How do I burn Divx for DVD Players?

The rule with lossy compressions: you put shit in, you get shit out. Lossy compression formats, like MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX), etc always lose quality.

Think it like this:

DVD is your full 1,500 page novel. You encode it into some format (VCD, SVCD, DivX) that loses information -- you shrink it down, cutting "not important" parts from it and can fit it into 500 pages. Then you want to cut it shorter again, to 50 pages (wrong analogy in here, I agree, as VCD/SVCD/DivX normally are roughly the same size, but still the idea is there) -- making the 50-page abbreviation from 1500 pages might be possible, but as the guy who needs to do the 50-page version, only has the already-cut-down 500-page version and not the original, the result will be much worse than from the original.

 

You're re-encoding it. This can be demonstrated "easily" with DivX as well:

-encode 2min clip with bitrate of 600kbps, using DivX5
-take the resulting clip and re-encode it to 600kbps DivX5 again
-take this second result, re-encode it to 600kbps DivX5 again
-rinse / repeat

By end of this funny experiment, where the encoding method is 100% the same all the time and the file size will stay 100% same all the time, you end up having one 600x360 sized colorful pixel that flashes with different colors every now and then.

 

Sounds useful. For discos maybe...

 

To put it very simply:

From excellent source, you get good lossy results.

From good source, you get below-average results.

From below-average source, you get useless piece of video.

This applies to all lossy compression formats, not just video, but audio (MP3, OGG, WMA, etc) and images (JPEG) as well.

 

np