MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO
30 MA XIMUMPC MARCH 200 5
want in your portable video, so the first
thing to do is locate the main movie
(frequently labeled “Title 01, Video
01”). The file you’re looking for will be
obvious because the play time equals
the length of the film. (Note: To avoid
running afoul of U.S. law, we used a
film that does not use CSS encryption.)
Uncheck everything else. (If you click
on the + sign, you can select individual
chapters and rip selected scenes from
the movie.)
The next step is to configure the
settings for your codec (initiates can
take comfort in knowing this needs to
be done only once; power users can go
crazy experimenting with the settings).
Click the gear icon and switch to the
Output tab. Change the “Default output
video format” to “Avi (Divx, MPEG-4),”
and then change the Video Codec to
“Divx Codec.”
Click the Configure button and
change the Encode Performance setting
to “Slow” to achieve the best-quality
encoding. Now it’s time to choose a bit
rate for your video. Just as with MP3s,
the higher the bit rate, the better the
quality and the larger the file size. You’ll
get good results with a 900Kbps bit rate.
The “Encode mode” drop-down list
will offer a choice of settings, but we
strongly recommend using multi-passencoding for Divx (and other MPEG-4)
video, so select “2-pass, first pass.” This
tells the codec to scan the video before
encoding, looking for sections that have
fast motion and/or a lot of detail that
will benefit from a quick throttle-up onthe bit rate. This data will be stored in a
log file, which the encoder will use on
subsequent passes, devoting additional
bits to scenes that demand more detail.
The result is that while your movie will
take longer to encode, the image quality
will be much better.
We’ll leave the rest of the options
at their default settings, except for
the name of the log file, which we’ll
manually change to coincide with the
movie name. That way, if we choose
to re-encode the movie later, we won’t
have to rerun the first pass. If you feel
like pulling a Little Red Riding Hood by
exploring the scary menus, you’ll see
a staggering number of options, each
of which is more cryptic than the last.
Explaining all these options is beyond
the scope of this article, but we have
provided a list of resources on page
39 for those of you who might want to
delve deeper. For now, click OK and trot
back to the main screen.
Now we’re ready to rip the movie.
Press the lightning-bolt icon and get
ready to wait. It will take a few hours to
do the first pass. No one seems to know
why, but some sessions will produce
an “AVIStreamSetFormat failed” error
message. If this happens to you, go
back to the Divx configuration panel
and select one-pass encoding (use theThere’s nothing inherently complicated about running a two-pass Divx
encode. You just have to know which settings to use.Setting up the second encoding pass is as simple as
changing a single option.