Video Compression With DivX;-)

Disclaimer: Don't be sleazy

Do us a favor: Don't crack DVD movies and post 'em up on the Web. Not for love or for money. It's illegal.

One last thought: This isn't the easiest thing to do. It makes the early days of MP3 encoding seem, well, laughably easy by comparison. Especially since it can take hours to make a really ugly DivX ;-) movie. At which point, you'll have to fiddle with the settings and start all over again. If you're not patient, well, you might wait a while until the process becomes easier.

The Right Tools for the Job

There are many tools available, but SmartRipper 2.0, which pulls the video off the DVD; and Flask, which compresses it down into single .AVI file, are our favorites. To use the DivX ;-), which is essential to get the tight compression, you'll need to download and install it, too.

Rule number one: you need a DVD drive to do this, so if you don't have a DVD drive, you're outta luck. You'll also need a ton of hard drive space to do this, at least 5GB of open hard drive space. More would be better, since SmartRipper stores the movie files straight from the DVD onto your hard drive.

While we're thinking about hardware, think fast processor. At the fastest compression setting that delivers the worst quality (it really looked awful), it took over three hours to compress a 104-minute movie. That was on an 800MHz Intel Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM. If you go for higher quality, especially on a slower processor, it can easily take a good eight or 10 hours to encode a viddy!

Here's a good legal question: Is it legal to make archival copies of your own DVD movies? We'd like to think so. But given how hard it can be to track this software down, we're beginning to wonder. Is there a lawyer in the house that can answer this one for us?

You can download the DivX ;-) codec here.

Here's a link to SmartRipper.

You can download Flask here.

DVD to CD: Let's Do It

Here's the very sparse, nutshell version of how to fit a DVD on a CD.

1)  Download all the software.

2)  Insert the DVD into your DVD drive.

3)  Launch SmartRipper and pull the DVD Video off the disk and onto your hard drive.

4)  Launch Flask, select your quality and output settings, then hit Run/Start Conversion.

5)  Go to bed for the night, or start working on another computer for the next few hours.

6)  Try to play the movie the next morning.


Fixed!!!

uggg, 2 of the links dont work  > . bu i will definaly have to try this  

You may want to try the links again. I just downloaded all 3 files okay.

[Keefe]

Oh my god!!  When I encoded a video my computer was running 100% of all resources.  And, It did take all night just to encode The Matrix.  It is worth it--The video quality is really high and it is not pixely at all!    Happy Encoding!!

Awesome...was it as easy as techman007 said in his post? Did you use any other software aside from what's on the first post?

[Keefe]

I did exactly what techman said...and i used those programs too.  Did anyone else try it?