| User review:
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SO GLAD I found this tool - it is exactly what I needed!
I have for years been using avi.NET for converting DVDs to DivX files, so I can watch my movies and TV shows from my hard drive, instead of having to get up and change discs all the time. A couple of factors prompted me to look for something different. I don't actually NEED the files to be DivX (or Xvid) - my WDTV media player will play a number of formats. And the new video player I just installed in my truck has a resolution limitation of 640x360, which is smaller than anything I've encoded, so anything I want to watch in my truck will have to be redone. Re-encoding a TV series with 168 episodes would have taken nearly 5 days (roughly 112 hours) with avi.NET, just for the encoding itself, not counting maybe 2 minutes per episode of prep time to set up the job queues. So I went looking for something that would do the job faster. I'll be able to do the same task with this program in only about 16 hours (the first season - 32 episodes - took 3 hours 15 minutes)! And that includes the almost zero prep time, since I can add an entire folder of files to the queue in a matter of seconds.
I have experimented with encoding episodes in a few different ways.
360p H.264 (1280kbps) with 6dB gain MP3 (chose this because it's the maximum frame size allowed by my truck)
240p H.264 (640kbps) with 6dB gain MP3 (chose this to be able to fit the entire season on a single 32GB flash drive)
480p H.264 (2304kbps) with AC3 passthrough (chose this for playback on my television - AC3 is 5.1 channels)
I chose each of the different bit rates to give me an average output quality of .31 bits/pixel*frame - not quite as high as the original MPEG-2 source, but not low enough to notice. I initially tried encoding using a small amount of Dynamic Range Compression, but without the 6dB gain, the output file was considerably quieter than the source, so I scrapped that idea. With each of the three different output settings, there was very little difference in the encoding speed - in fact, even though the bit rate is considerably higher, the 480p files encoded just a bit faster because of the audio passthrough, instead of having to convert to MP3.
FWIW, adding DRC to the audio increased the encode time considerably - for a single 26:33 source file, it took 8:47 to encode at 360p with DRC, as opposed to 6:20 to encode at 480p with AC3 passthrough - it took about 42 minutes to encode the same file using avi.NET. For a 2:22:55 movie (The Avengers), I was able to encode it in 42 minutes, as opposed to the roughly 3 hours it would take with avi.NET! |
