Sunday, June 10, 2007

Dr Divx

Basically for windows XP , this doctor here makes it quite easy to create DivX (AVI) movies. With standalone DivX players becoming common, Dr DivX is an excellent tool to have.

Features
The interface is quite Intuitive and user friendly, with extreme dearth of menus and buttons you just can’t do it wrong! The doctor supports encoding options like ability to specify final size, cropping video, de-interlacing, etc. You can also prepare multiple files for batch processing.



But it doesn’t allow encoding parts of the movie.



With a very few buttons to play with, finding the right one isn’t any problem. Open the file you intend to encode by using the Open button in the Input File field.

Next you can set the quality/file size options. The DivX certified settings correspond to the following resolutions: High Definition- 1280 x 720 at 30 fps, Portable- 352 x 240 at 30 fps or 352 x 288 at 25 fps, Handheld: 176 x 144 at 15 fps. Quality settings impact on the method of compression and the algorithms used to achieve this. Constraining the output file to a fixed size frees you from further tweaks. You can save the settings you have made under a profile with the Save Settings button, and recall these to be used for the next job by using the Custom Profile option. If you are not interested in tweaking individual settings, you can click on the encode button and be on your way.

The Advanced tab allows further refinement of the encoding output. Under the Processing Tab, you can specify additional options like the cropping range, or choose automatic crop in which case the program will cut the black borders automatically. Doing this you can decrease file size without loosing any quality. You can also change resolution and aspect ratio here.

Noise Reduction is useful in cases where there are too many “grains” in the movie, especially in Home videos. Choose settings accordingly. Progressive output will ensure better results. If “Psycho visual Enhancements” are applied, the Doctor promises to increase the quality of the output by using advanced techniques to detect and improve those areas of the film which will be most noticed by the human eye. Better quality equals more encoding time. Once all the settings are done with, just click the encode button and the job gets sent to the queue, but the process doesn’t start immediately. After that you need to click on the start button to let the doctor operate.

This a recommended program for specially those who seek simplicity and effectiveness foremost.

Media Coder

Media Coder (MC) is a very capable but difficult to use encoder. This is a front end that uses Open Source Video Tools like FFmpeg and Mplayer in the background. Being in its infancy MC needs to be forgiven for the buggy interface it carries. The earlier version 0.3.9 seems to be better than the newer one v 0.5.

It can convert MPEG2/MPEG1/AVI (DivX, XviD)/3GP/MOV/Real Audio/etc., to MPEG2/MPEG1/AVI (DivX)/etc.

Features

MC can even convert into format used in portable viewers like PSP, Mobile phones, etc. Simple encoding from one format to another is quite easy. Use the Add file button to add the source. Set the required encoding options in the boxes at the bottom. Compression can be set depending on what final size you might need or what quality you want. It has even got options for tweaking the audio encoding.

Besides choosing the codec, the video can be further processed to remove noise (white dots that usually show up in amateur video shoots in poor lighting conditions), or to crop the video or resize it. And surely the additional processes will increase the processing time.

If you are just interested in a part of the movie, you can set the time range in milliseconds, here. Since MC does not have an easy way to mark out the ranges, you will need to view the file or another player to set the exact interval. Ensure you have done the math properly or you would end up cutting irrelevant parts.

After all this is done, just click on start button on the top to let the encoding begin.


So all I can say is, This Coder converts anything, like almost.