Since I always get a debate regarding this, are you discussing
DiVx Home theater playback, or just the best method of
compression? I realize that many out there own
DiVx certified players that allows one to compress a
DVD to a single
CD and play it back. That's not all that big of a deal anymore since a single CD and DVD are only cents apart in price so why not just go with a type 5 DVD-/+R? Now if you're looking for the latest technology to give you the absolute best compression with good quality that you can store multiple copies on a hard disk for indexed playback or
streaming, then perhaps this will help a bit.
DiVx and
Xvid for
mpeg compression have more or less been abandoned to a new but closely similar format,
H.264. The developers of
Xvid have abandoned it and are now working on X.264 and
DiVx is currently beta testing an H.264 decoder. So the reality is to future proof your efforts it would make sense to encode to H.264. There are several different applications that can accomplish this although many are still in a kind of beat
phase, but unfortunately many are commercial. Fairuse still offers a free version that limits the video size to 700 Mbs which is the same size of a
DiVx home theater copy but with much better quality.
A copy of this size probably doesn’t include a
surround sound track since it would compete against video quality. I prefer to forget the single to CD disc backups and go for just a reduction in storage size. With Terabyte hard drives running for less than $250 it makes sense to consider hard disk storage. One can after all store. I prefer to encode my movies between 900 Megabytes to 1.2 gigabytes depending on the number of frames in a movie, I can keep a
surround sound track and not interfere with the video quality of the encode. Imagine having 800 high quality movies on a single hard drive.
You would have to have at least 8 spindles of 100
DVD-R discs at about the same costs to match it. Each time you want to play a DVD you would have to sift through your collection, choose a movie but don’t change your mind, and then put it away, but having movies organized and indexed on a hard drive that has wireless streaming capabilities, all that you will need is a remote control to do all of that.
Other tools to look at that are still pretty simple but costs money (unless you're connected) are Mainconcept reference, and Canopus Procoder 3.
DiVx will no doubt release one in the near future as well.
