Lately, I've gotten a pile of DivX movies (legally, of course, here are Valhalla Legends Inc. © we neither support nor condone piracy), but, because of limited hard drive space, I want to convert them to SVCD and burn them.

My question is, what's the best program to use? Right now I'm using TMPGEnc, which seems really nice, but there's a couple things I'm looking for.
* I want to make sure it fits on exactly 2 cd's
* I want to be able to do batch conversions (so I can start it going on friday and leave it till monday without worrying about it)
* I want to make sure it keeps aspect ratio, there's nothing worse than a stretched movie.

Also, last night I converted a movie with the option "Constant Quality" instead of "Constant Bitrate", and when I play it Windows Media Player crashes if I try skipping forward; any idea why it does that?

Thanks!
-iago

Well anyway, I figured it out.

First, I got BoilSoft's AVI/MPEG/ASF/WMV Splitter from http://www.boilsoft.com/ ( http://www.boilsoft.com/videosplitter/ ). I use that to divide the movie(s) in half.

Then, I use TMPGEnc from PegaSys ( http://tmpg.pegasys-inc.com/download_files/TMPGEnc-2.521.58.169-Free.zip ) to convert each half to MPEG2. By default, it assumes you're using 740mb cds and converts the video bitrate to the appropriate value to fit on a single cd, typically between 1600kbit/s and 2000kbit/s for half of a movie, which is good.

It typically takes about 5 minutes to split the avi and about 2 hours to convert half of it, on my 1ghz laptop, and TMPGEnc can do batch transfers.

I just thought I would share my findings with anybody interested in this. I'd be happy to answer any questions, keeping in mind I don't know very much :)

Good luck!
-iago

Thanks for the info Iago.
[me=Thing]copies and pastes into text file for future reference.[/me]

No problem!

The only thing is, it take a little while (~1-2 minutes each) to get each file into the batch, since it doesn't remember settings. But that's a small price, in my opinion :)

One additional note:

Specify 80min cd, not 700mb cd. ~760mb will fit on a 700mb svcd. Guess that's just how it works :)

ewww, that spitter program fucks up the sound on the second half. I know TMPGEnc can fix it, but that's going to take extra work. fuuuck.

It didn't do anything to the sound in the second half for me, might have just screwed up on you.

It happened on 4 different movies.

I got another one which seems to work, but it's got nasty registration protection (I spent all morning trying to crack it; the best I could do was get it temporarely registered, which is good enough for me.)

More news on this later! But tonight is homework night so all IM programs are off. :)

Eww! Matrix revolutions was like 1% too big to fit on two CD's at the lowest bitrate. Bastards.

Matrix deserves 3!

Yea, but matrix revolutions only deserves two, and reloaded only deserves one.