A question to video geeks

**Street Gerbil** · 20th November 2006, 19:50

Folks, any idea which is the best software to recode some movies from something weird that only plays on PC into DivX without loss in quality?
Thanks!

**xwhatsit** · 20th November 2006, 20:09

There's no way to do it without losing quality. Encoding something into a lossy format such as DivX, especially if it is already in a lossy format (which is what the source material will be for sure) will always result in quality loss.

However, certain programs can minimise the damage. Specific transcoders tend to do the best job. I'm not sure of Windows programs, I'm sure somebody will be along shortly to suggest something, but there's a few very good Linux programs which are generally accepted as the best options. There is `ffmpeg', `mencoder', and good old `transcode'. I'm pretty sure most of these, if not all, are available on Windows too but you'll have to check. Note: these are command-line tools, so are not the most straightforward to use. You'll also want to have a look around on the nerdy parts of the net to find appropriate settings in order to get the best quality. There may be a number of `front-ends' available for these tools, too; a front-end is like a pretty GUI point-and-click interface that handles the dirty stuff for you. An analogy might be your electric starter on your bike; just push the button labelled `start' and it'll do it for you, instead of having to crank the engine over by hand; nevertheless it's doing the same job, using the same tool. You get the picture.

My 2c.

**Fub@r** · 20th November 2006, 21:12

Originally Posted by Street Gerbil

Folks, any idea which is the best software to recode some movies from something weird that only plays on PC into DivX without loss in quality?
Thanks!

What is the "something weird" format?

**Rhino** · 20th November 2006, 21:26

Originally Posted by Street Gerbil

Folks, any idea which is the best software to recode some movies from something weird that only plays on PC into DivX without loss in quality?
Thanks!

As has already been mentioned, if the original is not compressed in a lossless format, any application used to re-encode to Divx will cause further degradation.

If you are running Windows as an O/S, I would suggest that you download Virtualdub from www.virtualdub.org. This can convert avis from one format to another with ease, provided you have codecs for both the source and destination audio and video formats required. If you want to convert to mpg, try tmpeg or virtualdubmod.