Everything, Everything

I got bored the other day and compiled the xvidcore.dll from the latest CVS off the XviD website. It was a bit fiddly but I managed to install NASM, install Visual Studio.NET, I also installed something else (something like pthreads? I'm not even sure it was necessary) and went to compile it. I'd put nasm into the path, but Visual Studio.NET gave me lots of errors, it seemed to be happier once I'd moved nasm to C:\\nasm and changed the path. But it still wasn't happy enough to compile, so I tried recreating the command that was failing and it worked fine when the output file was saved in the same location as nasm (i.e. I provided the filename, no folder), so I compiled each one by hand, something like two dozen files, and moved them to the debug folder and then Visual Studio was very happy, and out popped my xvidcore.dll. I replaced the version that was already in my system32 folder with my version, and it seems to work fine. I've only done a couple of short tests and two long tests (the last one was a 100 minute video that took 89 minutes to complete both passes on my dual core computer - it was onlyusing about 90% of my CPU, no matter if I had 0 threads or 2 threads). After adding the audio I ended up with a pretty decent looking conversion. I tested it on a single core CPU (2.2GHz Pentium M) and it was pretty quick. I'm quite happy with XviD now, but DivX is still easier and I think it uses my CPU better, but it does seem to take longer and doesn't seem to look any better in terms of quality. If anything XviD is slightly sharper.