Rip Packs - I want your opinions!

[fragpipe]

I'm a first time poster
I want an English rip pack that will encode using Divx 4.12, 2 pass, at any resolution
What I use is Rippack (that's it's name). It rips only at widescreen and even when you set it to 4:3 it still outputs widescreen with black bars on the top and bottom)
Any suggestions out there to alleviate this problem?
What's your favorite rip-pack?

Thanks
Dave

ps. This is posted twice because I think it's more appropriate here and it didn't get any posts

[1 Smelly Fish]

Hi, I just purchased the ROXIO Video Pack, i am yet to try it out yet but i will let you know how it goes.

Cheers

[DivZ]

forgive me if i am mistaken, but i believe 4.12 doesnt require 2 passes. only if you use 3.11.
but to answer your question the sbc rippack (with nandub etc) produces the best results that i have seen. its a little bit more fiddly but if you follow the guides then problems should be few if at all. quality is closest to dvd i have seen..
if you want ease of use then i suggest trying flask, results are ok but not great.
most rippacks should offer resize or cropping facilities, which is what you should be doing to to get rid of widescreen and eliminate black bars.

hope this is helpful

[Kaiser-Soze]

I believe DivX 3.11 does not have a 2 pass option (unless u regard as "2 pass" the fast-low motion).
On the other hand I think fragpipe is right about DivX4.12
DivX 4.12 gives u 3 options for compression

1) Constant bitrate mode
2) 1-pass quality-based mode
3) 2-pass variable bitrate mode

I think fragpipe is reffering to the last one

[DivZ]

ok...soz...im still a bit of a noob when it comes to divx.
but i did read in a forum at divx.com (which i now know suxs) that 4.12 included 2 pass in its code (not sure how to put this in words exactly) thus only 1 pass is required when encoding.
what are they talking about here??

either way, 2 pass on nandub with divx3.11 will give better results than anything else as far as i am concerned.

[Kaiser-Soze]

No problem m8
no need for soz
he means two-passes u mean second pass (second option, Low-motion)
Shit happens...

[DivZ]

lol...shite this can be confusing.

i thought i was talking about 2 passes. i do 2 passes with nandub
using divx3.11

this is from one of the guides:
Smart Bitrate Control (SBC) introduces a new way of encoding DivX: Changing between DivX low motion and DivX high motion on the fly, even at frame level, complete control about the internal codec setting parameters and 2 pass encoding for maximum quality and complete final size predicatability.


not that i want an argument, i just want to understand if i am doing it right.

do you agree sbc nandub produces best results?
if not, what are you using?

i havent been able to produce any decent results using 4.12. it either gives me errors or gives me bad movies although i havent tried gordianknot yet.

cheers.

[Kaiser-Soze]

This is indeed confusing lol.
Ok now I understand that u mean what I mean

Anyway I think Nandub using 2-pass with 3.11 is good if u want to have the DivX at a certain filesize.It also requires more time.
I sadly rip at least one DVD/Day(with an Athlon 550Mhz lol) so I don't have time to use 2-pass, so most of the times I use 1-pass (DivX 4.12) constrainedly. I also don't have a filesize restriction problem because I always make my DivX's at least 2CD's so I get good quality. As for decent results I never had a problem with DivX 4.12 nor bad frames, freezing e.t.c.
What problems do u get with DivX 4.12?

[DivZ]

in some cases there was no video playback while the audio worked.
i made a few which wmp couldnt find any combination of filters to render this file....
and every time i encoded with 4.12, whichever program i was using got the 'this program has performed an illegal function error' once it had finished encoding and jammed my pc.
it was damn frustrating i can tell you, so i went back to 3.11 and tried other ways, namely sbc. it worked 10 times better than anything else for me.
i only do 1cd movies now, most of my old ones were 2, but now they dont compare.

i suppose it all depends on the pc, the person doing it and the desired quality.

thanks for the feedback.

cheers.