preserve letterboxing in rips or not?

[hostyle]

Just a quick question.

I'm wondering if its frowned upon to keep extraneous blackspace in your rips? I usually like to get my rips over with as fast as possible, and leave the black bars at top and bottom for widescreen DVD rips (and hide them from display during playback in PowerDVD). But leaving them out would of course result in smaller files. What do other people do?

Using DVD Decrypter, DVD2AVI, vfapiconv, VirtualDub, radium and Xvid

[killingspree]

i'd say 99% of the people crop as it is a matter of minutes if not seconds to get the right values!

btw: i'd consider your method a little outdated ;)

steVe

[hostyle]

I tried to fight the urge not to bring this OT, but I lost badly.

i'd consider your method a little outdated

I'll bite. Bearing in mind that its quality that counts, not filesize, what would you recommend? Something that works with minimum effort (hours spent tweaking is not my piece of cake) and something thats freeware.

[jggimi]

Oooh, let me try.

Gordian Knot suite ... latest release is 0.28.5. Uses AviSynth rather than VfApi, and the compression (done with VdubMod these days) occurs in Fast Recompress mode, rather than Full Compression. Color stays in YV12 rather than YUY2 or converting to RGB and back.

I think you'll find it faster and easier overall.

[killingspree]

in addition to jggimis suggestions: lame and besweet for audio encoding

[hostyle]

I'll agree with you on two things: AviSynth (which doesn't work yet on my machine at home for unfathomable reasons, and I haven't had the time look into it yet) and Lame.

As always GKnot, the most user unfriendly piece of software I have ever seen, get recommended. I haven't used it in 6 months or a year. But you get all these sliders where you get to approximate settings, then encode and see if your approximated settings give you artifacts or not, then repeating the whole process if you did. Sorry but I'll pass thank you.

I'll agree with using Lame, but I'm still looking for somewhere to download the lame ACM (or whatever its called for LAME to appear in your audio codecs list) - it wasn't available on the Lame website last time I checked. I've asked before in other forums and I guess I'll ask here again. Why do you break up the audio demux, encode, AV mux into extra steps? I don;t see how encoding the audio at the same time as the Xvid can add any extra overhead as opposed doing them both seperately.

But seeing as I sound like a troll, I Guess I should give GKnot / R4R a try again as its been so long and development is ongoing.

Thanks

[killingspree]

Originally posted by hostyle
But you get all these sliders where you get to approximate settings, then encode and see if your approximated settings give you artifacts or not, then repeating the whole process if you did. Sorry but I'll pass thank you.
well that's what the comp check is for! you do your settings, do a chomp check, if you like the result you encode, otherwise you adjust your settings again!

a comp check takes about 10 min...

steVe

[hostyle]

OK. I'll admit I've learned that I've learned something new today :)

I've never seen a comp check or anything similar in Gordian Knot, nor heard it mentioned in a tutorial. I'm presuming its a new feature in the last 6 months / year? Either way I can't really say anymore without downloading the latest GKnot with up to date tutorial (probably Snowbeachs) and trying it out again - otherwise I'm likely to end up chowing down on my own foot.

Thanks guys, I'll probably be back about this later.

[Hiro2k]

It's been there for a while, but it wasn't mentioned in the guides up untill about a year ago.

[JimiK]

Back on topic: do crop away every single piece of the black bars (also left and right). Check in VDub if they're all gone. Otherwise you could get compression artifacts in this area.
Best regards,
JimiK
P.S. Of course I have to mention that Ogg Vorbis is the best audio codec around ;) (imho)

[hostyle]

Color stays in YV12 rather than YUY2 or converting to RGB and back

I had an hour or so over the weekend to try out a few things. I got AVISynth going which seems nice, but I fail to see any significant difference to what I was already doing. The rips look exactly the same using vfapi and AVISynth (unless of course I was doing something wrong in AVISynth) and AVISynth takes slightly longer (although it was only a 5 minute clip so the difference wasn't significant). What am I expecting to change by using AVISynth instead of vfapi / YV12 instead of RGB?

I do plan on using AVISynth for its huge range of fiters when I get around to VHS capturing again.

do crop away every single piece of the black bars

I tried this (twice - first using AVISynth and then using VirtualDubs null transform crop) and it resulted in a flickering green bar at the bottom right of the screen during playback that doesnt appear if I don't crop. All I did was crop 72 from top and bottom of the picture. No other filters.

[manono]

Hi-

You must have encoded using Full Processing as you do when using the VFAPI method. Using AviSynth Ver. 2.52 combined with VDubMod (NOT VDub) allows the use of Fast Recompress (as jggimi mentioned many posts ago), and will give you around a 25% speed boost over previous methods.

As for the green bar, please post the .avs script (and if you used GKnot to generate it, leave off the lines beginning with "#").

Maybe read the YV12 FAQ (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37276&perpage=20&pagenumber=1) to make sure you have everything set up properly.

[hostyle]

AVS script:


LoadPlugin("MPEGDecoder.dll")

MPEGSource("E:\TRANSPORTER\VIDEO_TS\transporter.d2v")

crop(0,72,0,-72)



On afterthought, perhaps it was some sort of problem with VirtualDub rather than AVS or removing letterboxing. I'll check that out this evening.

[JimiK]

Hmm, strange, there is not much you could do wrong with this script. I never had a problem with such a green line. Btw, if you use version 2.5x of AviSynth, then you don't have to load Plugins manually. Just put them in the plugin folder. Instead of Nic's MpegDecoder, you could try MarcFD's Mpeg2Dec.
As you have noticed, it's the huge pack of filters that makes AviSynth so powerful. Don't use any VirtualDub filters and choose "Fast recompress". This should give you a (small) speed advantage.
Best regards,
JimiK

[killingspree]

a few more things:

use Nics mpeg2dec3 v1.08
use virtualdubmod 1.5.1.1a
use Fast Recompress
try forcing your cpu idct e.g. for a PIV with SSE2 add , idct=5 after the d2v file so you get ...youfile.d2v", idct=5)


steVe

[snowcrash]

If you really don't like GKnot, you could always check out DVX. I think it's more user friendly and gives similar results.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55292&highlight=dvx

http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx

[Brother John]

Some time ago I had problems with that green bar, too.
I don't remember exactly but I know it was related to the playback filters I used. The encoding setup had nothing to do with it.