This is it. On christmas, if I am a good kid, I'll get a PS3. The reason I choosed the PS3 is because it seems to be one of the best media player in the industry, for the digital files and for the blu-ray player. I am not sure if I will even play games on it!
But, before I receive it, I started converting all of my dvd library (specially the children's one) to digital format. They will no longer have to manipulate them and destroy the media.
I discovered that converting a movie to divx is not as as easy as I tought.
First of all, I bought the official Divx Converter with the mpeg-2 plug-in for a little $15. Why is it so cheap? because it DOES NOT WORK. There is 1 film out of 10 that was fine. All others have the voice out of sync with the video. I read on their site that their algorighm is dropping some frame of video, that's why the video becomes out of sync with the audio.
They propose a solution, from someone who created a "batch" process to convert a dvd to divx without sync issue, but there were abount 10 steps to follow to convert them, and I do not want to lose 1 day for each movie I want to convert.
I finally found THE perfect tool. That's a tool I was already using in the free version, DVDFAB HD Decrypter. I used this software for a while to copy all my children's dvd to my computer. I need to copy my dvd, that I own and pay, to my computer, because I edit them to extract only the main movie configured with french audio track for my childrens. At 4 years old, they are not able to skip the ads. go to the menu, select options, choose french, start the movie. I create them an edited copy of the dvd with DVDShrink, then put it in the reader, and it automatically starts with the french audio track.
But now, I will use the extended features of this software. The option I am using is the dvd-to-mobile feature. This product worth about $100, but to convert all my dvd to dvix, it worth it.
I did some tests with a lot of the pre-configured formats offered in it, and I finally found THE perfect conversion profile.
After selecting the dvd files (vob) as input, I use this profile: dvd to mobile – Avi – generic.divx.avi.audiocopy profile. I only open the Edit window to choose the 2 pass (high quality) conversion, I left everything else configured by default.
What I like the most about this profile is that the bitrate is automatically configured to get 0.2 bytes per pixel. If I have more resolution, I have more bitrate. I do not configure a "locked" 1000 mbps profile that will be better with smaller files and not enough for bigger resolution movies. With the locked "bytes per pixel" ratio, I always get the exact same quality for every movie.
The default configuration is locked to 0.2 bytes per pixel. I did not found where it is configured, this is not in the XML profile file, I think that this setting is "hard coded" in the binary file, but that doesnt't matter, because this is the profile I prefer. A 2 hours movie creates a 1.25 gigabytes file, meaning that the avi file is 4 to 6 times smaller the the original VOB files, with an excellent visual quality.
Second thing I like, is to keep the original audio track. It does not reconvert it, it keeps the original AC3 5.1 audio track from the dvd and copy it directly into the AVI file without any conversion.
That creates a really good quality movies that I can only test on my computer for now, on the ps3 in 3 weeks!
Something is strange, I tried the exact same profile but in the "generic" instead of "avi" section and it did not use the 0.2 b/p ratio. I also tried the ps3 profile, which creates a 5.1 aac audio and a H264 video, and I really did not like the result.