I hope to learn and hopefully help others with this thread.
I want to check with the experts here, if I can get better results converting my DVD movies to XVID/AVI. First section what I'm doing and second section whats it for?
First Section: I first transcode my DVD using DVD Shrink, keeping the main movie, English audio track and editing the end credits out, which I don't really care for. The resulting file is uncompressed into an .ISO Format. I than use FairUse Wizard to convert the Movie into XVID/AVI using the options: Full Auto, Standalone Player MPG4 Profile and 2Pass and the end result is a 700-750MB File. The quality is good, but not the greatest I can notice artifacts. Is there other tweaks I can do to without increasing the file size too much to get better quality?
Second Section: I setup a user friendly system, so anyone in my house could watch movies without having to insert the original Disc. I hope by sharing this others might find it useful.
System: Pioneer DV410-V equipped with USB 2.0 + 80GB 2.5" Western Digital Drive Since the DVD Player does not have NTFS Support and Windows XP or Vista wont allow you to format Large Drives in Fat32 format I used a tool called Fat32Format alternatively you can use CompuApps SwissKnife both are FREE!!! I'm oldskool so I used the dos version.
Now all you need to do is convert your movies to DIVX/XVID dump them on to the Hard Drive and watch them on your TV. The Pioneer does 1080iUpscaling and has HDMI Support.
So before I go nuts and convert all my movies... I'd like to get the best quality possible for reasonable file size.
If I convert my movies with the method described above, I could probably fit 110+ Movies. But I'd rather have slightly higher quality video.
The best quality at the lowest file size will be using the x264codec in fairuse.
A 700mb x264 2-pass will look as good as a 900mb xvid in most cases. I haven't encounter any problems with x264 playing on any of my software media players but you would have to test it with what you have.
But in a side to side comparison the x264 700mb vs the 700mb xvid, it's not even close, you can clearly see the better quality even on a small computer monitor.
