I know why I have delayed updating the FAQs for such a long time. Writing FAQs is one of the most laborious jobs you can imagine and it's no fun at all. But it's finally done: Both the DivX and SVCD faq have been updated and are now much easier to read since I have added a table of content. This also means that from now on I'll be much more severe when it comes to answering emails containing questions that are already answered in the FAQs. As said countless times before: You have to have read the FAQs before you mail me. Don't expect an answer if you spam my mailbox with things that have been answered on this page already! Of course I'm always open for new entries in the FAQ.. 

I have also fixed a couple of missing links and sorted my software archive a little. You probably won't notice but it means that I had to move a lot of files around, and I have merged the two link sections into one. The distinction between the DivX and SVCD part of my page is getting smaller and smaller. 

And I'm still looking for webspace. As you know: 100MB, FTP access, no banners and binary files allowed are the criteria. Excelland is bombing me with ads and adds strange tags to every links. I definitely need another host. I have some interesting projects which I will only implement when I get a nice add-free hosting again. Actually I wanted to start my forum off my own domain this week-end but they guy who was supposed to set up a hosting for me didn't tell me how I can access my files from the web... Yes.. this goes to you Sushi.. mail be back ASAP! 

I have run a couple more tests with DVD Wise and concluded that either the program is screwed up because it can't make any VMG menus at all, or my sources are not accepted. My first DVDit tests also resulted in so many crashes that I'm condering abandoning the project. I don't know what's wrong with that program... every seconds time I select a video it crashes. DVDit uses PowerDVD for file playback but somehow that doesn't work properly.. the standalone PowerDVD works with all these files I use as source.. 

And after my rather unsuccessfull attempts yesterday I managed to use DVDit as well, so here's the guide. When it works it's a pretty impressive program indeed. 

cladDVD 2.62K3 fixes another annoying error message. 

Software: cladDVD 1.62K update.. fixes the stupid missing files bug. VobDec GUI 2.8d has better keysearch again.  DVD2AVI 9/29 and its VFP plugin 9/29 add support for 2+ / 4+ GB input files.. You can bet that the 4+ GB mode only works in Windows 2000. Didn't I tell you to upgrade? 

Also.. my host seems to put some really strange tags on the links.. don't ask me how they do it and why.. but the files you download will either have no extension at all or a wrong one.. but if you move your mouse over a link you'll see the filename in lower statusbar in your browser... just add the right extension to the downloaded file then.

Software: vstrip 0.6a is out. Among the new things are output file splitting and IFO parsing and a new way to  handle arguments. The last one is particularly annoying for me since I have sample vstrip command lines all over my site which I now have to change when I release the next release of the rippacks. As you might know I try to have my guides and my packs match.. so I refrain from changing to guides until the rippacks contain the necessary software. 

Software: DVD2AVI 9/26 is out and fixes some nasty bugs. I've also added DivXFix 1.01 and Normalize 0.21. 

I'm still looking for that WAV editing without loading the whole file in memory program. If anybody knows of it I'd really appreciate to hear from you.

Project DivX will allow you to combine video and audio from high and low motion files rather easily.. simply select the high motion scenes and Project DivX will do the rest. 

Software: DVD2AVI 9/24 is out.. now defaults to MMX iDCT since otherwise the program would crash in W2K on a P3. Furthermore VobDec GUI 2.8b fixes a bug in keysearch change (from findkey to vobdec) and there's a new mpeg2avi GUI: aMPEG2Avi GUI 1.2.  

Furthermore I have cladDVD 1.61min (without the VB libs.. these are on the download page just in case) and cladDVD 1.62 update. VobDec GUI 2.8c fixes yet another bug in keysearch and findkey.exe should be a bit faster now. Then there's also a public beta of Compress AVI... make sure you get the official release as well for instructions on how to use it if a step is unclear. 

I forgot something with my last update: VirtualDub 1.4c is also out. It fixes a nasty frameserving bug. 

After a lot of testing VobDec GUI 2.8 is out. The probably most notable feature is that it once again works in W2K.. you wouldn't believe how many non-working betas there have been. Also.. the keysearch is being done twice in case of failure.. the first one based on decss plus and the 2nd on vobdec which should result in perfect results.. decss plus can actually find a key in these VOBs where vobdec fails.

Finally it's been done. 2 different IVTC methods have been added to the DivX guides. I have also rearranged the guides page and merged the DivX and VCD&SVCD guides as well as the software pages to avoid the widespread confusion there was. VCD & SVCD related news are still in the SVCD section tough. 

Software: VFAPI Reader Codec and English patch added. DVD2AVI 9/22 is out and supports AC3 decoding, however it crashes always on my machine and the author will be busy for a while so there won't be any updates :( I've also added BSPlayer 0.8. The most remarkable addition is support for 2 audio tracks .. you need avimux to create such AVIs with 2 audio tracks. Also check out CompressAVI 1.02 which will allow you to create 20-40% smaller AVIs by using high and lo motion scenes. However the drawback is that you'll have to encode your movie twice.. Make sure you read the readme file for that one.

I've also tested the Graphedit based AVI encoders and the results were devastating. Both encoder would only work with the Ligos filters and that would result in seriously asynch movies - thanks for Purpleman who inspired me to look at these progs again and who pretty much gave me all the results I have now.. he did some extensive testing on that - and since all the other filters would either output in a different colorpace than needed or simply stop decoding after a few secs this is pretty useless at the moment. The I-media encoder does not even have cropping so it's pretty useless as well, and the asynch problem persists.

It's almost done.. only a few more days and the ultimate IVTC for DivX method will be online. It will probably not be doable for everybody but the point it that it can be done. More to come..

Check out Sarek's 1 CD DivX guide - and keep in mind: these things are never perfect. I mean the same resolution and bitrate will not always yield the same final size, which my ripping career has shown me. But it's a nice guide in any case.

And about that stupid banner: I know it's annoying.. if things work out I'll soon be on another site which has no banners again. I tried to contact excelland about it but they don't even answer.

Robshot has done it again: His article on miniDVD is a definite must read if you're interested in that format. It provides some interesting insights on how to make the Affrey play miniDVDs and why most other player will never play these discs.

Software: I've added Subadjust 1.3. This software allows you to split Subviewer/MicroDVD Player subtitle files in 2 pieces with the according timecode adjustments, adjust the subs, convert to almost every format (including ssa), etc.

I've recently come across a guide on how to add/cut silence in wav files using a small tool that wouldn't have to load the whole wav and therefore would work much quicker. Unfortunately I forgot the URL.. so if somebody knows what I'm talking about please send me the link..

If anybody knows a way to make TMPEGEnc letterbox anamorphic pictures BEFORE! cropping then I'd like to hear it. As soon as we can deal with that problem non-standard rff flags will not be a problem for DivX anymore - the problem is already solved for SVCD and miniDVD... you'll be able to make the perfect conversion... however.. the amount of work and time involved is quite insane. But if you are a quality freak as I am this is the only way to go. Currently the only thing I can do is to letterbox in TMPEGEnc... save an AVI in Huffyuv and recompress it in VirtualDub and crop there. This is quite a waste of space (about 120GB for a 2 hour movie..) and time so a direct solution would be preferable. 

I've added the multichannel DirectSound 3D filter v1.1 and an ac3dec ax filter which should enable you to directly encode these multichannel mp3 files... but I'm not so sure. The official homepage is in Spanish and the ac3dec filter has no description or instruction files. I hope to be able to test this filter soon. 

mpeg2avi PX3 0.03 is out. The good news: you can now specify which ac3 channel to rip. The bad news: CSS support is gone due to legal issues. Feel free to implement it again (the 0.02 release has CSS support and is still available)

Good news for all SSA people: Thanks to one of my readers I have another srt->ssa converter which offers some interesting options, like setting fonts, sizes, colors, etc. 

Tom's hardware guide released DVD rip guides. Well.. sort of. They don't tell you how to decrypt as ZDNet did, but otherwise it's about the same. Some data is not accurate tough, as Blight reported a few days ago. But it's interesting anyways. I wonder how long it takes till you get a CD containing DeCSS with your daily newspaper.

To "maz": Please get another email account... I have serious trouble contacting you. I sent you a sample clip but it was sent back to me.. the whole 400KB... I'm about to charge you the connection fee for that. 4 mails in the last 48hours came back from the mailserver.

Unfortunately there's nothing with the DVD2AVI -> TMPEGEnc AVI encoding solution as I thought. The problem is that the letterboxing will be applied after cropping, which makes the cropping useless for DivX encoders. The procedure is still useful for SVCD tough so you'll find it in that section. DVD2AVI may still become an interesting DivX encoder once the todo list is implemented but for the moment let's stay with the current tools. I've made very small updates to the various DivX guides, reflecting recent findings related to IVTC. There will be links at the appropriate places so you can go around deinterlacing and encoding at 29.97fps - but this usually has a price.

On the software side I have Eugene's DVD Player 0.93. Could somebody please tell nbci.com to fix their servers. It's a catastrophe, since xoom went nbci things are worse than ever. It almost never works. I've also added the Angelpotion codecs package v702. This package allows you to play any kind of MPEG-4 being used - or almost: MS Video v7 is not included and I think v1 is based on the Windows Media Encoder 4.1 version so it's not the new MS v1 ISO compliant codec. But it supports the Angelpotion definite format, as well as nAvi/SMR, DivX low and high motion and MS Video v2 and v3. If you want to install another codec than the angelpotion definite format you'll have to select custom installation. 

I also have a new subtitle method, an alternative to VobSub. 

Remember the 9/12 post: I did Matrix again with the exact same settings in FlaskMpeg. Result is that the file was 75796KB larger than the one done in mpeg2avi. This results in 9.26Kbit/s more than the result mpeg2avi created. 

Software: Eugene's DVD Player 0.93 is out. Unfortunately as long as I am unable to download there won't be a local copy. And to those who are interested about the next PX3 release: I've talked to him but so far it's not clear what's going to be added in the next release.

UDMA is not always better... It took me a really long time to figure out where to enable UDMA in W2K (read the FAQ on how to) and when my software players refused to play more than 2 minutes of video before completely locking up my system in regular intervals I thought it was due to my old windows installation. But 2 new installations afterwards (and one service pack) I know better. Only the H+ would still play DVDs flawlessly with UDMA turned on, and despite ripping being 50% faster I switched back to PIO mode in which the software players play a little less fluent but they play the whole movie... (and yes, my DVD-ROM is UDMA capable!).

I've found a very interesting program. Oleg has reported about DVD2AVI a while back but until now the releases were really instable and therefore not much use. This has changed now. The latest release performed rock-stable during my tests. There are in fact several interesting operations you can do with it and its vfp plugin, as to AVI-like handle VOB files in TMPEGEnc, "frameserve" VOBs to TMPEGEnc, DVD to AVI conversions, etc. It is also able to correctly apply IVTC to movies that have non-standard tff and rff flags as it seems. My 4 movies that have the interlacing problem in FlaskMpeg could be converted to 23.976fps just nicely with no artifacts and no deinterlacing. Exactly what Inwards - make sure you read his article about deinterlacing, I may have to make some changed to the TMPEGEnc guides in the future to incorporate his findings - told, IVTC is the key... and as mentioned a while back in my "new" mpeg2avi method. The only problem with DVD2AVI is that it currently does not support YUV12 which is needed to get proper DivX output, otherwise this could be THE converter once the todo list is implemented. My tests with Huffyuv revealed no interlacing and the picture looked really good. What is also amazing is the speed... it's even a bit faster than mpeg2avi and the author claims that it can still be optimized. In fact when the todo list is implemented and a few more fps squeezed out of it can replace a DVD player... it plays my ripped VOBs at 25fps. My tests with these problematic movies also revealed what I think could be the key why encoding the AVI in mpeg2avi leads to asynch in Rush Hour and Austin Powers no matter what IVTC settings you use in mpeg2avi (rest assured that an simple audio offset fixes the problem). Watching the frame type indicator I noticed that at the very beginning between credits the picture changed to progressive for a while.. and then progressive/ interlaced sequences would come at different "speeds" whereas the other two movies: Money Talks and Friday stay at progressive/interlaced all the time. I have already contacted the author to ask for YUV12 support and I wish him all the best implementing this and the todo list. This little program could be a real gem once it's fully developed. With it and TMPEGEnc's own IVTC there SVCD encoding should now be possible in almost all cases, as Inwards mentioned. There's just one thing where I don't agree with him: I own about 60-70 NTSC movies and only 4 are not 24fps progressive with standard 3:2 pulldown flags. The rest can be converted using FlaskMpeg without any problem.

I thought I placed this before my long post: Alberto Vigata, the author of FlaskMpeg is moving to another country and is currently unable to work on his program. From my own experience I know that such things take their time so don't expect any new Flask version soon. 

I've encoded Romeo Must Die and The Matrix yesterday, both using ac3dec and mpeg2avi (to Purpleman: no -s settings, my standard Warner method works, only for RMD I had to use change fps to match audio and video in VirtualDub, Matrix synched right away) in batch mode (all dos, even wrote a mix script for VirtualDub to mux from DOS mode). I've set a ridiculously high bitrate - 2700kbit/s DivX low-motion - but guess what... even then you can see some compression artifact. I'll try to verify whether this is due to mpeg2avi... it was in a low-motion scene after all. Now for the interesting part: The filesizes of the VOB files I converted (ripped via Vstrip_css using the v option, deleted any stuff I didn't need like multiangles, studio logos, FBI warnings and trailers, then merged): Matrix.vob was 5570108KB and with a running time of 8181 seconds, RMD.vob was 5045402KB with a running time of 6903 seconds. So far so good. Deductive logic indicates that my Matrix rip would bi larger than Romeo must Die. Wrong!! I used mp3 at 128kbit/s for both movies. The Matrix soundtrack takes 130896KB, the RMD soundtrack 110448KB. Still okay. But now dig this: The calculations with the set bitrate should result in Matrix being 2329762.5KB but it actually was only 1965910KB which results in an average bitrate of 2278kbit/s, whereas RMD should have been 2761087.5KB but it actually was 1638823KB which results in an average bitrate of 1602KBit/s. So here you have it: Despite all logics Romeo must Die got significantly larger than it was to be expected, larger than The Matrix which also contains a lot of action scenes and runs significantly longer which results in a larger VOB file. You can also see that despite the high bitrate the average bitrate is much lower than anticipated, especially in the case of The Matrix. What does that tell us: ONLY ENCODING A MOVIE REVEALS HOW LARGE IT ACTUALLY GETS! I've been saying it for weeks but now I have more than definite proof... not that I had it before but this is even more striking. And last but not least: some people might like their one CD rips but what I have now on my harddisk is really hard to distinguish from a true DVD... I spotted some encoding errors right away but I don't think that's due to the bitrate being too low... I'll keep looking into that subject. But a 3CD rip can definitely replace a DVD in my critical eyes. And before I forget: the resolution of both movies is 720x320 according to the default settings for NTSC 1:2.35 movie settings in mpeg2avi GUI. 

Software: VobDec GUI 2.7b is out. This release fixes some glitches with the merge function. I've also added Subviewer 2.0 and. PX3 also started working on mpeg2avi: Here's his first mpeg2avi PX3 release, currently not much has changed, only a couple of ASM fixes and the -a option which disables ac3 extraction. 

You can now use Windows Media Player to display your subtitles. Read more in the subtitle guide.

Software: VobDec GUI 2.7 is out. The package now includes vobdec.exe.

Software: SmartRipper 2.02 is out. There are 2 changes: First of all a bug in File mode was fixed where SR would rip the wrong files, and the keysearch now goes for 10 times the number of sectors. 

Another thing: Some of you have had problems with Scream I, the old non-anamorphic R1 edition, not the special edition. I've just read in another forum that the German Mystery Man DVD has the same problem.. one VOB can't be read and it's exactly the one that is a bit larger: 1GB instead of 0.99GB as VOBs usually are. There might be other titles that have the same problem (e.g. can't be ripped at all). If anybody out there has an idea how to conquer this problem I'd be happy to hear about it (don't contact me to tell me that you had this problem as well, I know the problem exists).. 

I'm a bit disappointed that nobody seems interested in working for this site. It can't be due to nobody visiting this site, the hit rate is at the normal level.. So once again: I'm looking for staff for this site. If you're interested please read here to see what I'm looking for.

Have you always wanted to publish on a frequently visited site? Here's your chance.. 

I'm also still looking for webspace.... remember: 50+ megs, ftp access, no banners, no traffic limits, reliable server. If you're willing, mail me ftp address, l/p and the url to access the site. 

I've also made some small updates to my modified mpeg2avi method. Unfortunately it looks like it won't be possible to find an overall solutions... the optimal settings are different for each movies and it looks like even using the -s options it's not always possible to find the right settings. 

I've finished my miniDVD guide. Currently my DVD-ROM refuses to read any CD I burn but I think my burn settings should be the right one. Please report your own experiences. Currently this guide only covers a basic miniDVD having one title and multiple audio tracks. To do more sophisticated stuff would require a full version of a DVD authoring software so if anybody feels like getting me one (preferably the latest DVD Quick Builder since that seems a program that is easy to understand and believe me I've seen other tools..) feel free to do so. I've got my hands on an old full version of CDMotion but that's just awful, plain simple. The MicroDVD Player has a much more powerful and easier software to create advanced disks and that is freeware. If a program won't let you set up a menu with a few buttons that launch a video at different chapters, or another menu, in a few minutes (provided that you have the necessary source files) then that program is simply useless. 

Eugene's DVD Player 0.92 is now available locally.