fladivision.com

about easyencode

Attention: This program is highly outdated and there are lots of other (better tools) around. Please visit www.doom9.org!

downloads

a short tutorial

download, unpack and setup

download the file easyencode.zip and extract everything (including the empty folders!) to a nice place with MUCH free space (10 GB should fit for most movies). please do not use any dots, spaces or other special characters in the directory name! now launch setup.exe (the red fish) and it will ask you about the IDCT to use. IDCT is that piece of software which decodes your MPEG2 video. most of you will have newer CPUs like AMD Athlon+ or Intel Pentium III+ and the 64bit FPU IDCT (nr. 3) is what you should choose. for older CPUs choose one of the others (32bit is a little faster, 16bit a little better in quality).


ripping the DVD

maybe you already know that the files on DVDs are encrypted for all this region code bullshit. of course, any encryption can be broken and today there are many legal DVD-rippers which can decrypt the files and copy them onto your HD. the best ripper in my opinion is smartripper. all you have to do is launch smartripper and do a "movie rip" into the folder input of your easyencode directory (change the target at the bottom of the smartripper-GUI). if you get some 1GB .vob files in your input directory, it should be all right :-) if you don't know which audiostream of the DVD carries which language, you can switch to "Stream Processing". if there is something like 0x80 Audio English AC3... it means audiostream nr. 0 is english. 0x81 Audio German AC3... therefore means that audiostream nr. 1 is german. it's not that difficult, is it? :-)

generate the bat-file

now let's launch the main program: easyencode.exe (the green fish). if it can't find any vob-files or the config file from setup.exe it will notify you. but normally it will ask you about the following:

region code
i hope i don't need to explain that... (read on the DVD case!)
if you choose code1 there will be a new feature available: in the normal case 23 fps should work fine. if you are experiencing audio-sync problems, try it with 29 fps.

audiostream
just enter the audiostream you want to have. if you are unsure which one to use, read step 2 again.

VBR mp3
VBR (variable bitrate) means better audio quality at a smaller size. if you are a newbie or simply not that quality addicted you don't need that.

with VBR:

minimum bitrate
enter the minimum bitrate for the mp3 audio. (eg. 112)

maximum bitrate
enter the maximum bitrate for the mp3 audio. (eg. 192)

quality level
the higher the quality level, the higher the bitrate (inside the limits you chose) that will be used. (eg. 4)

without VBR:

bitrate
128 or 160 kbit/s are the most used values for audio encoding. higher values will give you better quality (the difference is really small) and lower values a much worse quality.

aspect ratio
a DVD can be encoded in two aspect ratios: 4:3 and 16:9. to get widescreen (aka cinemascope, panavision etc.) they often add some black bars. smartripper tells you if the video is coded in 4:3 or 16:9 but it can't tell you if it is widescreen. but you can normally get this info from the DVD case. now choose nr. 5 for widescreen, nr. 4 for 16:9 or nr. 1 for 4:3 (very rare).

that was it! all the other settings have been set by easyencode. you can press 'y' to launch the encoding process right now or press 'n' to close easyencode and start process.bat later.

launch the encoding process

after you launched process.bat, mpeg2avi will let you choose the video-codec. choose DivX and set the bitrate (and if needed the other settings). a bigger bitrate will make a bigger file and better quality. to fit the final avi file on a CD-R (or 2), you can use the DivX BitRate calculator in the download section. press ok and go to sleep (or drink a LOT of coffee). your final avi should be in the output dir. have fun!

thanks

big thanks again to Toa! i don't think i would have made this new version without him :-)

for problems

use another tool, read the statement on the top!