Encoding Recommendations

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

Morning all. I have a specific task I'm trying to accomplish - namely, I have Season 2 of the Sopranos that I'd like to put onto a single dvd for watching while I travel. I've tried the x264 GUI solutions available (meGUI, StaxRip, etc) and while I get results, I'm not floored by the quality as I expected I would be. I've been using the HQ-Slower profile for the rips, and based on the comments I've been reading, that should be perfectly fine.

Some statistics that might be useful:


Season 2 of The Sopranos has 13 episodes totalling 694 minutes.
Episodes vary in length from 43 to 60 minutes.
The video appears to be 16:9.


Given the minutes in length and the size of a single layer DVD, I came up with an estimate of about 6.9 MB per minute of video for the basic bitrate calculations, and if I remember correctly, that brings me to somewhere between 800-1000 kbps, which I believe should be plenty for x264 encoding.

What do you all recommend for encoding profiles, settings, etc (regardless of the GUI - I'll try whatever is suggested) to get superior quality? I'm very sensitive to compression artifacts in the video, and not so much on the audio, so I've gone to Ogg Q=1 for the 2-channel audio. It will be played back full screen on a 17" Ubuntu laptop.

regards...

[bkman]

Factors like the resolution you are encoding to, whether the source has an odd interlacing pattern, how grainy/noise it is, etc. are important in giving you an answer. Care to share?

Also, what specifically don't you like about the encoded quality?

Btw, the bitrate you are looking at seems to be 942kbps - audio bitrate.

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

Factors like the resolution you are encoding to, whether the source has an odd interlacing pattern, how grainy/noise it is, etc. are important in giving you an answer. Care to share?

Also, what specifically don't you like about the encoded quality?

Well, part of my question has to do with resolution. When using StaxRip, guides I've read have indicated that a 55% quality setting is appropriate - but in order to get 55%, after doing the compressibility test, I was surprised to see that no resizing was necessary to get to that quality. I don't mind going down to about 600 pix wide. The source is non-interlaced, and there's very little grain/noise in the frame (I've been using the second denoising option).

The problems I'm having are that certain textures on clothing appear to warble in and out, like a ceiling fan obstructing a light fixture is shining on the clothes. They oscillate in brightness. Now, I know that good quality is possible, even with xvid (I've seen a great 350 mb episode of House from a torrent which looked absolutely impeccable).

Btw, the bitrate you are looking at seems to be 942kbps - audio bitrate.

Audio bitrate with Ogg Q1 should be about 96 kbps, right?

[bkman]

Well, part of my question has to do with resolution. When using StaxRip, guides I've read have indicated that a 55% quality setting is appropriate - but in order to get 55%, after doing the compressibility test, I was surprised to see that no resizing was necessary to get to that quality.

Some resizing would be implicit unless you are using anamorphic encoding. Using staxrip as an example, the resize switch would be totally unchecked to enable anamorphic.

The problems I'm having are that certain textures on clothing appear to warble in and out, like a ceiling fan obstructing a light fixture is shining on the clothes. They oscillate in brightness.

What are you using to decode the video? Make sure that postprocessing is off. Or if the artifact you are talking about is video blocking, try raising the deblocking strength and threshold settings in x264.

Audio bitrate with Ogg Q1 should be about 96 kbps, right?

Around 80, is the indicated value, but of course it varies based on the source. You should probably encode the audio first and use the resulting bitrate in your video bitrate calculations.

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

Some resizing would be implicit unless you are using anamorphic encoding. Using staxrip as an example, the resize switch would be totally unchecked to enable anamorphic.

I have anamorphic checked. Original resolution was 720x480, cropped to 708x480, and then resized to 704x400. Not much resizing there, but definitely some. This may be the cause of some vertical banding artifacts I saw.


What are you using to decode the video? Make sure that postprocessing is off. Or if the artifact you are talking about is video blocking, try raising the deblocking strength and threshold settings in x264.


Win build of mplayer. Looks worse to me with postprocessing off, much grainier with it off.

[bkman]

I have anamorphic checked. Original resolution was 720x480, cropped to 708x480, and then resized to 704x400. Not much resizing there, but definitely some. This may be the cause of some vertical banding artifacts I saw.

In StaxRip checking anamorphic just tells it that the source is 16/9, not that you want to encode it anamorphically. You probably don't need to worry about that if you aren't sure what it is, however, as I very much doubt that the resizing is to blame for the artifacts you are seeing.

Win build of mplayer. Looks worse to me with postprocessing off, much grainier with it off.

I'm not sure if mplayer has the same issues with postprocessing H.264 as ffdshow, so that may not be the problem.

Posting some screens of the artifacts you are seeing might be helpful.

[foxyshadis]

You certainly should never post-process h.264, you should either fix it up front during encoding, or use a playback denoiser like "-vop denoise3d". By using post-processing you'll always have pulsing and oversmoothing, because h.264 does pp within the decoding stage (in other words, you're doing it twice, messing it all up).

By cleaning up some of the noise prior to encoding, you can make the overall quality much higher, as well.

[check]

what is your target playback machine?

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

My target is a HP Pavilion dv8000, 17" widescreen, running Ubuntu Dapper.

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

I'm not sure if mplayer has the same issues with postprocessing H.264 as ffdshow, so that may not be the problem.

Posting some screens of the artifacts you are seeing might be helpful.

It's hard to post screens of artifacts that are pulsating in nature, low-level flickering.

[bkman]

Post a sample from the final encode then. You can cut it with MP4box/YAMB if it is an MP4 file.

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

You certainly should never post-process h.264, you should either fix it up front during encoding, or use a playback denoiser like "-vop denoise3d". By using post-processing you'll always have pulsing and oversmoothing, because h.264 does pp within the decoding stage (in other words, you're doing it twice, messing it all up).

By cleaning up some of the noise prior to encoding, you can make the overall quality much higher, as well.

Well, if I'm using MeGUI for encoding, how would you suggest doing the denoising? I'm sure I just need to experiment with different settings, but I'm not that familiar with the different denoising options (or the custom quant matrices either, for that matter).

[foxyshadis]

In the avisynth script creator there's a "noise filter" option on the second panel. It has four levels of denoising, based on hw much is present in the source (it might take a few experiments to figure out how to tell how much you have; if you go too high it'll get an oversmoothed look like bad xvid movies).

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

Where should I post a sample? I have a 6-minute clip that is 40 MB that I can trim down to about 30 seconds for a sample of the artifacts that I'm trying to deal with.

[KitchenStaffSupervisor]

I was having DGIndex conflicts with MeGUI, so I've switched to AutoMKV for the time being. Recommendations on settings there would be extremely useful - do I need custom quant matrices?