Just starting to backup my dvd's.
I was wondering what is better: weather to encode as a DIVX file or use SRINk or RECODE to make fit on one standard 4.5gb DVD disk.
Something long like any of the extended LOTR movies will look much, much better as MPEG-4 @ 4.37GB's than transcoded or even re-encoded MPEG-2. A shorter movie run through shrink, you might not even need to shrink if you discard audio, etc.
Definatly. I would recommend XviD. Fact is though that it depends on the movie. If you are doing a XviD/DivX avi/divx file for use on a standalone, then you would be probably doing movie only, so if you can fit just the movie uncompressed as MPEG-2, then re-encoding to MPEG-4 makes little sense. If the MPEG-2 requires re-compression; MPEG-4 will give you better quality. If you had an ultra certified player, then you could have menus, etc. with .DivX and still maintain quality, where as with MPEG-2, you could not.
If you were just encoding for say HTPC playback, then you could have menus with mkv or mp4 (playback is still somewhat of an issue) and save further space by using AVC/aac.
Definatly, although depending on how compressible the source is and what MPEG-2 encoder you used, you might not be able to pick the difference between any of the three (source, MPEG-2 re-encode, MPEG-4 re-encode).
As an example I did both discs of LOTR extended on one DVD5 as 1.99GB avi's with full anamorphic resolution, 5.1 sound and all audio commentaries plus forced subs. I'm quite sure that as MPEG-2 it would have looked like rubish if I had compressed 2 DVD9's to one DVD5. The 1.99GB's was to avoid burning as UDF/ODML.
Interestingly enough i thought part of this thread looked familiar as I follows celtic's DivX expertise ;). Initially I assumed you were referring to the process of backing up to dvd but glad you got it sorted. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/334917 <<--link to original thread.
