Need some info on DVD decoding

[Jimmah]

What kind of miminum requirements are there for Divx, general movie playback and DVD's? I'm using a Duron 750, 256mb ddr2100 and possibly a Rage Pro w/tv out, is that enough? Also, What kind of bandwidth does a movie use? Most of my movies are on an external HDD enclosure running USB 1.1, and the Duron has a teeny 1.2gb drive (its the only thin drive I own) so movies cannot be stored on there, is this enough speed?

One more thing: I've seen many an adapter for converting standard VGA out to RCA. Do these need specific video cards or are they generic? The board I have has onboard video, and any money saved lends itself to buying a bigger hard drive.

Thanks for any help, I'm such a newb with this area.

 

[Jimmah]

No one has fish love? I've been doing the google and yahoo thing, plus forum searches, to no avail.

 

[Fardringle]

I haven't tried it with the new 5.x DiVX codecs since the laptop died before they were released, but I had no problem at all playing back DiVX movies on my old PII-333 Compaq laptop...

 

[Jimmah]

Wow thats quite a minimal system! Thats a HUGE relief, I was afraid the duron wouldn't be able to cope if I didn't get hardware decoding or something. Thanks a lot for the info! Anything else is appreciated, like tips and stuff.

 

[forumposter32]

Hey, can I hijack this thread to ask another question?

I'd like to know if it's a good idea to convert a DVD to a 700 MB file. How can I specify 700 MB?

 

[Jimmah]

Originally posted by: forumposter32
Hey, can I hijack this thread to ask another question?

I'd like to know if it's a good idea to convert a DVD to a 700 MB file. How can I specify 700 MB?

Ahhh! Highjacker!

.....I think thats a very good question, one which interests me and would like to know more about.

 

[gsellis]

That is a tough thing. Understand that a DVD is usually either about 5 or 9 GB in size (but may not be full). Also know that MPEG2 video is compressed already. In theory, using WMV, 1-2Mbps is roughly DVD quality and that MPEG2 is probably coded at 6-8Mbps. So, if it were a 4.7GB DVD and you transcoded it to WMV, it might almost fit on 700MB. BUT MPEG-2 loses information when you try to take it to another format. The results would definitely be less than stellar. And considering many DVDs are actually >5GB...

Get a DVD burner. Discs are now < $.4 each.

 

[forumposter32]

I have a DVD-RW. And I have Nero and WinDVD (haven't used that yet).

My brother made a DVD that plays in his DVD player with Nero VisionXpress (or whatever it's called again). I want to do the opposite process (put DVD into video file about 700MB). How do you call that? DVD rip?

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: forumposter32
I have a DVD-RW. And I have Nero and WinDVD (haven't used that yet).

My brother made a DVD that plays in his DVD player with Nero VisionXpress (or whatever it's called again). I want to do the opposite process (put DVD into video file about 700MB). How do you call that? DVD rip?

Yes, Rip and recode. I think the Nero piece is Recode. You can try tools at Videohelp. I think the one I have used before is DVD2AVI. Once you get to AVI, you can do what you want with any encoder including DivX and Windows Media Encoder.

 

[jevans64]

The replies are sparce because DVD ripping is a touchy subject. :laugh: Needless to say, you should own the DVDs you want to rip. There are lots of utilities and such for completing the task. The process is a bit long to discuss here, so I will just provide links.

This is a very good place to start. There are lots of application downloads and guides to help you.

http://www.doom9.org/

There are a couple of packaged suites that are quite easy to use. AutoGordianKnot and FairUse come to mind. These suites have bitrate calculators that allow you to determine what bitrate to use based on program length and desired size. I want complete control over the entire process, so I use individual programs for each step in the process. Most of the SAME programs are included in the AutoGordianKnot suite.

Your system should be fine for playing Divx ( or Xvid, etc. ) but DON'T expect it to ENCODE Divx quickly. I would have to guess it would be anywhere from 4 to 6 hours to encode a typical movie using a 2-pass FULL PROCESSING ( cropping, resizing, deinterlacing ) mode.

Generally, a movie should be encoded to fit on 2 CDs ( 1400 MB ) and series TV can fit on 700 MB. I want good quality, so I use 2-pass ( the 1st pass calculates optimal bitrate, the 2nd encodes using a template created on the 1st pass ) encoding with bitrates exceeding 2000 kilobits per second.

There are still some problems with Divx 6 ( VobSub subtitles crash Divx 6 or don't work with their player ), so I would stick with Divx 5.21 until this problem is addressed. The lower compression modes are the same anyway. Divx 6 just adds another high-quality mode for HDTV content.

 

[Jimmah]

Yeah encoding isn't something this machine would be doing, just playback. I have a bunch of dvds that I want to put on the box, something like 40 if I remember correctly, it just needs a way to play them.

I am very relieved that it will work though, I was worried it would stutter and look like shiza.