About DVDXZONE

This site began in the summer of 2001 as just a basic two page site on how to rip a DVD to VCD using FlaskMPEG with the bbMPEG encoder.  I originally made this site because I wanted to show everyone else how to do this and also because it was summer vacation and I was starting to get bored.  I didn't really care much about this site once I got it up since I would only get about 1 hit per day or maybe 3-5 on a good day.  But as time went by, I became more experienced in ripping movies and encoding them in different formats like SVCD, DVD, and DivX.  So I decided to write new guides on encoding SVCD, DivX and DVD.  But the old two page site wasn't good enough anymore so I designed a new site which would eventually become what you're looking at right now.  This site would contain guides on everything I knew on DVD ripping and encoding.  Some of these guides are based on guides on other sites but with my own method of doing it.  This site also seems to have grown in popularity since it now gets at least 60 times more hits than it used to when I first started this site.  Because of that I have decided to put more time into this site and that's when I finally decided to write a guide on encoding and authoring a DVD as well as other guides.  I have written guides on almost everything I wanted to cover so there may not be that many new guides being added in a while.    

System Requirments

Before you start encoding any movie, I would suggest that you get yourself a decent computer with the following:

• Fast Pentium 3 or an AMD Athlon of at least 800 MHz
• 30+ GB 7200 rpm hard drive from a reliable manufacturer (Maxtor, WD, IBM or Seagate are good)
• A good quality motherboard from Asus, MSI or whatever brand you prefer. 
• Lots of RAM - at least 256 MB of DDR RAM or more
• A decent DVD-Rom drive
• A good video card such as a Nvidia TNT Riva or better. 
• A good soundcard - I would suggest a card from Creative Labs such as the Audigy or Live series. 

I would stay away from getting brand name computers as you never know what kind of cheap shit they might put in there.  They might say it has a 40 GB hard drive but is it from a good reliable manufacturer?  So always build your own computer so you know that you're getting quality stuff in your PC and it always ends up being a lot cheaper too.  

Almost any PC can be used for video encoding and conversions, but having a better one will run a lot better and faster.  I would also suggest using an operating systems such as Windows 2000 or XP.  Anything lower than that is unstable.  Imagine using Win 98 and halfway encoding your SVCD, your computer freezes, that would suck wouldn't it?    Windows 2000 and XP are the most stable versions of Windows you can get and I have never had XP crash or freeze on me yet. 

So if you meet all the above requirements you should be fine.  If you don't, it should still get the job done but it will take a lot longer and you may run into some problems.  It already takes me 10-12 hours to encode a 50 minute SVCD with a P3 800 MHz and 512 MB of RAM.  Imagine how long it would take on anything slower than 800 MHz?