scott wrote:
>> The tool I was using *had* a GUI. With 50,000 options on it. None of 
>> which appeared to affect image quality. (E.g., increasing the bitrate 
>> or the "quality" settings made little to no difference.)
> 
> Try XVid4PSP, it's free and so far I have never even needed to change 
> any advanced settings.  It has presets with names for each format.  If 
> you choose the format as plain AVI, under video encoding you can choose 
> options like "FFV1 Lossless" or "xVid HQ Ultra" or "x264 HQ Ultra" etc.  
> Under format you can also choose MP4 Mpeg1 Mpeg2 etc, it really is quite 
> easy to use.
> 
> It also accepts a huge range of input formats, including VOB if the 
> "open file" dialog box is anything to go by.
> 
> And of course if you feel like tinkering (I have never needed to), you 
> can go and edit the details of each preset.

I installed FFDshow the other day. That seems to give me several 
lossless codecs that are nice and easy to use.

According to what Gail said, the tool I used must have been the DivX 
encoder. (Or rather, the trail version of it.) I'm going to give Xvid a 
try later and see what that does...

(Of course, you never see DVDs that look blurry and messed up. 
Presumably that means they figured out how to avoid that in MPEG2. 
Unfortunately, MPEG2 is the hardest codec under the sun to find software 
for - presumably because they use it on DVDs, so everybody wants to 
charge you *money* for it...)

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