XviD

[laney]

-I'm not new to ripping and burning DVD's but i'm new to bittorrent... first let me say i've tried alot

of different bittorrent programs, and always uninstalled cause they were slow and sucked... its

been a few months and I thought i'd give it another try.. looked around, heard alot of good stuff

about utorrent.. this is the best BitTorrent program so far!

-I've been downloading DVDR torrents around 3-4gigs (iso, vob, etc.) then burning to DVDR with

CloneDVD2 with no problem. but i see alot of the torrent are XviD(DivX) and around 700MB and they

have alot more seeds... it would be better to download the XviD cause the smaller size (faster

download)... i never watch movies on the computer so how could i burn this format the DVD, and will the quality be the same?

Thanks, Adam

[Ultima]

DivX and XviD (and most other video compression schemes) are lossy, meaning data is lost in the conversion. When you convert back to DVD, it most likely won't look the same (lower quality). I think Doom9 might be a good place to look for this kind of information though.

[ICleolion]

www.doom9.org

its where i first started off when learning the ropes.

[laney]

ok guys, thanks!

[castle]

XviD mp4 can be indistinguishable from the original especially if they're ripped to 2 CD's (i.e., 1.4GB), and deifnitely when h264 is used. mpeg2 is a fairly old standard now and obviously video compression has evolved. h264 is one the standards for the new HD DVD and BluRay formats. Excellent quality at what would be considered low bitrates for mpeg2. Without a big screeen TV, few artifacts are noticeable when a 2CD rip is viewed, and even single CD rips can be very very good. If you're just interested in seeing a flick without a major investment of bandwidth (particularly upload if you like to share 1:1 and are on ADSL or other low upload ISP) this is the way to go. You have a number of options for viewing these on your TV. In order of difficulty...

buy a new DVD player, one that plays DivX files... this is your best bet, and they are quite cheap ($50-150)

what's nice about this option is that you simply save the files on a data disc and so it requires no extra processing at all. Once your done downloading you can be watching it 10 minutes later videohelp.com will list all known standalone DivX players

use a simple avi to VOB program like WinAVI or VSO DivX2DVD (fast but the quality of the conversion is just OK)

use TMPGEnc or Cinema Craft Encoder (aka CCE) to turn the avi into an mpeg2 and than some other program like TMPG DVD Author or DVDLab Pro to turn that into VOB's. You can also add a menu, which is not an option with the aforementioned programs.

Another advantage to the standalone DivX players is that they are basically like computers and will play a million different kind of files and frequently have conversion between formats as well (i.e., PAL to NTSC and vice versa)