What is Tom's Hardware doing?

[OS]

I just tried the ripper/flask thing and the visual quality loss is very substantial. Tried it on bugs life and the effect is like the entire movie got turned into a stream of jpegs of varying quality. However, this is my first try so I go at it a couple more times.

 

[Auric]

Tom's should stick to hardware. Just cause it was a revelation to them doesn't mean it is anything new. Am I sounding like a prick again? 😉 Oh well, nevermind. I have been using MPEG4 since at least Spring of 1999 and backing up DVD's before then with the capture/record method and MJPEG so I don't know where this December stuff comes from. Perhaps MPEG finalized MPEG4 as a standard at that time which might also explain the errors in the table. The audio and video range and formats which can be included in the AVI transport are legion, as always. The writer seemed confused that an MPEG video could have an AVI extension. A typical movie is 4GB, not 9GB and a lot of that would include several different audio streams so while the compression is great and all the 9GB to a single CD is a bit like a sensational newspaper headline. Also, I agree about the poor use of JPEG as examples. Even so they looked poor with visible interlacing. I'm with khat, skip Tom's and go right to www.divx-digest.com

 

[LeBlatt]

From page 1 of the review : "Differences in quality are hardly noticeable" Heh! B/S !

Differences are obvious. I have over 40 backups, 1/3 of them i did myself with DivX.
At the default rate of 910Kbps for video and 96 for audio, with 1 keyframe per second, the results are very cool, and allow 90mn of movie on a 80mn CDR. need to turn the rate down for longer films. under 600Kbps is ugly.
The fact that MP4 uses keyframes makes fast action scenes have a great quality loss (shaky images), and relatively still scenes are near perfect.
One key trick is to crop out the black stripes on top and bottom of a 720x576 16/9 format movie. This usually gets resolution to around 720x320, less pixels to compress/decode. If coding a 4/3 fullscreen movie, you cant crop so it is required to resize it to at most 560x448. Coding takes between 5 an 14 hours on a C850.
The rendering if very satifying on anything above a celery 600.

 

[SuperFreaky]

How have you guys been doing the audio?

I choose decode and have FlasK encode it as a stereo 128kps MP3.

 

[alinboy]

.

 

[Mark R]

I was under the impression that DivX is warez and therefore illegal. I believe that the decoding engine is a cracked pirate version of Microsoft's MPEG4 decoder, in the same way that the 'Radium' MPEG3 encoder is a cracked version of the Fraunhoffer encoder.

 

[zippy]

Funny, I was planning on renting a few DVDs tonight...not that that has anything to do with that article or anything..........................

 

[zippy]

The Divx-digest version of tom's...probably better than his too...

I have to read the divx digest explanation of how to burn DVDs to MPEG4 to CD first...but considering the site is dedicated to that sorta stuff....😉

Shit...that explanation on how to do it just killed a few brain cells...lil too ahead of me. 😉 I'll try FlaskMPEG tonight...