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GreenRomeo
27th August 2004, 06:34
Hi all,

After spending a week in reading carefully Doom9's final Xvid guide, Crusty's Xvid FAQs and, as Koepi has said many times to newbies, search throughout the Xvid forum, I didn't found enough the needed info for my problems. So now I post it here.

Unless you think that my question is dumb, or I was too lazy and need to take several week more to search through the forum with my poor English to find out the answers which take you only a few minutes to reply, please help me solving my problem, at least by give me a useful link. Thank you in advance.

And here it is.

MPEG or H.263?

Briefly, here is my question:
Should I used bitrate or size target to get the better quality in case output file size is not a strictly problem ? And if size target is chosed, what quantizer MPEG or H.263 should be used when I can't predict the ouput birate.

And below is what I specifically meant in the above question.

It is said vaguely in common Xvid guides that H.263 quantizer should be used in low bitrate and MPEG is suitable for high bitrate. But what is exactly "high" and "low" ? Is there a "threshold" such as 900 or 1500 kbps ... or it depends on each movies ?

I encoded my video file (WMV3, 640x272, 30fps, 1628 Kbps, ~1GB) to Xvid. My goal is preserving the quality as much as possible. First I used bitrate target and chosed the same value 1628 Kbps as the original. I think this is a high bitrate and hence used MPEG quantizer. The result is the size reduction of the ouput file is negligible, but the quality seems good.

But the Crusty's Xvid guide said that Size target should be used in any cases, so I tried to used it. I set a larger size (1.2GB against the original 1GB) hoping that will keep the quality better. The MPEG quantizer still be chosed. The result is weird. The ouput file size is not 1.2GB, but only 800MB, smaller than the original and even the previous ouput.

It seem Xvid has controlled the compression well when it wasn't sticked with a fixed average bitrate. But wait ... the ouput file's bitrate is now only 1050 Kbps (in my other tests with other source, this value is not constant but various: 1120, 849, 1100 kbps ...).

This result confused me because when I can not predict the output file size (as I choose file size target), it is clearly that I can not used the suitable quantizer: MPEG or H.263 (I even don't know exactly the standards we based to decide what is high or low bitrate).

Surco
27th August 2004, 13:04
Hi GreenRomeo

My english is bad too, so you can end even more confused :devil:

Originally posted by GreenRomeo
But what is exactly "high" and "low”?

In fact, this question doesn’t have a real answer.

MPEG codecs compresses by detecting redundancies between pasta and present frames (it is more complicated but let’s stay simple ;)), so if there is a very lot of motion in the video you want to compress, even 1500 can be a low bitrate.

But the opposite for low motion: in this case even 500 can be a high bitrate.

You can use drf analyze tools to guide you, lower quantizer = better quality (use search).

Originally posted by GreenRomeo
The result is weird. The ouput file size is not 1.2GB, but only 800MB, smaller than the original and even the previous ouput.

Search under “undersized”, you will find a lot of useful answers under this topic :)


Ops!! I forgot to answer at your main question: is a matter of taste ;).

MPEG has ringing before but blocks later, and h263 blocks before (on some fine gradients even at quant 2) but has much less ringing.

Do your own test and decide what suits best for your eyes.

GreenRomeo
27th August 2004, 13:50
Yes Surco, I now even more confuse :confused: , but perhaps my poor knowledge, not your English (seems quite better than me!) is the cause. The silences of other Xvid experts after reading my thread maybe also imply that I need to search, search and search more.

Thanks and regards,

Soulhunter
27th August 2004, 19:32
Links... 1, (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16935) 2, (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64043) 3 (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54729) !!!


Bye

Blue_MiSfit
27th August 2004, 22:25
for the love of god don't re-encode a wmv3. delete it. forget you ever saw it. get the dvd and re encode.

remember: garbage in, garbage out.

Soulhunter
27th August 2004, 23:03
Hmm, have never used WMV3 !!!

How good (or bad) does a WMV3/640x272/1628kbps clip look... :confused:


Bye

Sagittaire
28th August 2004, 13:47
I think WMV3 is the 4CC for WMV9 ... and i think WMV9 1628 Kbps must be good source for re-encoding in XviD ...