how to create multi pass Divx video file?

Rends · Post by **Rends** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 10:20 pm

Hi,
i just wanted to try out how to create divx videofiles with VS10+.

If i create a single pass Divx file (default settings) all is fine. Well i¡¬m a bit
dissapointed with the file size because the original mpeg2 was about 150MB
and the divx was 132 MB.

Next i tried to create a multi pass divx file.

First pass worked fine. It created a 9MB big file with no video like expected
but what todo next?
In VS10 i clicked on videofile export went to the Divx settings and choosed n.pass (spelling?).
But how to tell the divx exporter to read the first pass? I didn¡¬t found that option.
Have read the Divx manual but it didn¡¬t realy helped me.

Rends

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 10:32 pm

Don't use 'multipass 1st pass' but 'multipass Nth pass' instead.

I have done so, using the 3000 kbps bitrate and using the Balanced (default) encoding setting which for me renders faster than real time and produces an extremely good quality file. However, the file will still be large if you want good quality.

As a footnote, I have also used the final quality setting in Home Theatre mode -- '1 pass quality mode'. This takes away the bitrate setting and substitutes a 'Target Quantizer' set at 4. It is also set to use Balanced default encoding mode. Rendering takes about the same as multipass Nth pass. It unfortunately (from your point of view) produces the largest size file, but noticeably the best in quality (though not much more so than that produced with multipass Nth pass at 3000 kbps). I can play this file on WMP and PowerDVD, as well as the original (and much larger) DVD-compatible mpeg-2 of the same video, and I have a hard time telling any significant differences in quality between the two on my 19 inch CRT computer screen.

So if you can live with mpeg-4 file sizes this comparatively large (around 170 MB for 5 minutes of video), then I would go either for multipass Nth pass at 3000 kbps or 1 pass quality mode with quantizer target of 4 for the very best quality output in mpeg-4. The second method takes slightly longer (40 seconds for a video this size), but for me this is not significant.

Rends · Post by **Rends** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 2:04 am

Thanks for the Info Ken.
Well i havn¡¬t decided if i realy want to use Divx seriosly yet but i want to play around with the codec.

Rends

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 2:11 am

Well, as you may have deduced from my earlier post, I am not overly impressed with the quality of the very small size files. Conversely, I was mightily impressed, not to say rather surprised, by the high quality of the larger files produced by the method I outlined. And compared to others, they are still relatively small files anyway...

Rends · Post by **Rends** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 3:18 pm

The initial idea was to create some Divx files from Stuff i recorded from TV with my DVD-HDD recorder so i can copy the divx files back to recorder and play from HD rather than DVD.
But if good quality Divx won¡¬t be significant smaller in size than the original mpeg2 files i don¡¬t see a reason to use Divx.

Rends

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 10:45 pm

You'd need to test yourself to see what quality you get which is reasonable to you yet provides a relatively small file size. As relative file sizes, I have just captured some HDTV and it comes in at around 60 MB for 30 seconds. I haven't tried converting this to DivX. But based on my earlier experiments, I would still suspect that a very high quality DivX file, while relatively large, would still be considerably smaller than the same file in mpeg-2.