CEE quesiton and DVDRB add on question

[jbombs16]

CCESP 2.70.02: I just was wondering about the number of passes to use. For long movies, i select 10 (the max) as the number of passes. Is this over kill? i read somewhere that after 6-7 passes, there isnt an improvement in quality. Is this true? Should i just use the 6 passes (so really 5 passes) or even 7 passes (really 6) or stick with the 10 (really 9) passes for long movies?


Also for the OPV option in DVDRB, is there a hidden option to change the amount of the dvd that is looked at for the calulation of quailty. I thought i saw something about a range of .1-25 and 1 beingit, what is a good value? if i would select 10 for example would it significantly increase the PREPARE stage?
Also, if using OPV, and you can get the output size to be close to the max of the blank dvd, does this method produce good quality discs without the mulit-pass method?


DVDRB addons:

what is the difference between these two add ons, RB-Keeper & RB-Opt v0.20 BETA? Which one is recommended?

[jdobbs]

Actually here is a quote from the CCE 2.50 manual -- and the basic multipass engine hasn't changed much since then:

When two or more passes are specified, the encoding result is alternately output to the two files which are set in Video files. This is because the encoding result up to the previous pass can be saved when the Multipass VBR mode is used for encoding. This is effective when a lengthy stream is created.

Image quality slightly improves each time encoding is repeated, but quality improvement reaches its limit at 3 ~ 4 times of encoding. [emphasis added]

You can set the amount of the OPV sample with the following entry in the [Options] are of REBUILDER.INI:

Q_sample_percentage=n

"n" can be any value between .1 and 25 -- and represents the percentage of the original that will be encoded in each pass of prediction. So be careful. If you set the value to 25, and it takes 4 passes to get the value - you've spent just as much time (in prediction during PREPARE) as a second pass. The default value is 1 and 5 is probably the highest you should go.