Guide: Wrapping Xvid into DivX Ultra to gain Menus

http://www.oldskoolgames.com/XvidivxGuide.rar

I have done a lot of experimenting with encoding over the past few weeks. I really love the fact that Xvids deliver great quality at relatively small file sizes. However like most people I have been forced to use DivX Ultra files in the past because I like menus with my stuff.

DivX is a fine codec and compresses really good when encoding from a high quality source, such as a DVD rip or an HDTV rip, however when dealing with second hand files you usually end up with rediculously bloated file sizes in order to maintain the same relative quality.

This guide focuses on muxing Xvid source files into Divx Ultra files, so it combines the best of both. You get the small size and great quality of Xvid, and the Menu, 2 audio and 2 subtitle track support of DivX Ultra.

I am not the first to think of this, but I have seen no guides on the net on the subject, but plenty of posts from people asking about menu support with Xvid. So I wrote this guide.

As an example, I fit the entire Gundam SeeD series (50 episodes) onto a single DVD9 (dual layer DVD) including dual audio and subtitle tracks, plus have a couple hundred MB to spare. That is 17 hours of TV/cable broadcast quality video on a single DVD9 - fucking outstanding if I might say so myself.

The primary reason for doing this is for those people like me, who like to watch Anime on their TV using a set top player, because they either don't want to fuss with TV-out from their PC, or it is not feasible in their current environment. I did resize the video to 512x384 (480x360 with borders to compensate for overscan cutting off the edges of the picture) but it still looks just as good, if not better than 640x480 would, and I only had to use 1000kbps bitrate. It comes out to the same viewable area since TV's resize to 640x480 anyway. I also cut out unwanted stuff like opening and closing credits, and commercial lead-in/out.

I would rate the quality as good as a clean broadcast/cable signal, there is very little quality loss although if you look hard you can see tiny bits. I aimed for a file size of 160MB (with 1 Video and 2 Audio) with some a little bigger and some a lot smaller. So everything averaged out, as I clearly have left over space. Compared to the source MKV's which were usually 200MB+ on average.