HCEnc Living FAQ

[Trahald]

Being HCEnc was voted the most used mpeg-2 encoder currently, Id figure id supply a living faq. Current stable version is 023. Current beta is 024

The thread will be closed but anyone liking to contribute, please pm me.

FAQ:
1.
Q.Where did this application come from?

A.
Base Info:
HCEnc was created a few years ago by HANK315 written in Fortran95 (with a small amount of C and a bit of assembler for CPU optimization.) The project is currently free. First public test version released January 2005. Fortran being a math concentrated language works well for this purpose delivering a very fast encoder considering its quality.

Releases have generally featured a gui version, and a cli version (helpful for batch support.)

HCEnc supports encoding at SD(main @ main) and HD (main @ high) 4:2:0. 024 beta supports 4:2:2 output.

Since version 022 HCEnc supports multi processor encoding.

2.
Q.What applications will I need or will be helpful when I get started.

A.
Support Utilities:

Avisynth/DGIndex:
HCEnc supports input from Avisynth(.avs) and .d2v(dvd2avi/dgindex) files.
http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html
http://avisynth.org

EncSchedGui
Video encoder batch processing
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=128312&highlight=EncSchedGui



more to come...

[Jackie]

Thanks alot, is there a quality comparison about the quality it produces compared to others, especially commercial encoders?

[verydoomed]

Its an mpeg2 encoder but what sort of files will it accept as input?

[Emulgator]

HCEnc relies on a avisynth frontend, so takes .avs scripts as input.
Just one line of script will do.

Or you can add preprocessing to your liking, refine, resize, crop, add borders...

Everything that can be decoded by avisynth source filters and comes out there
in DVD or MPEG-2 Blu-ray legal resolution, colour space and framerates can be accepted as HC input.

[Jeff B]

The "Make BD Compliant" button checks both progressive sequence and 3:2 pulldown. Are both of these required in the BD spec? I especially want to know about the 3:2 pulldown.

EDIT: I came across an old thread that mentioned that 3:2 pulldown is not a requirement for 23.976/24 fps sources. Given that this is the case, I wonder why clicking the "Make BD Compliant" button checks the 3:2 pulldown option. Is this a hangover from the "Make DVD Compliant" button, which it is presumably based on?

From looking at retail BDs, it seems that the progressive_sequence flag should be set and that TFF should not be set. It should be possible to remove it with Restream.