Divx HD cheap solution

[John L. Miller]

I have been searching the vegas forum and cannot seem to find an adequate answer to my questions. I have been considering a Hi Def DVD solution for my personal use and have discovered some nice possiblities with the Divx format. Apparently you can get decent HD on standard DVDs and a Hi Def DVD player that plays DivX format for less than 60.00 bucks. It all sounds great, but since Vegas does not render to this format, how are you guys getting Divx HD to your DVD? Are you rendering to another format and converting with something else then what are you using to Author the DVD?

Is there a plug in for Vegas 7.0e?

What is the workflow after editing the Cineform intermediate HDV?

What do you Convert the files to Divx with? And what software are you using to get the DivX HD files to disc? I would really like some help with this. This is a very affordable HD solution for me. Thanks. J

[Doug Quance]

I am curious, as well.

I tried DrDivX, as well as the 15 day trial with the DivX converter... but I can not seem to get the resolution as good as I want.

[Herman Van Deventer]

Try TMPGenc express 4.0

Best bang for the buck.

[John L. Miller]

I have downloaded ffdshow that plugs in to vegas, although I cannot remember where and when I got it. But you can choose the .avi render solution and choose ffdshow and the codec. Then configure to Divx. It seems to be working, I have watched the clips on Window media player, but I have not figured out how to author it to DVD and keep the HD.

[John L. Miller]

I have been looking at the affordable upconvert DVD players that play the DivX files. They upconvert SD to HD, obviously if not shot in HD you can only improve the picture so much, but they do play the DivX files. Here is the problem, I cannot find anything for any of these players that says these DVD players will play DivX HD. That is different. Just because the DVD player upconverts to HD and plays DivX files does not mean it will play your DivX HD dvd unmolested. In fact, I read on some sights where some have complained that it plays these files in SD and then upconverts them. Whats up with that? The only DivX HD players I have found are also DVD HD. So, I guess I am going with one of those players. I am not wasting my money on Blue Ray because it costs way too much. I will support DVD HD and HD DivX because it provides HD at an affordable price. I wish I could find a WMV HD DVD player that was affordable. I really like these files. J

[Rich Perry]

I just purchased TMPGenc express 4.0 and it's an awesome product for conversion to Divx, beats DrDvix hands down!

[Bill Ravens]

I'm not sure why you can't use DivX within Vegas. It works fine from Vegas 8 for me. You need to drill down thru the avi preferences and be sure you have "Don't use third party codecs" unchecked to find it. But it IS there.

[Gian Pablo Villamil]

Divx and XVID have always worked fine for me within Vegas, from version 4 onwards.

Choose .avi as your render format, click Custom..., click Video tab, choose XVID (or Divx) as your codec. Save it as a template once you get it working nicely.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

I have been searching the vegas forum and cannot seem to find an adequate answer to my questions. I have been considering a Hi Def DVD solution for my personal use and have discovered some nice possiblities with the Divx format. Apparently you can get decent HD on standard DVDs and a Hi Def DVD player that plays DivX format for less than 60.00 bucks.

Yes, you can get some decent HD on plain old red-laser DVDs. Yes, you can get a DivX player with <i>upconversion</i> for under $60... (woot.com had a DivX player and DVD recorder, refurb, for only a bit more recently). However,
upconverting players don't actually play HD... they take SD and spit it out in your favorite HD format of choice... pretend HD.

There are a very few red laser DVD players that actually can play HD from DVDs. I've had one of these since 2005 (the IOData AVeL Linkplayer2); most of them are out of production, now, with the advent of the blue-laser player standards.

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

It all sounds great, but since Vegas does not render to this format, how are you guys getting Divx HD to your DVD?

Of course Vegas can render to DivX HD. It's not included with Vegas, but if you buy the DivX authoring package (I have this, it's cheap), you get a standard CODEC plug-in that does all of the official DivX formats (HD, SD, portable, etc).

Naturally, this is only video rendering. Vegas does fine at rendering DivX HD, WMV/HD, WMV/VC-1 or H.264 for HD-DVD and Blu Ray. What you need beyond that, for any interesting discs, is an authoring application. I have generally made my own WMV/HD discs (which play in the IOData unit) "by hand"... the interface is based on HTML and JavaScript. Nowhere near as easy as making a DVD in DVD Architect, or other DVD authoring apps, but it does work.

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

Is there a plug in for Vegas 7.0e?

Most video CODECs, such as DivX, are available as modules for Windows, either Video for Windows (the old one) or DirectShow (the current one) multimedia subsystems... often both. Any of these will work in Vegas, and most other Windows applications.

DivX is based on the MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile encoder, and you can buy the authoring app from http://www.divx.com for cheap. There's also an open source version of it, called XviD, which you can find via Google. The DivX stuff tends to be a bit faster and possibly better quality, but the Xvid encoder is decent.

One nice thing about DivX is that they certify hardware (DVD players, PMPs, etc). The DivX authoring stuff includes preset to ensure your video conforms to the various standards, the XviD stuff does not.

For WMV/HD, you need Windows Media 9 video, which is generally part of the Windows OS these days. They do offer an advanced encoder, which has some extra features over and above the CODEC's settings. WMV9 is probably a bit more efficient than DivX, but I believe the DivX code has been tweaked better, so it encodes faster for the same bitrate.

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

What is the workflow after editing the Cineform intermediate HDV?

I really don't use Cineform anymore, but the workflow is the same, regardless of the form of your HD input video. I usually print an HDV copy of any significant video edit, to write back to tape. For WMV9, I render to WMV9; for DivX, I render to DivX, in either case, from the Vegas timeline. You can use the same sort of bitrate calculators you use for SD video, since you generally set bitrate as the primary tweakable in either CODEC.

My IOData player also plays DivX-HD, at least to an extent. The original DivX-HD profile was 720/30p at around 3000kb/s, with an MP3 audio track (though AC-3 surround sound is also pretty commonly done). I'm more likely to render for 1080/60i or 1080/24p, depending on the material... I think there's a new DivX spec for these resolutions, but I haven't done DivX in awhile.

The advantage of WMV/HD has been that my player understands this format, so I get navigation and all on the player, not just on a PC. DivX 6 offers its own navigation solution, and there's at least one cheapish authoring system out for it. This will still play the main video under DivX 5 machines, but that's still kind of annoying on a DVD player. In general, if your DVD player doesn't know DivX 6 or WMV/HD, it may well play the main video, but it doesn't autoplay, it doesn't handle dual-mode discs (I do DVDs with WMV/HD and DVD on the same disc... my IOData asks which one I want to play). Plain old AVI, DIVX, and WMV files will play, but you have to browse to find them.

When you're authoring HD, it's also cool to have network play. The IOData unit plays HD, including WMV9, DivX, and MPEG-2 .mpg and .ts files over a sufficiently fast network (I have a Gb backbone from my main PC to my livingroom... the DVD and other devices connect to this via a 1000/100 switch).

And of course, if you have a recent HDTV, you can probably plug your DVD player directly into the TV over Firewire and/or HDMI (my 71" Samsung does both).

[Jack Zhang]

Weird, you can encode XVID?

I can't encode XVID but I can encode DivX.

If I re-associate Xvid with the original Xvid codec, it doesn't work. But it works with the generic MPEG-4 decoder in the Divx codec.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

Weird, you can encode XVID?

I can't encode XVID but I can encode DivX.

If I re-associate Xvid with the original Xvid codec, it doesn't work. But it works with the generic MPEG-4 decoder in the Divx codec.

I did install XviD after DivX, originally... though that was some number of DivX updates ago. They both work fine, always have worked fine, and shouldn't be in any sort of conflict unless you try to register one for the other, I guess. I never had to do any trickery... it just worked.

As far as decoding, yes, XviD and DivX ought to be interchangeable.

[Paul Cascio]

Wow, Dave. That was an awesome tutorial. Great job. Thanks.