Posted by Polar Light on 01/13/06 09:47

<normanstrong@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:G_KdnfypnoLP_VzeRVn-iw@comcast.com...
> DVDs are encoded in MPEG-2. Currently, there is an MPEG-4, which is more
> efficient, using 30% less space for the same quality.

MPEG4 has been around a long time. DivX is based on MPEG4 & was proposed as
a 'rental' format back in the late 90s, before DVDs became commercial.
>
> Is there a program available that will decode MPEG-2 from a DVD and recode
> it to MPEG-4?

Many of the movies available for download have been ripped from DVDs &
encoded as DivX to keep file sizes under 1Mb. Many are small enough to fit
on a CD ( not to be confused with Video CDs, which are encoded using MPEG1 &
offer much lower quality). As a result, there are endless web pages dealing
with DVD to DivX conversion, such as
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/articles/dvdtodivx.html

Or you can get dedicated software: http://www.dvdtodivx.net

What program would one use then to play the MPEG-4 encoded
movie?

On a computer, you can play back anything if you install the right CODEC.
The DivX CODEC is freely available for download (http://www.divx.com/) &
will enable you to open Divx files in many applications. There's also a
dedicated DivX player on this site.

Watching feature length movies on a computer can be tiresome though, a TV is
still the best option. Some set-top players can handle DivX disks but not
all of them can. All of them play back standard DVDs though, so unless you
wish to share your movies online, there's little point in ripping to DivX
instead of conventional DVD. If you don't want to buy dual layer DVDs,
DVDShrink can compress them to fit onto single layer ones.

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