Mpeg2avi "create my avi" problem

[ghobbit]

Hi
Sorry if this has been asked before but I did do a search and couldnt find anything relevant.
I am a newbie to all this and had a go at converting dvd to divx. I used nickyguides and as far as i can tell have followed everything to the letter. However Ive come unstuck and was hoping some guru out there could help

Ive used the software suggested:

DivX Mpeg-4 Codec 3.1alpha (or greater) - actually use 5.0
Fhg Radium MP3 codec
DanniDin's GUI v0.19
Mpeg2avi 0.16B35
Advanced Bitrate Calculator 1.8
Ac3dec

My system is 1400 amd athlon
512 ddr ram
tnt2 32mb agp card
hollywood plus decoder card
toshiba dvd rom drive
win xp home

i am using a PAL dvd and used claddvdxp to rip it. i created a *.lst file.

I have extracted (is that the right word?) the audio ok but when it comes to the avi not a lot happens.
I click on "Create My Avi"
A dos box appears and from recollection says ' Now encoding" or something like that. Another box or two opens one of which is showing the actual film as it encodes. Nothing else appears in the dos box at all.

Once the movie has finished, I looked in the folder where I told mpeg2avi to put the file and theres nothing there except the wav file i created and still nothing in the dos box. When I extracted the audio I recall several lines of info in the dos box.

What could be going wrong?

Im using the software simply because the website says to. I dont know how good it is or if theres anything better I should be using.
I dont know what to check to see whats going on

Helppppppppppppp
Thanks for any input
steve

[setarip]

Before you seek or receive a multitude of varying suggestions regarding DIFFERENT ways of accomplishing the same task, I thought I'd ask you a simple question:

Have you used "Find" from your desktop to try to locate the .AVI file you may have created (In case, for whatever reason, it's not going into the directory you believe you've sent it to)?

[ghobbit]

Hi

Thanks for your reply

Yes I did use find to look for the file and no it isnt antwhere on any of my drives.

The mpeg2avi was told to put the avi file into exactly the same folder as the audio file.

It was also the fact that nothing appeared in the dos box whilst it was encoding that also had me concerned. As I said there were messages in the dos box whilst doing the audio and was therefore expecting to see messages whilst encoding the avi.

from what i can gather fro other threads there should have been something.

steve

[hermanthegerman]

I personally prefer DVD2AVI and VitualDub to encode my movies. It's fast (realtime @1GHz Athlon) and gives me perfect quality. You can find Guides here on the page how to do that. But other than described in the guide, I encode my movie allready in DVD2AVI instead of VirtualDub because I've not seen a difference in quality so far and it works faster.

Regards,
hermanthegerman