AviSynth & Windows Media Encoder

[medic611]

After experiencing my latest codec conflict with windows media encoder I have decided to do all of my recodes using avisynth.

My question is when using the WME GUI (I tried to teach myself the command line, but my brain started to bleed!)

I have been resizing my Widescreen DVD rips to 848 x 480 for playback on HTPC and Xbox360s. Is there any advantage to resizing in avisynth using LanczosResize or the resizing tool in the encoder GUI?

Also currently all playback is on SDTVs, however, wanting to be future compatable with LCD displays should I be switching to RGB color with DGIndex?

This is not intended to be a "what's best?" post just looking to the pros and cons of each way of doing things. As most of the guides are Divx based and contain no reference to Windows Media, outside of the WMVHD (much later down the road.)

[benwaggoner]

The Lanczos resizer is much better than what WME can do natively (and is thusly slower).

Resizing quality is pretty tragic in WME at anything other than Complexity 5, and even then I bow my head in shame. I don't ever use WME to scale for any quality-critical projects (and I pretty much only do quality-critical projects these days).

Expression Encoder 2 has Lanczos, bicubic, and super sampling, so I believe we've redeemed ourselves in this area :).

[Ranguvar]

Off-topic: Try Spline36 :) Slower by a little, but to me is just as sharp as Lanczos, and halos less.