2hr 20min DVD on 1 cd (divx)!

[Lui]

Hi,
I was wondering whether i can fit i a dvd movie of length of 140min in a single cd divx file. For example i converted the dvd of batman and robin (2hr & 20min) and used a bitrate of 680 using 2 pass. The clarity wasnt that good. So i was wondering if there is any particular thing that i need to do to get better quality in 1 cd.

thanx in advance.

[benderman]

680 kbps x 140 min = 697 MB. If you want to use a 700MB-cdr you will have to use a part of the 680 kbps for the sound. If you want 128kbps-mp3-sound you will only have about 550kbps for video. That is very low and I would better make a 2-cd-ripp.
If you still want to go for a 1-cd-ripp you should reduce the resolution of the video to a width of 512 or lower. If it is fullscreen-4:3-video you should use 400x300.

[khp]

You will never get a 140 minute video to fit on one cd, with great quality.

There are some steps you can take to get better quality at low bitrates.

Resolution: Make sure you don't use too high resolution. The bits per pixel value, generally should never go very far below 0.20. GordianKnot will tell you this value. But you can calculate it yourself (bitrate*1000)/(height*width*framerate)

Chopping: Make sure you cut away the black border around the picture, a sharp contrast between the picture and the black border, will wreak havoc with the DCT compression algorithm. The easiest way to chop in Gordianknot is to click 'auto chop' and then click 'smart chop all'. Which will chop off the black borders, and then chop off a bit more to achive a perfect aspect ratio. Note: The autochop feature in GKnot is not always perfect, you should always check that all the black borders are gone.

Subtitles: IMHO the best way to do subs is to use directvobsub as per this guide from doom9. You could also do subtitles that are 'burned' into the movie, but that introduces lots of sharp edges, which don't compress very well. A single language subtitle stream takes up about 3-5 MB, but if you used 'burned' subtitles you would need approx 20-50 MB more to achive the same picture quality.

End credits: End credits are expensive, if you encode them with the same settings as the movie, they can use as much as 50-80 MB, GordianKnot can help you cut off the endcredits or encode them at a very low quality level.

Filtering: If you are aming for one CD rips, I would suggest that you select 'Little noise' in the 'Noise filter' section in GordianKnot, this will make the movie more compressable and hopefully give you better overall quality. But ofcause I almost never do 1 CD rips so I usually don't use any noise filter.

[UncasMS]

and in addition to what you list, khp, one should of course use an apropriate resize filter!

sharp bicubic will be the worst choice in your case as it will not let the overall compression be too good.

use bilinear for 1cd rips which will be blurry but compresses better

but all in all, go for 2cds

[Lui]

Thanx for the help guys. I think i will go for a 2 cd rip. I dont want to confuse myself with GordanKnot and other programs as i a newbie to this and i use X-mpeg and follow the guide given at dvd-digest. I will get pretty confused if i try any other programs. I do know how to crop files but i am not sure of resizing them. Please let me know how to resize using X-mpeg.

[techno]

Whatever has been said is correct, but SOMETIMES u can fit this amount on 1 CD. SOMETIMES. use fast motion as see what happens, SOMETIMES it gives u quality and fits on 1 CD, SOMETIMES, ALL DVD rips / DVD's depends the way it was made

Techno

[khp]

Originally posted by Lui
I do know how to crop files but i am not sure of resizing them. Please let me know how to resize using X-mpeg.

This should be covered by the DVD to divx conversion guide 2.0