difficulty. What you should look for is if the movie is blurred or very sharp. The more blurred, the easier it compresses.

[Lanefair]

True

I agree that the outlines are the most obvious places where quality is lost. That said, are there any guidelines on bitrate? How many minutes of tolerable cartoon can you get on a 700mb cd? I don't need an extremely specific figure.

[Enchanter]

How long is your cartoon show? Generally, it is usually short enough, allowing the use of bitrate of 825-1050 most of the time. This bitrate is considerably high and you shouldn't be too worried about low bitrate.

[Lanefair]

Cheers,
I'm more interested in putting multiple episodes of a certain cartoon series onto cd, as opposed to a feature length animation. Each episode being around 22 minutes. So I want to get as many episodes onto cd without compromising the picture quality too much.

I'm curious about the compression as well, what percentage between smooth and crisp is advisable for low bitrates?

While I'm at it, flask mpeg doesnt work now that I've installed Windows XP, I suppose I should sort that 'minor' problem out first. An error message pops up when I click 'Start Conversion'.

[Enchanter]

For me, I usually put 4 episodes per CD. That means they are high-quality, at 640x480 or 512x384 and using a bitrate of around 1000. You can also put each episode into 50MB pieces (at 320x240), but the quality leaves reeaallly a lot to be desired.

As for your encoding procedure and you being a Flask user, I suggest using the codec 4.12 instead. It allows you to use 2-pass encoding mode which results in higher quality for the same filesize. Also, please don't start asking me what a 2-pass encoding mode is because there are plenty of guides for it available and you can do a search on this forum for that topic. I have amply covered that here and there (it's sickening to have to repeat that times and times again).

[benderman]

I compressed a lot of simpsons-episodes from TV or DVD. Most important is to use a very good deinterlacer because most cartoon-series are interlaced.

Till now I stored the episodes in 3 different sizes:

1) 320x240 with 400kbps: small signs and texts are nearly unreadable

2) 384x288 with 500kbps (+96kbps audio): results in files with about 100MB every 22min. A higher bitrate is only usefull for action-cartoons.

3) 512x384 with 800-1000kbps: very close to DVD if you use a good deinterlacer. Higher resolutions are only usefull for very detailed cartoons. With 128kbps-sound there will be only space for four episodes on on cd.

If you want to go for really small files you should try to reduce the framerate from 24fps to 12 fps. Most cartoons are painted with only 12fps. The biggest part of the movie will look same as if encoded with 24fps. Only some action-scenes that are painted with a higher framerate will not look as smooth as the original.