Does VBR cause problems when converting to Divx?

[stu8080]

I have tons of Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy all those cool cartoons taking up about 100GB of my precious 200GB Hard Drive.

Now i have a DivX DVD player and was hoping to store 10-12 episodes to a DVD and wanted to reduce my 1GB episodes down to about 400MB. When i encode using Auto GK and DrDivX on default settings or higher i get horrible results with sound out of sync and a course scrambled pixelated look.

Before i start to trawl the Divx/Xvid forums i wondered if it had anything to do with VBR or if anyone here had any tips??

Thanks in advance

[capone]

I just use basic setting w/ minor tweaks in Dr Divx.  It's not the end-all of encoding, but it's fairly intuitive and simple.  It's great for just a quick divx-ing of recorded shows.

VBR hasn't/doesn't make a difference, that I've seen for input.

[stu8080]

i tried encoding about 6 months ago with some good results, when i try now though no matter how high i set the settings the results are awful! Thats why i thought the change to VBR recordings may have affected things?
Do you encode any of the american cartoons?

[reven]

you should be able to get a 30min show, or 22min show, to about 200megs at good quality, really good quality, using xvid. i have a lot of 60min shows (44mins) at 350 megs, all hdtv, better quality than i get with normal sdtv.

[stu8080]

Thats better than i expected! I should be able to get good results from default setings shouldnt i? If so i must be doing something wrong!
I use normal recording quality in GB-PVR, transfer the files over to another PC to encode with a bitrate of about 1300
Reven, what software do you use? and do you use defaults or your own settings?

Cheers for the responses!

[reven]

all are at 350megs, 624x352 widescreen.
using Xvid MPEG-4 codec
1019kbps
audio
48000 hz, stereo.
mp3 vbr audio

play around with settings like that, im not sure if the video is vbr, i didnt create the files, i just have a lot of them all at 350megs, and all really really good quality.

[stu8080]

Ive just tried a DVD which gives perfect results! I am using an Analogue input to my PVR-350 though... could the original mpeg be too noisy??