SA tivo -> DivX in Linux, best quality

[angra]

I've been doing .ty -> DivX under windows for a while now, and have quality up where I want it, but I'd like to transition my transcoding over to a nice, fast, linux box that i have use of. It's considerably faster than my windows box, and i dont use it interactively, so its the ideal platform.

problem is, I'm kind of lost on the tools for doing this under linux. I have mencoder, transcode, and a few codecs installed, but I haven't yet figured out the ideal combination to use for high quality DivX's. I've read doom9.org, and dvdrhelp, but, unsurprisingly, there is a relatively small group of people using linux for transcoding, and an even smaller group doing TV sourced video, as opposed to dvd sourced. Lots of (to me) noise about resizing and aspect ratios, etc, kind of hard to wade through.

Anyone here doing tivo->divx conversion for optimum quality using a linux platform? Got any pointers? What program do you use, options, etc?

Thanks

[mavrcksd]

you can check out ffmpeg

MAV

[angra]

Thanks for the suggestion - do you use that? I have that installed, but havent yet experimented with it. What settings do you recommend for very good, archival worthy quality?

I'm off to read the man page, but the choices are overwhelming, and encoding even a short clip takes a fair amount of time per test.

Thanks for answering, and any further pointers you might have.

[mavrcksd]

I just use it basically to resize the source to the output and also to deinterlace it.

not much else.

[IndieRockSteve]

check my page below out, I have some scripts that will automate it for you using mencoder. It converts to a high quality DivX file with mp3 audio using lavcodec (the codec part off ffmpeg).

some other good stuff about linux and tivo. I also haven't updated it in a while so if you PM me I can give you more info.

[angra]

Thanks! I will check it out. Might be a day or two before I get back to you with followup questions or results. Thanks for answering!