I believe the forum server logs your IP, but no one else sees anything but "Logged," so no worries there.

And I agree with your logic, everything being equal it seems the encoding would take longer if it's utilizing less cpu time. I can only guess why, but for whatever reason the Divx codec has always seemed to utilize less processing power when I increase the quality settings. Maybe ump has increased the quality for the ESS slider.

Maybe some time I'll compare divx encoding speeds using different quality settings, bus speeds, and processing steppings on my computer. maybe extreme quality mode in divx is more demanding on other system components instead of the CPU.

I used to encode all my divx movies the manual way, as you say. I've found it's not worth the trouble unless you'll be distributing it and quality is critical, otherwise FU takes 10x less time and does the trick amazingly well.

it depends on movie length, final file size, amount of bright colors/action in movie, personal preference, et cetera.

just use full auto mode...

have you tried changing the encoding speed, from fast/low quality to slow/high quality divx? Lower quality encoding will utilize more CPU, I believe higher quality encoding is limited so that quality is not degraded from overworking/overheating the processor. could be wrong though.

so was 2.6 faster than 2.8 for total time?

by adding a third track, do you mean three audio tracks or 1 video/2 audio? (which it already does)

only if they are not protected, i.e. you burned them yourself or they were not professionally done.

If you are going to be using a HD tv, I would highly recommend investing in more hard drive space and leaving movies in DVD format. That's the route I would probably take. Encoding will take a lot of time and energy on your part, require faster hardware for whatever you're playing it on, and a HD divx or xvid file will still be 2+Gb for a DVD.

On a standard tv, regular length movies usually look fine at only 700mb, but when you use high def you WILL notice the difference and they won't look as good.

let us know how it works out, good luck!

try using a different DVD copying program that removes the encryption on the disc. maybe anydvd or dvd decrypter, or just try burning the disc using IMGburn

Fair Use Wizard does this as well!

deal is over

From what I've seen lately, I'd say it's not longer being developed. Nothing new has arrived in many many months.

sorry for the late reply! check "enable expert mode" on the second screen. if that doesn't work maybe it doesn't allow cropping in iPod mode?

If you're doing the automatic/wizard mode in Fairuse, you'll probably have to disable that. Click through the default options until you get to the screen showing the movie with dotted lines on the picture. Select 4:3 or 3:2, or whatever cropping you want, and then continue with the conversion process. hope that works.

so you're converting to ISO images with DVD Shrink and burning with Nero?

you check use Daemon Tools to open the ISO and see if DVD Shrink is the problem, if that works fine then try a different program to burn the disc, like ImageBurn.

google search for those, should be easy to find.

If you download virtualDub, I'm sure there's a filter you can apply to lighten the film.

No matter how you go about it though, you'll have to re-encode the movie, which will take time and lower the quality.

never, actually 

Have you tried the movies in your computer? I'm guessing either the discs you're burning with are crappy at the end (try compressing to 4.1GB not 4.3GB, smaller DVD file size), or your burner has issues, or convertX2DVD has issues. If you can burn to ISO image and open with Daemon tools, try that and see if it still has issues. If that works it's not convertX2DVD.