AutoGK, Divx/Xvid DVD ripper, have you heard of it?

[GoldDragon]

I autoGK daily to compress my recordings for archival. It's great for my simplest projects, but its auto cropping sometimes leaves something to be desired. It also doesn't let you tweak codec settings.

When I need something that's a little less plug and play, I use mediacoder. Very nice manual cropper, even better than xmpeg's. And it gives you access to most of the codec settings in a very nice little gui. It's not 1.0 yet, but I'm loving it so far.

And yeah, you need something extra for any ripping. DVD Decrypter is still serving most people's needs, despite development having been shut down. It's progeny, ImgBurn, is also a nice piece of software.

Mian,

Have you tried the manual crop settings in AutoGK's ctrl+F9 menu? You can do an exact crop using the 'force cropping of' fields, but you must check the 'Tune autocrop parameters' box and set the threshold to 0, otherwise AutoGK will attempt to use one of its automagic cropping formulas. Based on your usage description I'm guessing you are familiar with these options, but this information might be helpful for newbies.

You know it's been quite awhile since I tried Mediacoder. Just had a look at the site and it seems to have matured nicely. The screenshot of the visual cropper looks nice indeed. I may have to give it another shot.

I'm also not a fan of 2 pass - a 2 hour DVD can take almost 4.5 hours because of 2 pass.

gazoo, that just means you need to treat yourself to a cpu upgrade . I just encoded a 2h15m movie in 1h49m.

Seriously, though, I remember my first days with AutoGK back when I was living on an Athlon t-bird. Encoding took 8-10 hours or more, and my computer was useless during that time. My current dual-core can easily handle encoding while web-surfing, emailing, managing files, burning discs, etc. Sometimes I've forgotten that AutoGK is even running, then I see it in the system tray and I have to marvel at the wonder of technology. Back in my i386 days I never dreamed I would one day process full-length Hollywood movies on my pc.

GoldDragon

[mian]

Mian,

Have you tried the manual crop settings in AutoGK's ctrl+F9 menu? You can do an exact crop using the 'force cropping of' fields, but you must check the 'Tune autocrop parameters' box and set the threshold to 0, otherwise AutoGK will attempt to use one of its automagic cropping formulas. Based on your usage description I'm guessing you are familiar with these options, but this information might be helpful for newbies.

You know it's been quite awhile since I tried Mediacoder. Just had a look at the site and it seems to have matured nicely. The screenshot of the visual cropper looks nice indeed. I may have to give it another shot.

Didn't even know there was a ctrlF9 menu. :o Anytime I needed to do something that required manual tweaking, I switched to xmpeg, and more recently, mediacoder.

I'll look into it. Thanks.

[pz1]

Didn't even know there was a ctrlF9 menu.

You would have known if you'd read this whole thread (see this)