I just got the Lite-On DH-401S-08 and started experimenting with backing up my blue-ray discs. My main reason for doing this is so that I wouldn't have to hear the noise of the drive while I'm watching a movie.

I haven't found the best bitrate for divx compression yet but I wanted to post my findings. The only big difference in quality I could see after comparing side by side a couple of times is when there is fast movement, you will see some blurring and blocks but it's really not that bad. I am going to try 2-pass encoding tonight and maybe bump up the bitrate a bit to see what I get. (1-pass took about 5 hours to compress, 2-pass 8 hours)

Another major advantage is the h.264 decoding almost takes up all my cpu while divx only used about 11~50%.

Ratatouille:
TS file after tsremux twice with 1 Dolby audio stream: 20,491,457,620 bytes
4000kbps 1-pass divx compression: 3,450,216,208 bytes
(both of these files are the same resolution and length)

Please post your findings and some comparison comments.

Most people will object to DIVX video at 1080 with only 4Mb bitrates, especially on screens larger than 40". Reducing to 720 will have a big positive effect on the compression artifacts.

Do you mean use h.264 re-encode instead?

Which applications did you use to convert? DivX Converter?

I think what CDan meant is to use the "HD 720p" settings.

I used Dr. DivX Insane setting.

i wouldn't use divx for files like this.

MKV contrainer with H264 is much better