Fair Use has become one of the hottest utilities to hit the DivX market so far.  I decided to write this webpage to explain the method that I use to create great DivX's using Fair Use.  The structure of my guide, and many of the concepts come directly from doom9's guide, in fact, it is his guide that taught me the ins and outs of Fair Use.  I am not writing this page to compete with doom9, only to offer my take on the entire process and to set up an official page for Fair Use which I believe it needs and deserves.  The second reason I started this site is to establish myself as an alternate place to turn to with questions regarding the Fair Use Wizard.  Hopefully this will allow FU2K to focus more on programming and less on answering questions in the forum*(I answer all the questions I can there as well).  I will update this guide whenever I update my method of creating a DivX, I will also update the files as needed. (by the way, I get most if not all my updates from doom9, and as he says, "For the webs most comprehensive MPEG ripping guides go to www.doom9.org")

*a note about the forum.  More than half the questions in the forum can be answered by reading the FAQ's and the ReadMe, so make sure you do that before you try anything or waste anyone's time in the forum.

The concept behind Fair Use

Fair Use will be the all-in-one program for MM4 and VKI DVD to DivX conversion once audio is fully implemented.  "FairUse accesses the DVD data at the lowest possible layer, just like a software DVD player would".  At the very beginning the disc will be ripped to your harddrive and after the so-called indexing part you can remove the disc and you won't need it anymore. FU includes almost everything one could wish for: IVTC for NTSC sources, field aligning to remove interlacing artifacts in PAL, subtitles, IFO parsing, auto-cropping and an easy next / auto way to create your movies. Simply chose a program stream, subtitles, resolution, bitrate of the audio and the final size and press auto a few times and you have it. Well, almost. The program is still in beta state and is far from optimized. On a P3-550 it takes a good 24h for a regular less than 2h movie. So don't even think of trying that on your old 200MHz machine or you'll grow old before the program has finished. FU is also a very demanding program when it comes to resources... it'll eat away more than 100MB memory when you create 4 streams at the same time and it'll push your system to the limit. Many people who overclocked their CPU had to find out that while their system would work alright normally it would crash under the load of FU. This happened to me; I had a duron 600 OC'd to 1000 running stable with every program out there until Fair Use.  Once I stepped it back to 980, everything worked fine.  However, you will want to get your CPU running as fast as possible, while still remaining stable.  Also, a dual processing system will cut Fair Use's encoding time in half.

Besides enough memory (don't even go below 128MB), a stable system (keep in mind that W2K/WXP blast away the older Microsoft OS's when it comes to stability, and a reformat on a regular basis is never a bad idea), a DVD drive, a lot of HD space (the whole DVD content will be copied to your harddisk, plus you create X video streams and in the end combine these streams to yet another one - so basically you'll need [Audio size+(final-size-of-movie)*(number-of-encodings+1)+(size-of-vobs on your harddisk)] ) you also need to have a working ASPI layer. Should you get an ASPI error, download and install Force ASPI.  I have been running WinXP since Release Candidate 1 and have had zero problems with FairUse, in case anyone is hesistant to upgrade for this reason.

READ THE FAQs and the ReadMe

Check out the Main Guide
Check out the Diff Tracking Guide
Calculator page(submit your own ideas for me to code)
email me if you have any questions or comments regarding this website or FairUse.

Download these Files:
FairUse_0.30_Beta.zip
nandub1.0rc2.zip

You can get audio utilities and information here

Visit Doom9's MPEG Palace - the best DVD backup place on the web
Visit Doom9's forums
Visit the Fair Use Forum
Visit the Audio Forum
Check out FUBatch to batch encode multiple FairUse Projects