I've added the latest VobSub, Vidomi and Subadjust. Furthermore I've added synchronizer, a tool which helps you synch your movies a bit easier than doing it in VirtualDub (it allows to preview your settings so you don't have to mux to find out if some settings work or not). Another interesting tool is mpg2mps, which converst your SVCD MPEG-2 streams into I-author compabible format w/o using the I-author muxer (so you can use the superior bbMPEG as muxer). Mini DivX Launcher is the probabily easiest DivX launcher. It will automatically install the DivX codec if needed (you don't even have to enter anything) and then it automatically launches your movie or gives a menu if multiple avis are present.

The OpenDivX team strikes again: DivX 4 Windows 4.0a50 is out, along with Playa 0.5.0. I'd love to give you a first quality impression but as it happens my pc crashed again. In the meantime I got a new PSU, ran the ramchecker again (no problem.. the new ram is just fine), replaced the KB with a PS2 one (mouse is already PS2) and got some new IDE cables plus I connected the IDE devices differently. I also tried 4 different detonator releases (5.3, 6.5, 6.77 and 11.01) so it's definitely not a driver problem. If everything works right I have another HD next week-end but I don't think it's the problem. I also get a cheap ass GFX card to see if my hyper expensive Geforce DDR card is to blame. Either way.. I can't afford to buy a new GFX card or CPU&MB.... and please.. no mails about hardware unless you can actually provide a working solution (that is.. provide some new hardware for me).

Also just a reminder: the design contest is still running.

I'm back. But I only had 1.5h of sleep last night and I had to dig thru more than 100 emails so I'll keep this short. Please no more hardware related messages.. I know what to do. What I need is hardware now *hint*.

SmartRipper 2.26 should fix the missing chapters issues (I'll have to do the ID4 test again as it looks) and Morgan Stream Switcher 0.94 now works together with dvobsub.

Thanks for all the suggestions but it really just comes down to this: I need some replacement hardware to nail down the bug in my pc :( Please don't send me mail with suggestions anymore.. I'm getting swamped in mails so the ones concerning ripping problems get lost. I think I've heard anything I ever need to hear about hardware problems (and I'm more scared than ever to get an AMD chip). I should have replacements for all hardware parts which can cause trouble by the end of the week.

I will be on a short vacation starting today and to give you something to chew on in the meantime I updated the Nandub guide so that it now corresponds to the latest release of the program. I've also added all the latest discoveries made by the nice people active in my forums. Thanks guys! Ac3dec 0.821 is a combined GUI/CLI version which is 2 times faster than the old version.

If anybody has the time to browse the SBC forums for interesting stuff which might be added to the FAQ please let me know.

Since I keep getting suggestions on how to fix my computer problems but these suggestions usually don't work since the full extent of the problem is unknown here goes: I've had this machine for more than a year now and it has been running rock stable, meaning one crash every 2-3month. At the beginning of the new years things slowly turned to inacceptable. Crashes started to occurr more and more often and reinstalls didn't fix the problem. This is my hardware config: Intel P3-550, 100MHz FSB, 128mb PC-100 SDRAM (no known manufacturer), now replaced with 128MB PC-133 Samsumg SDRAM. The mainboard is an Asus P3B-F running on the latest BIOS revision (1006). GFX card is a Creative 3d Blaster Annihilator Pro (GeForce DDR) using the Nvidia reference drivers 650 (official release.. not beta). I also have a SBLive Value a RealTek RTL8139A Network card (Planet ENW-9503A) and a Haupauge WinTV Stereo TV card. I run a 27GB Maxtor U92732 UDMA-33 HD as primary master, a Toshiba SDM-1212 DVD-ROM as primary slave, a PlexWriter PX-1210A as secondary master and a Iomega Zip-250 as secondary slave. Last but not least I have a Logitech Wingman USB mouse and a Chicony USB keyboard. First of all let's exclude the obvious reasons: screwed up installation, most of the hardware (I removed all extension cards plus all devicec on the secondary IDE bus and used a completely fresh install.. still crashes), Viruses (I check regularily.. furthermore I have the original W2K CD), Trojans (I use Zonealarm). As said.. having only HD, MB, CPU, RAM & GFX card in the pc and reinstalling doesn't help and since I got new RAM it can't be that either. I also switched the IDE cable but that didn't help either. What remains is the GFX card and the MB, and maybe it's possible that something with the HD is not okay since I got a BSOD caused by portcls.sys recently. So, is there any ways to test the on-board controller of a HD? I should get another GFX card to test with next week.. so then I'll know if I can throw my expensive GeForce card away or not. On another note: the problem is definitely not software related, it happens on a clean W2K install with only GFX card drivers installed as a plus, nothing else. The crashes most frequently ocurr watching DivX movies, but it's not due to corrupt data since I'm using stuff I created on my own here. I checked all the fans and each and every of them is working properly so heat isn't a problem either. Power consumption shouldn't be either since the system has been running w/o problem for quite a while.. and the CPU isn't too power hungry. The problem isn't purely related to DivX either.. crashes also occurr during normal daily work (for instance.. I had to write the aspect ratio guide twice since the pc crashed when I was almost finished) but it's most easily seen during DivX playback.

So if anybody has an idea.. I'm open to suggestions. Keep in mind what I've said above.. I pretty much tried every trick I know from 9 years of assembling PCs for my friends. As it looks I'll have to replace large parts of my hardware which is very unfortunate since I hadn't planned an upgrade until the summer where I actually get some money (studies don't pay).. Well.. that's the whole sad story. I hope this never happens to you.. it's majory frustrating when the pc crashes several times during a movie.. if I had the money to buy a new one right away I wouldn't hesitate to throw this piece of shit right out of my window.

Forgot some important facts: The system isn't overclocked (never has been either) plus the crashes manifest themselves as follows: the pc freezes and the 3 leds on the keyboard go on and off (roughly every 2 secs or so). Furthermore theres a high-pitched sound coming out of the soundcard. And I use WMP6.4 for playback. Another thing: whenever I get a BSOD instead of the freeze I get the following: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Could it be that my IRQ controller on the MB is broken? Damnit.. I want a new machine... I'm so sick and tired of this shit. I've never seen anything quite comparable.

Another update: it's definitely not heat! I triple checked every fan.. everything is glued just fine and they're all working. And another thing: I checked the error log and I get a lot of errors caused by i8042prt (error code 26) and warnings by the same device (error code 17). Dunno what it is but it sure sounds like a chip on the MB. And I'll get a new power supply on Monday.. I'll have to get a 300W one anyways as soon as I can afford to upgrade to a T-bird.

And on we go: I just like to stress that it's NOT IRQ conflicts.. I removed all cards, reinstalled and it still crashes right away. I've also tried the 6.67 detonator drivers again (been using 6.5, 10 and 11 releases.. no go) and I use a PS2 mouse now, plus I moved the NIC to PCI slot 3 so there's absolutely no IRQ sharing going on now. And about the errors in the log... these are caused by my keyboard.. which has been behaving a little strange every since I got it.. but I never got major problems. Anyways.. I'll get a dirt cheap ps2 keyboard just to make sure it's not that. Another thing: Never in life will I install a lesser OS than W2K.. if the hardware is not up to W2K it's broken, quite simply. Moving the memory to another slot didn't help.. tried that a long time ago.. and switching deviced on the IDE bus neither. Please make sure you fully understand my full problem report before submitting any suggestions.. I get swamped by mails but most suggest things I already tried. Also.. BSOD are not the main crash results.. it only happens once in 20 times.. usually the pc just freezes.

New RAM and it still crashes.. I'm running out of options here :(

BSPlayer 0.834 is just a bugfix release. Nandub b21 fixes some bugs and adds a few new features as adding copyright info for WMP to your AVIs. vStrip 0.7c_css gets the languages for the individual streams from the ifo file.

We got our first price contribution: a $20 gift certificate for the winner of the design contest. More to come?

BSPlayer 0.833 adds bookmarks, the ability to play MP3 files, some W2K bugfixes and some changes to the ini format. Furthermore the problems with external audio files should be solved now.

PowerDivX NG 2.5 has a new interface, subtitle support thru VobSub and personalized pan&scan support.

We changed the rules for the contest a bit.. now you can submit in almost any format.

And off it goes: The Doom9 logo & T-shirt contest starts today. We're eagerly awaiting your contributions.

Razorlame 1.14 should fix all problems of the previous versions (or so they claim). My forum has been down for a bit now.. time I remind the guys at ezboard that I'm a paying customer. BTW: I've noticed that forum.doom9.net is down more often than forum.doom9.org ;)

I'd also like you to take a look at the very last line of this page: What is on this page is not free to take. Too many times I've seen other sites shamlessly copying content of this page and many pages are leeching of my software, forcing me to switch access paths to the software archive every once in a while. If you come across a website which takes or links content off this page please let me know (or contact the admin of that page directly).

Nandub b20 is out. It's now based on VirtualDub 1.4d, all VirtualDub functions are fully functional, and the functionalities of both the AC3 version and the MP3 VBR version have been added. Keep in mind that these are a lot of internal changes and it might not perform as stable as the old release, therefore I kept b19 for the moment.

And my pc keeps crashing.. 5 times yesterday is a new record. But I've found the reason for my crashes: After running GoldMemory 3 times I know what I've been suspecting for some time now: My memory is about to die.. there are several bits which are already broken and I don't think it'll become any better.. the number of crashes has been slowly growing since the beginning of the year. Time to get some new RAM then.

Friday the 13th again.. any my PC already crashed 2 times :( I'm beginning to suspect that it's a problem with my RAM.. I have a clean installation and I've checked the insides of my case.. no chance there can be a short, overheating or anything. And I use the same programs as always. Which brings me to a question for you: My next machine will contain a T-bird (1.33GHz as it looks.. tired of waiting for my rips to finish). I'm still not completely decided whether to get a DDR board because the price/performance isn't that great at the moment. However, I've heard some nasty stories about incompatibilities of the VIA chipset on most SDRAM boards for the Athlon. And I was interested if you have made a similar experience with the KT133 chipset. I'm mainly interested about USB support (since I have USB keyboard, printer and mouse) and compatibility with the SB Live.

As promised in my new years resolution I've added a DVD basics page to this site. At the moment it contains information about aspect ratios and the DVD structure. More to come, but probably not soon since stuff like film to video transfer is a bit more complicated to explain properly. Last but not least I have added a 1 CD profile for SBC. I've used this profile before and the results aren't too shabby, but of course, as always, they are not optimal and you should definitely try to play around with them.

And some new software: SubRip 0.95b fixes the grey-only subs in the I-author output mode, adds transparent background option to the subtitle preview settings, and makes it possible to ignore all bad packet headers. SectorExtractor 1.2 now includes UDF parsing and should handle any kind of 1.00GB files without problems. Hint: there's a readme file in the package ;)

Azid GUI 0.5 should work properly with W2K. I've added lamecom.dll for all the poor souls who need the Lame ACM (I only use graphedit.. much better). Thanks to Phreak404 for compiling. OpenDVD is a plugin for the latest DVD2AVI beta (not available here since it's not a stable release) which allows you to open DVDs directly. Please keep in mind that creating a DVD2AVI project directly off the disk for frameserving is MAJORLY STUPID and can seriously shorten the expected lifetime of your drive. Also.. there is NO SUPPORT for it at all.

Then there's been a very disturbing development concerning copyrights in the EU: If this law will be ratified the EU will have the same "*ç%ç as the DMCA. Good-bye fair use. Once again big corporations are screwing the rights of us customers. And of course, we as customers have no lobby to defend our rights. But let me ask you: If studios and record labels don't give a flying f*** about our rights and circumcise them at will shouldn't we just start not caring about their rights as well? Copyright? No thank you! Studios, please give me a reason to continue letting my 200+ DVD archive grow. Because this is clearly not the way to go, it's an open invitation for people to pirate in retaliation.

A new FlaskMpeg output plugin has been released: it allows you to encode to WMV7 (though I'm not so sure why you would want to encode to a closed format).

I've completed a 2nd installment of the DVD Ripper comparison. Not surprisingly vStrip once again managed to come out first. In fact it cleared 7 out of the 8 tests I put all the programs through. The only thing still left to be done is is 1.00GB VOB support (or in other words: the ripper needs its own UDF parser). After that test I took the liberty of removing certain rippers from the page since they aren't quite up to the task at hand and would only lead to additional trouble. The guides now only use DVD Decrypter and SmartRipper which perform not so shabby. I'm afraid vStrip is just a bit too much to handle for the average ripper. Hopefully I can convince maven to make the GUI a bit more user friendly...

Nandub b19 has been released and it adds the following: simplified codec setup, one click first pass encoding and direct 2 pass encoding. Lots of fixes of issues which could potentially lead to problems. Luminance correction and a macroblock artifacts/freezeframe checker has also been added. The guide and sample profile have already been updated ;) Subadjust 1.54 adds a split wizard, incorrect character detection and better ssa conversion.

Finally it has been done: I've spent quite a bit of time on my article about different MPEG-4 codecs: Duke it out in MPEG-4. I think this is the last quality comparison article I will write.. all my previous articles were mostly only critisized, not appreciated. I've tried to respond to the criticism by being even more careful but I'm afraid some people will not be happy with the conclusions, even this time. Once 3ivx because available for regular encoding (Quicktime.. not thank you) I might add that to the comparsion, and maybe update it when new OpenDivX releases become available. BEWARE: there's a huge amount of screenshots. And for IE users: File - Save as can save you a lot of reload time;)

I've also made a new FlaskMpeg rippack, this time without vStrip and VirtualDub since I feel they're not really needed anymore. I do not longer support 44.1Khz audio in DivX since downsampling involves not only quality degradation but also a lot of other problems. Furthermore DivX audio sounds so bad that I strongly suggest you only use MP3 for your DivX movies. Expect a new SVCD pack when the final flask 0.6 is finally released.. looking forward to the day when I can dump the zillion of different Flask versions.

Avery Lee invites you to Take the iDCT challenge. Try to find the difference between the different iDCTs.

You might have noticed it already.. we're fully back online. All the regular URLs are in service again and I have a nice load balancing in effect which should improve server performance. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all my hosters again. This page couldn't exist without you.

Micro DVD Autorun 1.77 adds the ability to set the size of the subtitles depending on the resolution and to set any value in mdvdp.ini. I've also added Movie Collection Tracker 1.5 update. Last but not least I've updated the SBC profiles again, I accidentally forgot to remove a line which removed all your filters in the last release.

TMPG12e fixes the corrupt SVCD profiles, and a few other things. It also supports LAME as external encoder and SSRC as external sampling rate converter. As usual, no TMPG without a VFP plugin.

I've updated the SBC guide again with a lot of useful information and there's a new SBC profile which uses less conservative settings. You should definitely check out the SBC FAQ before posting SBC questions. And.. the FlaskMpeg frameserving has been almost completely removed since DVD2AVI will just give you less problems. And I can't stress it too much: SBC is a method for very advanced rippers. Unless you feel comfortable with encoding scenes over and over again trying to find optimal settings for your movie and if you feel uncomfortable with DVD2AVI then you should leave this untouched.

The latest release of Vidomi adds a new cropping feature called Hypercrop, a 23-30% speedup and streamlist support.

Also.. if you read this it means you won't be touched by it, but here I go anyways: doom9.org is down at the moment, the server is still alive and can be reached by go.to/doom9 but I've switched the nameservers and it will take a while until the new servers will kick in. Then we'll have load sharing on two very fast servers which should ensure that this site can be reached even better.

I keep learning more about SBC.. expect an updated version of the guide again soon. But the thing remains.. SBC is a tool for very advanced rippers and nothing can ever change that. This is not my sole opinion, pretty much every beta tester I talked to agrees and so does the author. If you feel confused about all the possible settings you should stick to Fair Use. And do not use FlaskMpeg to frameserve.. DVD2AVI is much better.

You guys have created an incredible server-load over the week-end. 4.7GB of SBC downloads in 1.5 days breaks every traffic record I ever had. Now I've split up the package into just the binary with debugger and source code. This should help reduce the server load a bit since this is clearly the most popular download at the moment and not everybody needs the source code. I'd also like to pre-announce that there might be a slight downtime for doom9.org (and go.to/doom9) in the days to come since I'll be switching nameservers. doom9.net should be working as usual though.

Small changes to the SBC guide and I've addes a quick and dirty SBC which addresses some common problems. I'll add some optimized profiles as I get them.

If we're at the issue I'd like to bring up something which has really bothered me in the last time: First everybody started screaming for SBC and how much they needed it and that it should be released immediately even if the documentation is not ready. Now that it's out many people are bitching about how difficult the program is. SBC has never been designed for newbies. If you are afraid of encoding the same movie over and over again and play with the settings to get an optimum quality rip then this is not the way for you to go. SBC requires a lot of patience. If you don't have it.. or if you think the setup is too hard then use Fair Use which may look even better than SBC if you use the wrong nandub setup and which is a lot easier to learn.

MMswitch 0.92 contains bugfixes and the ability tocustomize text description of streams displayed in Windows Media Player. Read the included readme for more info on how to do that. AzidGUI 0.3 adds the ability to save profiles.

Big news: Smart Bitrate Control has been released, courtesy of VCDVaULT. For those who haven't heard Smart Bitrate Control, or SBC for short, is simply the best way to encode to DivX. It allows codec switching on the fly at any frame and can manipulate many internal parameters of the DivX codec to ensure best quality. I've had the possibility to test it extensively prior to the release and I've never seen 1CD rips which looked that good so grab it and test it. As it's a modified version of VirtualDub it comes with the source code in accordance to the GPL. A word of advice though: the encoding process is somewhat harder than just use FlaskMpeg so make sure you read my guide very carefully and follow it excactly. I've been indstructed by the programmer directly on how to use it and I've included all the useful information he gave me on the tool's use in my brand-new SBC guide. And no, this is not a joke, despite the date. Remember, you saw it here first. Oh, and before I forget, the tool's name is Nandub ;) Don't forget the profiles for an easy start.

Morgan Stream Switcher allows you to use dual-language AVIs in WMP and to switch the audio stream on the fly. Vidomi is a new DivX encoder based on DVD2AVI Flask and Virtualdub. Basically it combines the best of all worlds and saves you the frameserving setup. I've also added the Flask 0.60 preview source code to the software page.