Preview Information

Under the preview display, you'll find some details about the video file that will be created although it can take a few minutes for the doctor to figure out the preview information. While performing the necessary calculations, Dr. DivX will display a progress bar labeled Analysis above the preview window. When the analysis is complete, the preview information will be displayed.

The preview information includes the length of the video and the target resolution in pixels. The preview information also provides estimates for the resulting file size and the final frame rate. You'll find that audio bitrate and the video codec bitrate have the greatest affect on the resulting file size. Typical files will be 90% video and 10% audio so between the two, the video codec bitrate is the dominate factor.

By adjusting the audio bitrate and the video codec bitrate, you can trade off quality for smaller file sizes. Lower bitrates make smaller files but also don't look or sound as good. Make your bitrate selection in the Advanced window under the Audio tab and the Codec tab.

In practical use, audio bitrates over 128 kbps sound good and video codec bitrates over 1300 kbps look clear even on big screen TVs. You'll certainly find them better looking than your average television broadcast anyway. If you are encoding files for small screens like PDAs or phones, you may want to run the audio bitrate down to 64 kbps and the video down to 150 kbps. The result looks pretty decent on 3 inch displays and an hour of video is only slightly more than 100 Meg in size.