I am looking to rip some DVDs and would like the end product to be of the best quality but the smallest file size for VCD. It seems XVID seems to be the most popular. Is XVID what I'm looking for? Also, what is the best application/program to use to accomplish this? Thanks in advance!
Hi huckypuck, No, we encode MPEG4 AVIs in here, not VCD - they are MPEG1. SVCDs (and DVDs) are MPEG2. DivX and XviD typically encode a movie backup to ~700MB AVI file, burnable to 1 CD. Including multichannel hifi audio! Amazing. We got that covered. It's perfect for storage w/ distribution over a LAN, for example (I have ~180 movies on a 250GB SATA drive, lotsa room still.) VCDs offer pretty good quality, but spread over ~1400MB (2 CDs). Playback compatibility is good though, any DVD player or PC, while XviD MPEG4 cannot playback so easily... Anyway, we use TMPGEnc to make VCDs, and it's not free like XviD - they expect you to purchase the codec (like DivX). I guess they talk about TMPGEnc in the MPEG1 and MPEG2 Encoding forum http://forums.afterdawn.com/forum_view.cfm/40 but it's mostly about turning AVIs into MPEG2 (DVD). Not too much activity or innovation in MPEG1 lately, not too many folks making VCDs anymore, everyone has DVD burners now... So for playback compliance you burn DVDs, for small filesize it's all XviD MPEG4 AVI. More & more standalone DVD players will play DivX/XviD these days too - kewl! You can fit 6 XviD movies comfortably on 1 DVD. Hope this helps, L8R
Thanks for your response but I'm a little confused. I have TMPGEnc and I use it to encode mpeg1 & avi files to mpeg2 to burn to DVD's. WORKS GREAT!!! So I can use it to do the opposite? Bottom line is, I'm got a DVD of some fights of a friend of mine. I want to rip them and end up with high quality/low file size files that will be ultimately hosted on the internet for viewing.
Can't really add to what I've said. TMPGEnc will encode MPEG1 and MPEG2. You can therefore create VCD, SVCD and DVD. For that you use DivX/XviD. Intead of 1GB the file you serve will be ~100MB (about 10%). Regards