hi all,

what settings do you find give best results, considering i dont really care how long it takes to encode as its worth taking a little extra time to get better quality, but not worth sacrificing large file size.

I am fairly new to video encoding, i mainly use it to encode mpeg2 that i have recorded of my digital tv pci card, mpeg2 is about 1.5gb for 3/4 of an hour, just encoded using divx and it is now 320mb with some loss of quality, thats at 1 pass and 1000kb/s, i used a program to encode called dvd to divx which i find to be very good, to resize i used bicubic sse/3dnow.

what settings/programs/codecs do you use for optimum results?

Did you know: pressing the print screen request key (in winXP at least) takes a screen capture and saves it to clipboard, alt and print reqest takes an image of highlighted window.

Xvid is by far the best codec to use in my opinion.
As for settings you should always use 2 pass mode. The beauty of 2 pass is the first run is a dummy run that reviews and checks where more or less compression is needed. When the second pass is run it gives more bitrate to more demanding scenes. For example if you use 1000 bitrate at CBR some scenes will be good and some blocky. but using 2-pass all scenes "should" be good. Just trust me I have been encoding DVD, VHS to VCD and AVI for many years and the best methos is 2-pass and the best codecs are XVid and DivX5.

I use VirtualDub for my video encoding tool, I have found
the program DVD->divx to be acceptable to good quality
but not excellent, it is a far more easier program to use than the individual codecs and VirtualDub but with less quality.

Here are my basic settings for XVid
First Pass Settings:
Motion search precition - 6 Ultra High
Quantization Type - MPEG
FourCC Used - XVID
DivX5 Compatability - Yes
Default settings everything else

2-pass 2nd pass internal settings:

same as first pass settings +

Min I frame Q - 2
Max I frame Q - 31
Min P frame Q - 2
Max P Frame Q - 31

Discard first pass - yes
Payback Proportionally - yes

everything else default settings

Resizing and filters is another kettle of fish.

The best would be to download guides to help you

hope this helps

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