Just a step-by-step recipe on how to do the conversion.
You need:
1. PC with a DVD player installed
2. Any kind of DVD software player
3. The DVD you want to convert
4. The program “Smartripper 202”.
5. The program “Flask Mpeg 594”
6. Some kind of bitrate calculator, I prefer “Advanced DivX Bitrate Calc!Version 1.8”
7. The DivX;-) codec
8. And finally a MP3 codec. “Radium” is a good one.
Install all programs from number 4-8 on you computer according to the on-screen instructions.
Now the ripping and packing itself:
1. Insert the DVD to rip into your DVD-player
2. Start the DVD software player.
3. Let the film begin to play, be sure to get to the movie itself, commercials or FBI-ads and such in the beginning will not do.
4. Press “pause” !
5. Start Smartripper and wait for the user interface to come up.
6. Smartripper will know what to rip so you just have to point the “Target”-directory to some place on your hard disk that can hold some 4-8 Gb of data
7. Press “Start !”
8. After some time the Smartripper will inform you that the ripping is complete.
9. Close Smartripper.
10. Close Your DVD-software player.
11. Start Flask !
12. Press “File” and choose “Open File”
13. Browse to the directory where you saved the DVD-rip and point to the first
file with the extension “.vob”
14. Flask will now analyse the file.
15. Depending on which language you want, you must choose audio-track. English is almost every time the track “0x80”
16. Press “Flask it!”
17. Start advanced bitrate calc
18. Choose what size you want the movie to be. ( 650Mb, 1 CD 74 Minutes is the
most common format.)
19. Make input sound rate 96Kb/s Stereo and 1 audio stream.
20. Fill inn the length of the movie in minutes.
21. The number in Blue text will change as you do this. It is the bitrate you can use on this rip , remember this number.
22. Close Advanced bitrate calc
23. Go back to Flask Mpeg
24. Go to “Options” and “Output format options”
25. Press “Select video codec”
26. Choose “DivX;-) Mpeg4 fast motion” (“Slow motion” makes bigger files and are not specially designed for “calm” movies as some seems to think.)
27. Press “configure”, make key frame every 3 seconds and adjust the Data-rate to the number you remember from the bitrate calculator.
28. The “Smoothness-Crispness”-slider should always be at 100.
29. Press “ok”
30. Press “ok”
31. Press “Select Codec” for the audio.
32. Adjust to MPEG Layer-3 and 96kBits/s 48,000 Stereo
33. Press “ok”
34. Press “ok”
35. Go to “Global Project options”
36. Under the “Video”-tap tag the frame rate 23.976 if the source is NTSC and 25 if the source is PAL.
37. Tag “Reconstruct progressive images”.
38. Normally you do not need to tag “Deinterlace video”.
39. Tag “MMX iDCT” under “iDCT Options” everything else is bullshit.
40. Go to the “Audio”-tag and press “Decode” audio.
41. Under “Post Processing” you should tag “HQ Bicubic Filtering”, “Keep Aspect ratio” and “No letterboxing”
42. Under “Files” choose a name and a directory to drop the finished DivX;-) file into.
43. Under “General”, tag “Compile whole file” and you can also choose to shut down the computer after the job is done if you like.
44. Press “Show Output-pad”
45. Press “Reset Settings”
46. Under ”Output Size” press the ”Width” to be “672” ! (A lot of DivX-ing has taught me that this is the best format.)
47. Press the same amount of “-“ or “+” on “Height” to keep the aspect ratio right !
48. Tag Crop and adjust “Height” of the output picture and “Top offset” so that there are as little space black as possible both under and over the example-picture. The less black, the better quality on the finished movie.
49. “Left offset” and “Width” are best left untouched, but you can fool around with them if you like, remember the with to be “672” when you are finished.
50. Press “Hide”
51. Press “ok”
52. Press “Run” and choose start conversion.
53. Display output if you like but this increases the packing-time.
54. Setting the Priority to “High” also shortens the time, do not use “Highest” as this may make your computer so low on resources that it may crash if you try to do anything when the packing is going on.
55. If set to “Idle” the process gets much slower but you can use the PC to do other stuff and the DivX-ing is going on in the background.
56. Wait for the process-bar to hit 100 % and you have managed to convert a DVD to a DivX;-) movie.