x264 settings for sport DVB files.

[rhys87]

Hi i currently use x264 to encode my dvb captures using StaxRip as it way better than xvid in fast motions. The only problem i have in sports is the grass appears to be blurry and patchy in bits. I use a bitrate of 1200, 2pass, resize 512x288, motion estimation method Multi-Hex, subpixel motion estimation 6, trellis Always, B-frames 3 and reference frames 16. Is there any settings that could be tweaked to improve the grass?

Help would be appreciated :)

[foxyshadis]

Try turning the inloop/deblocking strength down. (It goes negative.) Sharktooth's HQ profiles use -2,-1 for instance. This should decrease the blurring on playback, though it might hurt compression and possibly cause some blocks to show.

[bond]

i would assume sports has been encoded interlaced. what deinterlacer are you using?

[rhys87]

i was using TDeint after i analysed the video with a little program i found here but the end result in StaxRip was that the video encoded looked blurry, so i am currently not using one.

#This source is interlaced, and the field order is consistently tff.
LeakKernelDeint(order=1)
#TDeint(order=1) #higher quality, but slower

[check]

To improve the grass, I would firstly use more bitrate, the few encodes of live sport I've done have sat between 1500-2500kbits. You would be better off not resizing it either.
If you want to tell if the deinterlacer is the cause of the bluriness, open up the avs script in a media player to determine if that is also blurry, or if it's simply due to the low bitrate you are using.

[GodofaGap]

I wonder if your DVB captures are not blurry and blocky to begin with. I one time saw a DVB sample of a soccer game... and didn't look that good.

And well... sport has probably too much motion for kerneldeint to be motion adaptive. So most if not all motion is above threshold and will be kerneldeinterlaced, which can be a bit blurry at times.

[rhys87]

i've got megui finally up and running im doing a few tests with a small sample to see if i can improve it.

The capture is pretty good quality, its not true HDTV but its not blurry.

It might be just me but i did notice a difference using Sharktooth's build of x264, the grass seemed less patchy.

[Mug Funky]

@ GodofaGap: australian DVB-T is usually around 6mbps, which is quite acceptible, especially from a modern hardware encoder (hell, it's pretty good on an old hardware encoder).

@ rhys87: IIRC, sharktooth's newer build include a patch do to with skipped block handling. that'll probably be reduding the patchiness.

i wish that x264 supported interlace... it's not even a priority at the moment, which IMHO is a tad myopic considering more people are using it for DVB timeshifting, and hence need to be prepared for interlace. but then it's still very much early days for h.264 all round, considering loads of decoders don't even support interlace. for now you can smart bob-deinterlace it and encode at twice the frame rate :)

[futurex]

australian DVB-T is usually around 6mbps, which is quite acceptible, especially from a modern hardware encoder (hell, it's pretty good on an old hardware encoder).

the bitrate is fine (for the commercial channels at least) but too often, and not limited to sport, the source is crap, whether it be from crappy cameras or a satellite feed ;)