Quick Start

Choosing an Input File

The quick start guide will talk you through the following steps:

1. Start Dr. DivX
2. Press Open and choose a video file to convert
3. Press Encode to see your choice queued up for conversion
4. Press Resume to start the encoding
5. Press Play to view the results

Creating your first DivX file is a snap with Dr. DivX. Look on your desktop for the Dr. DivX icon to launch the program or look on your Start menu under All Programs->DivX->Dr. DivX...

Once the doctor is up and running, press the Open button next to Input file(s). Find your way to any old video file you have laying around. You might want to pick a short one just to test things out.

Dr. DivX will do a quick analysis of your file. There's no telling how long the analysis will take. It will depend a lot on the size of your file and the speed of your computer. However, the doctor will display a progress bar to let you know that the analysis is underway. Short videos on fast computers will be analyzed in a few seconds.

All kinds of buttons will light up in Dr. DivX after the quick analysis is complete. You may also notice a much slower analysis progress bar working in the background. There's no need to wait for the slow analysis. After all, this is supposed to be a quick start.

Some video files may come with multiple audio tracks. You can selectively choose one or more of them from the Audio track(s) list. Likewise, not all videos include subtitles but those that do will allow you to choose one or more subtitles to include. By default, you will get all audio tracks and all subtitles.

A DivX certified profile such as Home Theater will be selected along with Balanced quality. Assume these are fine for now and just leave those settings as they are.

Dr. DivX will automatically choose a Title based on the name of the file you selected. You might want to change that title or at least mentally note what the doctor decided.

File and Batch Icons

Press the Encode button and you'll be transported to the Batch page. You can flip back and forth between the batch page and the file page using the batch and file icons on the toolbar across the top.

If this is your first time using Dr. DivX, the first and only line in the Jobs window on the Batch page will show the name of the input file you selected, the name of the output file that will be created, and the current status of the conversion. The status will probably be Waiting or something similar.

Find and press the Resume button in the Jobs window. Then go make some popcorn. It might take a while. The status will change to Running and a progress bar will start grinding away in the Job Status window. Dr. DivX tries to estimate how much remaining time will be required to complete the conversion, but this isn't an exact science. The doctor is known to make some pretty awful guesses at first, but usually a more precise estimate appears shortly.

During a quick test while writing this document, Dr. DivX took about 6 minutes to encode a 5 minute long, high quality video on a fairly average PC. The resulting file was 4 times smaller than the original but visually looked about the same. Your mileage may vary.

When the conversion is complete, a Play button will appear in the Job Status window. Press the Play button to start the DivX Video Player and see your new video. If you are happy with the result, don't forget to delete the original input file which is probably just wasting precious space on your computer's hard drive.