I have a movie on 4 SVCDs Nero images. I do not own a DVD player so I tried playing on my PC using MS Media Player. The picture is stretched vertically (or squashed horiz) and the sound in not synched. I figure the best thing is to convert these to Divx. So ....
I extracted the MPG files from the Nero images using VCDGear but when I try to load them in TMPGEnc I get an error:
MPEG Import Filter: pack synchronization error.
Am I doing something wrong? Am I heading in the right direction or should I be doing something else with these SVCDs to play them on my PC?
Thanks.

Download Elecard MPEG-2 codec or use PowerDVD 4.0 (best method) to play the SVCD files. There's absolutely _no_ point to convert the files to DivX or any other format, you just end up losing quality.

So, bottom line is that if I have an SVCD, view that directly and don't bother to Divx.
Hence if I start with a DVD, should I be creating SVCDs or Divx?
SVCDs are attractive if you have both a PC and a DVD player.
But, if you are only using a PC, I would think this is where Divx shines, because SVCD by definition is limited to 480x480 but the Divx could be equivalent to a DVD at 720x480 (or there abouts?).
How's my logic?
Thanks for the advice.
Oh, tried the EMPGEnc and sound is now great but picture is still distorted. Using FlasKMPEG, I produced an AVI and the picture size is 480x200 or 2.4:1 excluding any black areas. When I play the SVCD, the picture area is 390x~220 of 1.8:1, hence the distortion.

SVCD is definately the way to go if you have stand-alone DVD player or ever plan to buy one (and can't afford to buy DVD-R writer yet). DivX is good alternative for PC-only playback, but really the comparision between good SVCD rip and good DivX rip is almost impossible to do in terms of video quality, although very good DivX rip normally fits to 2 CDs and for SVCD rips, you need 3 CDs.

Such a bullshit
#1 DivX much much better in quality than svcd
#2 with SVCD you'll end up with minumum of 2 or 3 CD with WORSE quality than ONE DivX CD
#3 I agree that if you watch movie on TV it is much better than on 21" monitor, and that is exacly how you should watch you DivX, with using TV-Out from your desktop or notebook.
If you don't have device with TV-Out - buy video card that support it - it will cost around 90$ + cables to connect to TV around 20$
and it is cheaper than DVD
As to movie control - you can use wireless keyboard or wireless remote for PC ( another 20$) but you don't really need it, because your data is on ONE disc, and you don't need to grab your ass three times to change disks on your dvd - like it will happen in SVCD case.
And you don't need have zillions ugly boxes around you to keep all this attached SVCD's together, and you don't need to waste extra back for two more CD's and you don't need to waste extra half of hour for writing.
and best of all - in this setup you can watch other multimedia formats too, or play you favorite games ( if you have really cool home theather system)

DRY_GIN:

-SVCD is a standard, DivX3 is merely just a hack of Microsoft's codec, DivX4 is legal attempt to make DivX3-compatible codec without copying MS and DivX5 is the only one that is actually based on a standard, MPEG-4. DivX3 and DivX4 playback will go to the way of dinosaurs very quickly, but if you have 10 years old VCDs, your VCD tools/players/etc can still play it.

-I have to disagree you saying 1CD DivX > 3CD SVCD in terms of quality. But still, this is just my opinion. I agree that 2CD DivX looks better than 3CD SVCD in many cases. But as I said in earlier post, I don't want to get into fight over formats and to support one format over another. I simply want to hand out the both real options (DVD-R beats the crap out of both anyway and drives are already relatively cheap, so the whole "fight" is kinda pointless :-).

-quite many people appreciate the fact that you don't have to use your $2,000+ PC to watch movies in the living room from 36" HDTV, but instead use the $200 good quality stand-alone DVD player and let your father/brother/friend/daughter/son play Doom3 with it in bedroom while you watch the movie in living room. That's probably the main reason why ours and many others' forums are full of questions "How do I convert AVI to something that can be watched with stand-alone DVD player?"

-as a temporary solution, I actually prefer CVD over SVCD and DivX (CVD being 352x480/576) as those clips can be later on stored directly to DVD-R.

-and as said, fight over formats is totally useless, recordable DVDs will simply beat the crap out of all existing formats within a year. Only problem why this hasn't happened yet is the fact that downloading 4.36GB takes too long for most of the people.

Alright, You make your point, I agree with you too, let's just wait for cheap dv-r's.
Exept that i was able to play deltaforce something on my notebook connected to my external monitor while my wife was watching divX on TV from the same notebook,
howether you right, this notebook was quite expencive.., but i didn't buy this notebook because of DIVx or tv-out and so it can not be considered to be purchased because of this,
and from another hand, most of old ( 2 years+ DVD players do not understand CD-r format) and so for this people it is a hard choice of buying extra DVD player just for computer outputs or just connect computer to tv/stereo.
I bet they choose second solution.