Looking for the ideal H.264 batch-encoder

[odditory]

I have about 20Terabytes (7TB online on SAN, 13TB offline) worth of mixed DVD and HD source material that I want to batch-encode to H.264/AVC with minimal quality degradation and am hoping to reach about 25% of the source's size per title (i.e. 4.5GB MPEG2 -> 1.125GB MPEG4 AVC).

I have a farm of 10 dualcore 3.2ghz PC's and so I'm looking for the ideal batch-encoder without wanting a degree in x264 commandline usage or a zillion fiddly and buggy opensource filters, splitters, etc. one after the next.

So far it seems FairUse Wizard looks okay (but buggy) since it handles DVD content well, and its unfortunate that Nero doesn't support batch-encoding since its results look good.

Any opinions?

[Sirber]

RealAnime batch well but it doesn't hande DVD and HD well. Thanks for not looking :)

[Chainmax]

I'm sure some of the x264 experts could cook up a .bat file suited for you. One thing though: since you'll be using that much bitrate, I'd advice you to use Sharktooth's eqm_avc_hr custom matrix for the DVD reencodes. For the HD ones the default matrix should be ok.

[stax76]

Maybe StaxRip can help you, it has a CLI.

[odditory]

I was hoping for something simple and perhaps even commercial if needed be. I tried MainConcept's batch encoding and its slower than Nero and doesn't even look as good.

After lurking for quite some weeks now on various forums regarding AVC encoding, it feels like x.264 is the 'linux' of AVC encoding - endlessly tweakable, fiddly and free, but a huge learning curve that isn't suited for commercial applications without seemingly endless tinkering. i.e. Having to completely disassemble and reassemble a car before you know enough about it to simply be able to drive it for the first time.

[MrWizard]

I can tell you that, as a novice encoder, x264 is not that hard to use. Especially if you start out using a GUI like MeGUI, it is easy. Figure out what settings you want to use in MeGUI, then examine the command lines that is uses for x264. That'd be my recommendation, anyway...

[smok3]

odditory, iam using my batch cli thingy which is connected to total commander for months now without any thinkering (i just edit the bitrate part of the script mostly and replace x264.exe from time to time and thats it.) - for your purpose you would have to really heavy modify this thought, so if you can give any hints on how exactly do you plan to use all this horsepower maybe someone can thinkup something?

[nm]

I think one only needs to learn to use command line once. After that you can quickly pick up any tool, check it's man page and type away. It really isn't harder than a GUI after you are familiar with the basics. Now if I were you, I'd pick up a bash tutorial and tinker a while with some simple scripts. Since you have a problem to solve, learning is even more interesting. It will benefit you in the future too, or at least there is something new and useful to learn instead of yet another clicky GUI.

[stax76]

After lurking for quite some weeks now on various forums regarding AVC encoding, it feels like x.264 is the 'linux' of AVC encoding - endlessly tweakable, fiddly and free, but a huge learning curve that isn't suited for commercial applications without seemingly endless tinkering.

You don't have to tweak if you don't like to, sharktooth has made profiles for MeGUI (StaxRip uses the profiles too). Batch encoding isn't hard, here are some examples:

StaxRip -template:DVB "C:\Movie 2\capture.mpg" -encode
StaxRip -template:DVD "C:\Movie 2\VTS_01_1.VOB" "C:\Movie 2\VTS_01_2.VOB" -encode