Anyone got any good recommendations for a free DivX movie recoder/encoder?

Doing a search for DivX seems to take round in circles and no clear recommendations.
I particularly need DivX format as the plyer in question only supports DivX (I am not sure if Xvid is 100% compatible or not?)

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I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

http://www.divx.com/
sent you a pm

i know a few who use this one
http://www.imtoo.com/dvd-ripper.html

rips and converts to divx in one go ,been told its easy to use ,not used it myself though

Hi Foggy - got PM (as you know )

Just done a first VOB to DivX conversion. needed to find an AC3 filter as one doesn't come with the s/w unless you pay extra on top
Googled for it and found a free one :)

Not tried playing it yet to see how it looks like.

How long you reckon time-wise to rip a DVD? I left the PC to it, but it was not very quick and took all the cpu time doing it

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

depends on the drive ,i had a tosh drive once used rip like you wouldnt believe
can normally rip one in about 15/20 mins or so ,but only by leaving pc alone, as you have noticed it uses all your cpu
thats why i have 2 pcs set up

if its taking an age check your dma settings on the unit .just google dma settings

I actually typed the wrong thing

The Ripping is fast enough (occasionally goes really slow if the DVD media is a bit beaten up).

I meant to say the DivX conversion of the VOB files (that are now on the Hard Drive post Rip) that was taking ages. Think that is par for the course, but my desktop PC is not very cutting age to say the least compared to stuff on sale nowadays ..... P4 2.80GHz with 2GB RAM

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

havent done a lot of vobs to divx ,mostly divx to dvd which can take 2/3 hours
would guess with a P4 it will take 4 hours or more ,but then it depends on the vob size obviously
if you can you might be better off doing it when you have gone to bed

Hmm - think I may have to do it with another box for overnight stuff

My P4 box has a load-variable fan and it gets REALLY noisy when cpu is fully loaded.

Got a Pentium M Desktop which I built a few years ago specifically as a PVR to leave on 24/7 (it is totally silent and the fan only made a noise once when the sticker on it - saying "noiseless fan" - dropped off and fell into the vanes )
Might try it out on that system to see how long it takes.

Oh - the converstion I just did .... I chose the "Mobile" format as it was meant to be for the car's player and that is what they recommend, but the quality was rubbish"
Great compression - 2.2GB down to 92MB but way too much quality loss.
Gonna try another conversion using "Theatre Mode" and see what that is like.....

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Great compression - 2.2GB down to 92MB
haha not suprised the quality was rubbish

normally a full dvd ..4.7gig goes down to cd size (700meg) and the quality is spot on

Just as a matter of interest there are many, many tools available for Linux that can translate files in this manner. Some of them have features that I'm not sure are available under windows such as cropping, (left and/or right), and so on. That's useful if you have a file that has an aspect ratio of more than 16 to 9, (the ratio for a widescreen TV), that looks great on the movie screen but appears as a thin strip across the middle of the TV. Some of them are command line style but some of them have a GUI front-end such as WinFF. Actually, that's also available for windows as well but the linux version uses FFMpeg or mencoder, (can't remember which :)), as a converter so that would be a problem for the windows versions, obviously.

I also forgot to mention that even if you translate to DivX you still might not be able to play on some DVD players because there's sometimes a problem with the format of the file. I had such a problem recently when the width was above the maximum for my player, thus the need for the 'crop left' and 'crop right' mentioned in the post above.

Hi I have an AC3 filter if you still need it it is very small give me an email address to send it to if you still need it

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Thanks For Yor Time

Time Lord

Built myself a new PVR at the weekend ....

Intel Core 2 Quad Processor,
4GB RAM
2 x 500GB SATA Drives
4 x TV Tuners - runs at about 5% utilization when recording 4 TV programs at the same time and playing back a ripped DVD.

So time to try her out on a DivX recoding

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Sounds good Hoovie ,DivX should be a walk in the park