Comprehensive guide to HC?

[TheManuel]

Is there an onling guide to HC's settings, besides the included documentation?

I would like to understand more about vbr vs. constant quantization settings, i.e. in what situations it is recommendable to use one or the other, etc.
Right now I try to encode my home videos to the maximum quality possible and simply use VBR with 0 bias and a very high bitrate but don' know enough about CQ.

Thanks.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'm not exactly an HC expert, but I assume that its modes are similar to other encoders.

2 pass VBR is useful if you want to hit a target bitrate(filesize). If you aren't too concerned with the final output size, you can use CQ mode.

(this is a little over simplified and general, but it will get the idea across)

MPEG encoders use quantizers to represent the level of compression for any frame. Lower quantizers mean less compression, higher quantizers mean more compression.

Foe example, a test frame encoded at q5 might have a size of 1000 bytes, and a frame encoded at q4 might have a size of 1200 bytes. The q4 frame would likely look better than the q5 frame because more bits are allocated to it.

This 200 byte difference might be totally irrelevant if you are looking at another frame, where q5=1000 bytes and q4=2000 bytes, you just don't know!

When you do VBR, the encoder has to guess which quantizers to use for each frame in order to hit your specified output filesize / bitrate. 2 pass VBR makes this job a lot easier for the encoder, at the expense of time.

When you do CQ, the encoder just uses a constant quantizer, not caring about how many bytes each frame takes. Therefore, a CQ encode will also have constant quality (generally). This can be tweaked a bit using CRF like x264 does, but that's outside the scope of HC.

So in conclusion, CQ modes give an even quality, and are overall a lot faster than proper 2 pass VBR. However, you have no idea how big a CQ encode will be without doing some tests. CQ is a very bad idea for DVD because DVD has very strict limitations on bitrate.

Anyway, to those who really know the ins and outs of how this works, sorry for my oversimplification. That's just how I understand it on a high level :)

~MiSfit

[TheManuel]

B_M, this already helps inmensly. I guess I haven't done my homework on MPEG2 encoding.
So if size were not an issue, (although it typically is) I should just set it to 1 for maximum quality, right? Regarding bitrate limitations, HC enforces bitrate limits by increasing the quantizer temporarily if the limit is going to be violated.

Now, as far as B and P factor quantizers, why would you want to increase the weight of one relative to the other?

And one last one for you:
Is it possible that, if I use VBR and set it to an extreme average value of say, 8500kb/s some of the bits will be wasted and simply used forcefully because I specified such a high bitrate or is there not such a thing as wasted bits?

Thanks much for you answers.