Encoding question. Problem with cartoons vs. non cartoon TV show DVD's.

[Hamburglar]

I hope this isn't a stupid question, but I have been ripping my hair out trying to figure this one out.

I am taking all my box sets of DVD's and putting them into XVid to easily watch them on my XBox, plus I like having backups. I ripped my Futurama episodes with AutoGK and they looked amazing. Honestly, just as good as the originals. So I based my settings for EVERYTHING on that, which is to have a minimum width of 512, file size on each episode of 175mb, 128kbps mp3 vbr sound, (in secret menu mode) I choose cartoon mode, IVTC the material, and sharp matrix for xvid. Futurama and The Simpsons came out incredible.

Now I am doing non cartoon TV show DVD's(Married With Children, King of Queens, etc), and they are lookin' pretty ugly. I IVTC them which I determined to be correct, turn off sharp matrix, turn off cartoon mode (obviously), and the rest I leave the same as the above for the Futurama and Simpsons rips. The rips do look pretty ugly (no offense to AutoGK, I am sure I am doing something wrong which is why I am posting here). Where Futurama looks basically identical to these DVD's, the non cartoon rips are plagued with a lot more compression, not as sharp as a picture as the originals, and a very ugly oversaturation in skin color that produces some color flickering. I would jump up and say that cartoons have way less going on screen so naturally they will compress better, but that doesn't explain the terrible looking skin tone color and horrible "rainbowing" or "red flickering" of people's skin.

I would like to know the modes people recommend to use for non cartoon TV show rips. 175mb is the max I will do per episode, because I remember downloading Seinfeld DVD rips at that quality and they looked amazing, so I guess I am doing something wrong. Should I be setting the resolution to 720 set width rather than 512? Should I be setting EVERYTHING to 720 since that's their native resolution and I am insane to try to compare 20 year old episodes of Married With Children to Futurama? I would really love to hear some opinons.

Also regarding the 720 vs 512 width thing, I encoded all of season 4 of the Family Guy with a minimum width of 512, and some episodes came out 512, others, 720. I am assuming the episodes that were 512 had more going on in them than the ones that were able to acheive 175mb at 720?

Thanks for anyone kind enough to respond to my mounds of problems!

[CWR03]

There are two basic reasons why Married...With Children won't look as good as Futurama in the same file size/resolution: one is that animation is much easier to compress since there are large areas of similar color and it requires less bitrate, the other is that Married...With Children will come out at a higher framerate since it was videotaped.

As far as the width to use, you should select a width that will yield an acceptable output with your desired filesize. If you can't get any quality at a width of 512 and a filesize of 175 MB, you might consider a larger filesize.

As far as settings within the XviD codec, it won't affect the outcome if you're using AutoGK.

[manono]

I agree with everything. You might check the log that AutoGK produces. I'd almost bet that for the given size and resolution, the results of the compress test were very low.

Different sources compress differently, and live action compresses much worse than simply drawn cartoons like The Simpsons and Futurama. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you had to double your file size to get quality similar to that of the cartoons, at the same resolution.

[Wolfman]

So what is a low compression test 58% say? what is the lowest acceptable ??
ANother suggestion 4:3 ratio stuff needs quite sigbificantly more bitrate than 16:9

[manono]

Hi-

58% might be low, but it's not very low. I was thinking more along the lines of 20-30%.

[Tikker]

when I encode 30 min episodes, i use these options


1/3cd size (approx 233 mb) and 128bit vbr mp3 audio

can't tell the difference between original and the divx (5.2)