confused about nero profiles

[oluv]

sorry for my newbie questions, but i am quite new to codecs and i am looking for the perfect codec for backup of my own movies and got into divx, xvid and finally found nero digital, which i was trying in the last few days and which impressed me most qualitywise.

now reading about AVC main AVC high and Ateme etc i would like to know how all this is implemented into recode. which profile-preset from recode is an AVC-high profile, which one is AVC-main and which profiles are APC?

besides i wanted to know what normal encoding times are for best quality? i was testing with an AVC-cinema profile with "extra" quality and 2-pass and it took 25 minutes to encode a 1-minute clip :( i mean the quality was great, but a whole movie would probably take several days this way. is this normal, or is something wrong?

thanks for any help!

[bond]

now reading about AVC main AVC high and Ateme etc i would like to know how all this is implemented into recode. which profile-preset from recode is an AVC-high profile, which one is AVC-main and which profiles are APC?all in all speaking we dont know what exactly the nero profiles en/disable, what vbv they enforce aso as the specs for these private nero profiles are not publically available

still your question can be answered as nero doesnt have a high profile encoder till now, so all encodes you will do with nero will be in the main profile (and baseline profile if you disable a lot of features)

besides i wanted to know what normal encoding times are for best quality? i was testing with an AVC-cinema profile with "extra" quality and 2-pass and it took 25 minutes to encode a 1-minute clip :( i mean the quality was great, but a whole movie would probably take several days this way. is this normal, or is something wrong?again all in all there is no direct relationship between encoding time and output quality
on my pc (pentium3 866mhz) i can make a full dvd backup encode in something like 30 hours :D

[oluv]

again all in all there is no direct relationship between encoding time and output quality
on my pc (pentium3 866mhz) i can make a full dvd backup encode in something like 30 hours :D

thanks for your response!
are you talking about a backup with nero digital? if yes what are your settings? are you using the avc-profiles and encoding 2-pass?

by the way, have you ever experienced problems with recode2? i tried to encode one movie (about 2:30h long) and shortly before it got finished recode crashed. i was using 2-pass. then i tried the same but only with 1-pass and it worked. so i thought to try again, but today morning i found recode crashed again.

i am still not sure which codec to choose. would x264 be an alternative? what about quality/speed when compared to nero digital? i haven't found any recent codec-comparisons with the new codecs. maybe in the german c't, but i have to find the article again, i don't know what their conclusion was.

[dvd_maniac]

With so much talk these days about High Profile, I still do not know what the differences are between the High and the Main Profiles.

IIs it just better quality/ bitrate, newer features?

[Manao]

New features : custom matrices, 8x8 transform size, and lossless

8x8 transform size improve the quality / bitrate tradeoff, custom matrices allow what they allowed for XviD. Lossless ( used only if enable ) transforms x264 into a lossless codec that performs not so bad ( depending of the motion, slightly better, or a bit worse than ffv1 ) but that is slow as hell to decode.

High profile also brings some new colorspaces ( 4:2:2, 4:4:4 ) but these aren't interesting for dvd ripping.

[dvd_maniac]

Well then, I do not understand the buzz around the High Profile. I do hope it will at least utilize my dual-core CPU. Currently I get 80% when encoding using ASP, but only up to 55% when encoding AVC. Not sure why the newer codec is not SMP optimized and the older one is?

Anyways,
Thanks for the response Manao.

[Manao]

AFAIK, none are SMP optimized.

And the buzz around high profile is justified : 8x8 transform brings a 0.3 dB gain, and don't destroy as much as the 4x4 transform the textures. Once good sets of matrices will have been found, custom matrices will also be really usefull ( all my encodings with xvid were made with the hvs good/best matrices )

[dvd_maniac]

And the buzz around high profile is justified

I have been encoding all my DVDs into AVC Standard Profile at 400-450kbps.
Average movie size is 325MB. I am happy enough with the quality but what kind of quality gain will I notice using the High Profile in my case? 10%, 20%?

[bond]

I have been encoding all my DVDs into AVC Standard Profile at 400-450kbps.
Average movie size is 325MB. I am happy enough with the quality but what kind of quality gain will I notice using the High Profile in my case? 10%, 20%?you should already get a better quality if you dont restrict the features by enabling one of the nero profiles. use unrestricted

[oluv]

use unrestricted
? please explain. what do you mean with unrestricted?

[bond]

unrestricted profile

[oluv]

unrestricted profile
sorry to sound stupid, but which one of these is "unrestricted"? i have the following ones:
Maximum Definiton
Mobile
Portable
Standard
Cinema
High Definition TV
Maximum Definition - AVC
Mobile - AVC
Portable - AVC
Standard - AVC
Cinema - AVC
HDTV - AVC
Memory Stick Video (PSP compatible)