There are quite a few hidden options in AutoGK and they can be accessed by hitting Ctrl+F9.
When the hidden options menu pops up, you have alot of selections to choose from if you wish. I will go through these options and give some recommendations.
.mono is an option made for classic film fans. All classic films originally had mono audio but when moved to DVD they came with dual mono AC3 audio. By using the mono option of AutoGK you can free up space for video bit rate and improve quality. DO NOT select this option unless you are encoding a classic film.
.cartoon as quoted by the creator of XviD, "enables some mechanism in the motion estimation which drops (instead of encoding them) more macro blocks. The result is a more stable, a little less detailed image. Exactly what you need for cartoons like Futurama or the Simpsons." In short, if you are encoding American style cartoons, use this, if you are encoding anything else (including Japanese anime such as Dragonball Z) do not use this option.
Leave the .ivtc and .deint options unchecked unless you are an expert, in which case you would not be reading this guide.
.credits can be a very useful feature. It allows you to compress the credits to free up space for better bitrate for main movie. Inside the Frame Calculator type in the starting time for the credits and set the Quality to 40. Set the framerate to whatever your movie is. (NTSC is 29.97 or 23.97 and PAL is 25.00).
.autocrop simply defines how sensitive the auto cropping will be. The higher you set the value the more cropping will be done. To disable cropping, set the value to 0
.aspect allows you to manually set the aspect ratio if you do not like a predefined 16:9 or 4:3.
.fps is mainly for HDTV 50/60 fps sources. Quoted from the AutoGK website "option is only useful for HDTV 50/60fps sources. By default AutoGK tries to restore 24fps FILM material from 60fps sources and if that is impossible then it leaves fps at 60 (50 fps sources are always left at that fps at the moment). So user can explicitly try and set lower fps. (Note: if you have a pure progressive material you may end up with shuttering video in the end when reducing fps. Use it only if you know what you're doing)"
.sharpmatrix forces AutoGK to use sharp mpeg matrix no matter what. Use this if you are making a 1 CD encode.
The next three options are for experts only and should be left off.
.adjustsubs is a another useful option. If you have subs, check this box so AutoGK can put the subs exactly in the same position where they were in the original DVD.
.colorcorrection allows you to brighten up the picture of your encode if it is too dark. Most movies do not need this option and selecting it will slow done your encoding process by 20 percent.
.detect43 allows you the option to check if the aspect ratio is between 1.25 and 1.4 then AutoGk will crop the video to a perfect 4:3 so there are no black bars on your TV when viewing.
Starting the encoding process and finishing up
You are now done, and are ready to start the encoding process. Press Add Job and then Start. Do not hit Abort at all during this process or you will lose your encode and have to start over.
Once this is done, in 2-3 hours depending on your PC specs, you will have a nice AVI sitting in your HDD waiting to be played on a bunch of different players, such as Media Player Classic and VLC.
Enjoy.
Finishing Up
You can find guides on how to playback your file here at AfterDawn.
How to play Xvid files-In this article we will take a look at the options for playing files that have been tagged as "XviD", or that you have determined contain XviD-encoded video. It covers playing the file in many different players with different setups on your computer. XviD is a very popular codec and as such, there are many thousands of files available that contain XviD video.
We hope this guide has been informative but if you have any questions or concerns, please post them in our Discussion Forums.
Version History
v2.0 -- 26th November, 2008, Completely redone, more cross links, fixed images, headers, some parts rewritten. (Dvdback23)
v1.0 -- 19th March, 2007, First version online (Dvdback23)
