Divx to KDVD, scripts, resolution, etc.
 

Hi all,

I just got my DVD burner (LG GMA 4020B) and would like to transfer my DIVX collection to DVD. Most of them are widescreen 640xXXX or 544xXXX and have good quality (2 CDs rips or 2-pass 1 CD Rips). I have some questions:
I should use 352x480 or 720x480? Or maybe 352x480 with some sharpening (or this would sharp macroblocks also)?
Should I use the optimal script with MA (for better compression)? Or just load the movie since DIVX already did something like the job of the script?

Just a tip for people doing this: using FFDShow to add noise (mplayer noise) and post-process gives the movie a much better look, killing the dancing blocks, very common in DIVX stuff (try to see DIVX on TV-Out). I know it also increases the bitrate, but I won't be able to post-process and add noise with my standalone, so I guess it's a good idea to do it at encoding. To use FFDShow in a Avisynth script you have to replace AVISource with DirectShowSource.

[]'s
Vmesquita

Just an upate:

After some tests, I realized that even 576x240 resized to 352x480 (maintaining the aspect ratio, of course) looks blurry on the TV, even using sharpening filters. So the best choice is 720x480, altrought you have to bicubic interpolate. I also couldn't manage to make the ffdshow or the DivX native decoder work correctly for encoding. I mean it works, but the encoded clip freezes for about half a second on about every minute, and this is very annoying. This happens on the PC and on the stand-alone. Any fix? For now I decided to just add some noise using AviSynth, but I really wanted to encode using ffdshow...

I also had some problems with frozen frames, and I am still working on this... Man I thought this would be really much easier than it is!

[]'s
Vmesquita

Ahhhhh....sounds to me like the joys of divx! :lol: Just kidding! :wink: That's one of the reasons why I don't like the format myself and tend to avoid it like the plague.

I don't know much about solving your divx problems (or kdvd for that matter), but I just wanted to let you know that I recall reading some posts some time ago in this forum about "fooling" a particular dvd authoring program into thinking that a 544x480 resolution file was actually a 720x480 file by some sort of "patching" or "header" process. (sorry to be so vague, but I didn't memorize the exact details since it doesn't relate to me very much!...I have no dvd-burner :( ). Maybe someone can chime in here with some helpful hints for you.

If you try searching through some of the older posts here in the KDVD forum, you should come across the posts I'm talking about though. That way, maybe you could get away with keeping your resolution at 544x (which is closer to the original resolution of your divx files) for your KDVDs (if this trick will work on your player, that is), rather than needing to use 352x or 720x. Maybe that would give you a sharp enough picture for your liking and save you some space? Just a thought. Good luck.

-d&c

Must be something like the process to create DVDs with SVCD resolution... But I don't want to do that, because the discs would be non-standard... I wish DVD-Consortion had included some intermediary resolution in the standard, like 480x480 or even 544x480.
The process for DivX -> KDVD is really full of steps and traps, I'll write a guide after I have done some with success if I have the time...
I am taking about 7 hours on a Athlon XP2000+ for a 1h30m DivX movie... And the I am only enlarging to from 544x240 or 640x272 to 720 x 272 (bicubic), adding black bars and noise(AddGrain, to kill macroblocks) and subtitles and that's all. Is it too slow?

[]'s
Vmesquita

That sounds about right, I personally use 720x 480/576 for all my converts from divx for compatability and on my P4 2gig a 1 1/2 hr movie will takes about 5 hrs to convert without any filters.

I use divxrepair for fixing errors in avi's it works quite well.

Uhmmm...you do know that you're at kvcd.net, right? :lol: Standards!?...We don't need no stinking standards here!!!! :lol: J/K. I understand your compliancy reservations.

But where would the fun be for them in doing something that actually makes sense and would make more people happy?! :lol: Hopefully, someday, maybe the brainiacs in charge of making the decisions will realize that more options are always better than less options. Likewise, hopefully more and more dvd player manufacturers will take note of KVCDs and start making it more common for their players to support vbr mpeg1 and kvcdx3 resolutions. People want more for their money, not less! :roll: To me, a dvd player that will only play store-bought dvds is utterly useless, no matter how great it might play them. As a consumer, I want a player that I spend my money on to be able to play every single format I could possibly throw at it...heck, if I decide to shove a piece of bread into the loader, I want it to spit out a piece of toast for me a minute later (and it darn-well better be lightly buttered too!). :wink:

That's cool. I'm sure many KDVD people could benefit from a guide!

hmm :?: ...sorry, but I'm not experienced enough to give a definitive answer to that one. If I had to guess though, I'd say it doesn't sound too out of the ordinary. I'm pretty sure it's much slower to increase resolution as opposed to downsizing resolution.

Regards,
-d&c

Standards :!: what standards :x
:arrow: ____STANDARDS____ :gun: :rotf:
Just kidding :cool:

-kwag

:wink: I wrote a little guide to add more movies on 1 DVD.

2 or 3 Movies on DVD

These are the right resolutions:

3/4 DVD full (544x576 (or 480)) for AR: 2,35:1 movies

3/4 DVD small (528x576 (or 480)) for AR: 1,77:1 movies

1/2 DVD (352x576 (or 480)) for AR: 4:3 movies

U´ve problems with the filters, try this:

Extract ur audiopart of the movies with virtualdub (or Mod or so) 2 wav.
Encode this WAV-file with BeSweet to 160 kbps 48.000 Khz MP2 Stereo.

Normaly every one knows that TMPGEnc has a bad resizer. So open ur. AVI-File with MovieStacker 2.00 beta 3 and choose the right resolution for ur movie. Add the standard KVCD-Filter to it. U can load the settings in MovieStacker. Here is a script for the resolution 352x576:



Load this with ToK and do these Settings:

Choose one of ur avs-Scripts and open it in ToK.
Go to the section 'Predition & Spacing' and enter ur wanted filesize at spacing by using 'free'.
For example: U´ve 4,380 MB free on ur DVD. So u can splitt this space to 3 same file sizes. So enter 1.460.000.000 Bytes.

Go to Audio & More an enter the path to ur encoded MP2-File for this movie.

At more enter this for the GOP: 1, 12, 2, 1, 25.
Go to Main. Choose Mpeg 2 and activate no muxing! Hit Start and ToK encode ur movie in the wanted filesize. Must be a nice quality!

Edit ur DVD with TMPGEnc DVD Author for example:

Open ur files with add and choose the right audiotrack for the movie.
Create a menü with chapter or so and create the DVD-Files. Burn this with ur favorite burnig-program like Nero 6...

If u´ve the troubles again open the AVI with TMPGEnc and choose there the right resolution and encode only the videostream. Type the right quality setting of ToK in ur settings. Maybe it work...


Or try this guide:

http://www.weethet.nl/english/video_kvcd_intro.php

@urban tec:
I read on the homepage of DivXrepair that it doesn't kill all the frames between the last keyframe and the next, where the bad frames is. Seems interesting to me, since killing all the frames forces me to resynch the subs, wich is a pain in the ass... Killing one ore two frames probably doesn't make difference, I'll will test this thing. I was scanning to find bad frames with DivFix and replacing them with the last good frame during encoding (using avisynth and FrozenFrame) , but this way I had to kill many frames just to kill one bad.
But with no filters doesn't the movie look a bit blocky because of the DCTs? Do you use any post-processing?

@dazed&confused
Yeah, I know that, standards can be really annoyng sometimes. Maybe they should have made the DVD specs like that: Must play any MPEG2 and MPEG1 with a max of 9800 bitrate. That would be really cool. I really agree with you, players should support everything and I bought mine after checking that (Philco DVP-2500). But it's nice to take the discs to a friends house and play, unfortunatelly not everyone has te knowledge to not buy those stupid players that are "DVD standard on commercial media-only". We should start an ad camapain against them! :-)

@Avalon
It's a good guide, however, it's more like a KVCD on a DVD then a KDVD. The Tmpgenc resizer is terrible, blur everything. I use the Avisynth bicubic to enlarge my stuff from 640x480 to 720x480.

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Vmesquita

Depends on the source as to wether I use filters, looks fine on my tv without, usually, but I dont have HD/TV.

I also don't have HDTV (I have a Sony Wega 29' ). But I can see lots of DCTs in 1 CD rips of dark movies.
What filters do you usually use? I tried to add noise using addgrain and noisegen (a mplayer noise port), but unfortunatelly the noise that looks amazing on TV-out, looks horrible after encoding and playing on the stand-alone... The DCTs goes away, but the movie looks like a bad broadcast on the dark scenes. Seems that noise adds too much entropy for the encoder, adding noise at realtime with ffdshow and playing on TV-Out looks just fine. Now I am just using BlindPP() to post-process. I also tried FluxSmooth but I saw no improvement.

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Vmesquita

If there are DCTs in the original it would be hard to mask them in a re-encode without softening the picture to much so I dont bother (call me lazy).

My Tv has filtering that works quite nice at removing a lot of the noise anyway, it is acceptable to me.

Actually you could also add noise on the movie and it would look natural. The problem is, after encoding, noise becomes ugly artifacts. I guess if used a high bitrate, I would be able to get a good output, but of course I don't want to do that. So I better live with the DCTs, they're not that bad.

[]'s
Vmesquita