Question about Divx (MPEG4) on DVD

[Allan Phan]

Hello

I used Dr. Divx program to compress a 187MB mpeg2 video to 30.2mpeg. I forgot to check what format it has became after the compression but it does play in windows media player and also on divx player. At first I thought it might give me some crappy picture but to my surprise, the quality is awesome. I compared the origional file with the after but I don’t see any quality lost.

My question is, if I use the compress file (30.2) to burn to DVD, will I get bad quality or about the same as the original one?


Thanks
AP

[Patrick Jenkins]

<<<-- Originally posted by Allan Phan : Hello

I used Dr. Divx program to compress a 187MB mpeg2 video to 30.2mpeg. I forgot to check what format it has became after the compression but it does play in windows media player and also on divx player. At first I thought it might give me some crappy picture but to my surprise, the quality is awesome. I compared the origional file with the after but I don’t see any quality lost.

My question is, if I use the compress file (30.2) to burn to DVD, will I get bad quality or about the same as the original one?


Thanks
AP -->>>

As long as you use a high bitrate (4000+) when encoding back to mpeg2, you'll have pretty much the same quality as the divx.

Keep in mind that this is all lossy so the more you do this transcoding it'll eventually deteriorate (repeat this process about a dozen times and you'll start noticing issues), but the immediate degredation is much less noticable than if you were using an analog copying method.

[Rob Lohman]

Personally I would go with the highest quality I can, so I'm using
the original. As Patrick indicated you are doing an extra pass
of (lossy!) compression:

1. DV encoding
2. Divx encoding
3. MPEG2 encoding (for DVD)

But it in the end it all depends on how it looks to your eyes!