I'm attempting to convert a DVD to Divx5 by following the guide from this site at http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd2divx_anamorphic.cfm The problem I'm having involves using CDEx v1.5. It mentions in the guide that DVD2AVI is supposed to create a .wav file but it doesn't seem to be creating it. After following the steps in the guide, a .d2v file is created but CDEx seems to be needing the .wav file to do its thing. Can someone tell me what might be going wrong here? I'm going to try using CDEx v1.4 but I'm skeptical that it'll solve the problem. The guide states that v1.5x seems to have problems with large .wav files but this problem doesn't seem to involve a large .wav file, it involves the absence of a .wav file. The only other possibility I can think of is that the DVD2AVI program I downloaded from the link in the guide seems to have a slightly different GUI than what is shown in the examples, which may be causing me to err in creating the required audio settings. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
The problem is that DVD2AVI is probably outputting a .ac3 file rather than a .wav file, this was the problem I had and needed to convert the .ac3 to .wav, I used Ac3Tool, you may need to adjust the loudness of the audio as mine came out a bit soft when I done it.
Many people with same question here...? Ah well; I must read this guide and find out what's up! Soon come back.
Ok the key in that guide is to select [bold]decode[/bold] audio, not demux (which would generate AC3 file) so presumably you want to get a WAV file from this, right? But the WAV wouldn't be a nice 2-pass Azid WAV... This guide is a little bit stale (it's originally from 2001) and while we thank the efforts of those who authored it, it needs to be completely re-written. I'm going to take on this job (as time permits) because I have never found a guide that describes exactly what I do! Meanwhile: for a different viewpoint, check this: http://www.doom9.org/gknot-main3.htm Somebody, remind me how to take 'snapshots' of my desktop, to illustrate my guide: I used to know but have forgotten the keystroke combination... (Duh!) Later _X_X_X_X_X_[small]IT Technician BSc MCSA XP2500+Barton 512MB PC3200[/small]
I really hate to say it you know, but all that arsing about is waaaaaaaay unnecessary. Radium hacked Fraunhofer MP3 codec (to achieve 128kbps and upwards bitrates @ 48kHz for your audio) and a working, installed copy of DivX Pro - and then all you need to process and encode your VOB files all in one go, and all in one smooth, integrated process... Is FlaskMPEG. I use the 0.78.39 test build, but I'm sure that there's a newer stable build out there. It's fantastic, it solves just about all of the hassle of these more complex methods, and it's incredibly easy to learn how to make excellent rips, so long as you understand the basics and have a bit of savvy about you. Sure, you can move on to more advanced stuff, AC3 muxing, subtitle ripping etc, later on, but you can hit "Flask It!" after setting up the audio settings, codecs used, bitrates, cropping and trimming the video to get rid of the blank space, setting it up for dual pass etc.... All this is one inside one file. You get excellent results, with minimum hassle (compared to virtualdub/frameserving methods etc, although you can use FlaskMPEG to frameserve) - and you don't have to arse about with any m2v files, re-encoding AC3 files, demuxing files, parsing out IFO files, any of that crap. I don't understand why more people don't use it. :/
With FlaskMpeg, you can only encode the main movie. But I am talking about converting the whole dvd into DivX. Obviously, to accomplish this, one must use a software like DoItFast4U together with all the AviSynth 2.5.4 and all the DVD2AVIdg.exe and MPEG2Dec3dg.dll, and AC3 Decoder v1.24, and etc., together with VirtualDub method to have everything on the original DVD into mpeg4 ( DivX ).
I see, well, if you're after encoding the entire movie, the way I would do it personally is to use Smartripper to give me the vobs for each section, and encode them all with Flask to give me the various sections. I'd then use something like a MiniDVD-compatible menu system to load the various sections... ... But why bother with all that now, when you can just recompress the vobs to fit onto a DVD-5 DVDr? Or better still, with these dual layer DVDs coming soon, there'll hardly be a need for even any recompression... True backups of DVDs. Why waste time nowadays with DivX when you can have MPEG-2
Quote "the way I would do it personally is to use SmartRipper to give me the vobs for each section, and encode them all with Flask to give me the various sections. I'd then use something like a MiniDVD-compatible menu system to load the various sections... " From what you are saying, it is obvious that you have not tried DoItFast4U to back up the whole DVD into DivX. Quote "with these dual layer DVDs coming soon, there'll hardly be a need for even any recompression... True backups of DVDs " Dual-Layer DVD Burner are still expensive, not to mention that at the moment, no one is willing to pay another $200 on another DVD Burner. Besides, for the next 12 months, the lowest predicted price for one single dual-layer DVD Disk is at least six dollars: ( at least $6/disk ). Not an economical way at the moment to conserve the quality that the original DVDs offer. It is going to cost you a huge amount of money to go in that direction for the time being. Besides, Hollywoods you not want you to copy their DVDs with a dual-layer DVD Burner and dual-layer DVD disks: DVD X Copy gives an inferior result and Hollywood still be able to convince you to buy an original DVD ( movie ) with 7.5Gb or so of movie on it: if you use dual-layer DVD Burner with dual-layer DVD Disk, Hollywood would be very unhappy because now, they can not convince you to buy their movie DVDs anymore. Hollywood would be again very unhappy if the DVD Burner Manufacturers put out the the comsumer market a product like the dual-layer DVD Burner and dual-layer DVD Disk. But we are talking about TECHNOLOGY here: how to convert DVD into DivX ! When Technology is involved, we have to push it as far as it can go, just like science and math, and ect. Talking about reserving your legally own DVDs ( movie ), the only way to reserve these is by putting these DVDs in a safe place and never touch them. But have you ever heard of DVD ROT? In case you do not know what it is, here is a simple definition: DVD ROT is the rotting of the original DVD even when it is carefuly kept and being not used at all: the original DVD just gone UNREADABLE due to chemical reaction on the recording surface of these DVDs ( dvd rot will not affect DVD-R and DVD_RW ( plus and minus ) ). So to solve this problem, at the time being, you will have to do two things as follows: 1. Use DVD-Rebuilder to encode at least 3 pass a particular movie into a 4.3G fitable onto one DVD-R. 2. Use Divx Pro and other software to convert the original DVD into Divx: recommened convert the whole DVD into DivX by using DoItFast4U or other software. The reason for this is, if you try to convert an already encoded DVD-R produced by DVD-Rebuilder, the quality of the result is not as if you encode from an original DVD. Besides, it takes your times and effort to produce ( make ) what will be yours: Using a dual-layer DVD Burner with dual-layer DVD Disk makes Hollywood very unhappy.
Converting your DVDs (any DVDs!) into DivX makes Hollywood very unhappy. The current DVD-RW technology makes Hollywood very unhappy. In fact, EVERYTHING that lets customers either make legitimate, legal copies of movies they own, or perhaps either download or borrow DVDs and make their own copies, is annoying Hollywood. It always has done, it always will... It's a case of supply-and-demand: as the technology becomes more popular, and more widespread, the overall cost of producing the media will become cheaper (the large cost has been the cost of developing the technology in the first place, as more people buy the equpiment and the blank DVDs, the cost per unit will decrease) - remember how much it cost to buy DVD-R and DVD+R equipment when it first came out? And look how cheap it is now. Personally, I can't really see why anybody would want to backup an entire DVD to DivX - it's not playable on most DVD players, the quality _IS_ going to be lower than the original DVD, even at very high (more than 1mbit/sec) bitrates - but for those kind of high bitrates, you'd need a DVD to burn the DivX files onto... So why not just transcode the original .vob files to a DVD-R anyway? The movie industry hasn't been able to convince me to buy any DVDs for a LONG time. While they keep on releasing movies with no interesting extras, just a couple of director's commentaries and a weak 30 minute documentary or "making of", I won't see any good reason to buy a DVD. It's only the spectacular DVDs that I think are worth buying, stuff like Lord Of The Rings, the Terminator 3 DVD (have you SEEN all the extras on it!), good releases like that, where there's a genuine amount of work gone into making the DVD. The companies that make the dual layer DVD technology are never going to not release a product because the movie industry doesn't like it - it's like the copy-protected CDs that come out now, companies like LiteOn make CD drives that can recognise these corrupt CDs, and they are made so that they can read them just like normal CDs without any problems! I think that's a FANTASTIC idea. The same also applies to companies who make these digital music players like iPods and Creative Muvos and Zen Extras - the companies will make products that they feel will appeal to the widest customerbase possible, regardless of what the music industry thinks. They only want to make money at the end of the day, if people won't buy original DVDs or CDs because there's nothing on them that makes people want to buy them then that's up to individuals (I will still buy a GOOD CD or DVD if it's got content worth buying and keeping). Just a couple of other replies... I use XViD now, instead of DivX 5 Pro (although I still have it installed, DivX takes SUCH a long time to encode video compared to XViD, and the quality of XViD is higher when you compare filesize vs. bitrate... And XViD is open-source. No licensing fees It takes longer to encode an entire DVD to DivX (especially if you're using dual-pass encoding, with some kind of filtering or resizing involved, and encoding of the AC3 audio to VBR MP3) - it's easier and quicker to just transcode a DVD to a size suitable to fit onto a DVD-R. I use DVD2One to transcode VOB files, with very little quality loss whatsoever. Of course, you can completely reauthor the DVDs, but it takes a lot longer - and the quality gain isn't _that_ much anyway. The main bonus to copying DVDs to DVD-Rs is that they will play in ANY DVD player, as you (usually) first of all remove the CSS region protection, and you can play them in any DVD player as they're still in DVD format. Which I really like Plus you don't have to worry about the menu systems or anything, so your DVD still looks like the original from which you've made the backup copy - it's a superior backup method now that the storage medium has become feasibly cheap. Don't get me wrong though, I still love DivX... It's just more cost-effective and time-effective to transcode VOBs nowadays instead of making DivXes. I still make XViD encodes of my own films that I like to have on my hard drive though to watch whenever I feel like it
Quote "...transcode the original .VOB files to a DVD-R..." Transcode is a word of yesterday, a word of old technology. Even DVD X Copy, which is the one that has the best transcoding algorithm and multiangle and seamless-branching and ect. handlings, yields to the currently available DVD-REBUILDER. But you are right, DVD-REBUILDER is still a far complete and perfect and easy-to-use application for an average user: with an advanced user, DVD-REBUILDER is the right tool and the good-choice tool to backup DVD9 onto DVD5: even the people at the Doom9 Forum on DVD-Rebuilder, who provide and instruct others on how to use this DVD-Rebuilder, these gentlements ( except the author of this DVD-REBUILDER ) seems to not mention some of the shortfalls of this DVD-REBUILDER: For example, not a single one of these advisers mentions the mistake of using FieldDeinterlacer: FieldDeinterlacer is a bad deinterlacer: it is only being used by testing and simplifying how deinterlacing could be implemented into a one-click application like the DVD-REBUILDER: SmoothDeinterlacer.dll should be used in this FieldDeinterlacer's place. And so for an average user, DVD X Copy is the tool of choice at the moment: DVD-REBUILDER requires knowledge of video encoding with AviSynth AVS editing and a lot of work and a lot of patience to produce a perfectly encoded DVD movie by using the currently available DVD-REBUILDER.
Very true. NEVER ever use the field deinterlacer, not even if your life depends on it I agree totally. Also, I still think that transcoding has a very valid usage in today's tech world, digitall tv broadcasters either encode their live feeds, or transcode their prerecorded MPEG-2 streams, in realtime, as they broadcast them - transcoding isn't dead by any means. And the nature of the Transport Stream specifics of the MPEG2 format used by DVDs allows for transcoding while retaining the vast proportion of the original file's quality... It's a great tool in the arsenal of the A/V manipulator.
