What are your settings?

[Difatoni]

I just want everyone's opinion on what they prefer. Just trying to get a general feel.

The goal is to encode movies for backing up standard 720x480 dvds in AVC .mp4 for a home media center that will play in MCE and Front Row.


1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?

[Morte66]

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?

For quality, I'd take x264 and the various freeware preparation tools (but you need to learn how to use them to get the benefit). For workflow and productivity, I'd take AnyDVD + Nero over the freeware tools.

2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?

Do your own tests. It depends on your display, viewing conditions, taste etc.

3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?

See 2. Maybe start at 1000kbps and vary up/down. If it's going to hard drive rather than CD/DVD, so you don't need an exact size for every file, use constant quality encoding rather than constant bitrate.

4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?

Crop black borders, but never resize. Encode the original pixels and set an aspect ratio on the final file.

5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?

Manual crop if you're fussy, auto-crop if you aren't.

6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?

See 2. Try 128kbps for stereo LC-AAC, vary up and down until happy. A bit less for HE-AAC.

7. Would you do a 2nd pass?

Yes if constant size. N/A if constant quality.

8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?

Always do inverse telecine on material shot on 24fps film and converted to NTSC. For truly interlaced TV drama/comedy shot on 29.97fps NTSC video, I'd deinterlace but you should decide for yourself. Sports might be worth interlaced encoding to get maximum motion information.

9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?

If your PC is slow enough for the decoder to matter at 720x480, you shouldn't be doing a bulk encoding project.

[alec_robertson]

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?

I like mencoder with x264 as it lets you do sound and video encoding and any inverse telecine in one step.

3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?

x264's crf mode does a pretty good job and only requires one pass. try a few encodes and see what works (dark scenes or skies seem the most difficult for x264 so look for these). same goes for bitrate, try a few and see what works (1000, 1500, 2000...)

4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?

I encode my movies for the archos player, which doesn't handle aspect ratio so I rescale to 1/1 sar. If your decoder handles aspect ratio, then you could just keep the original scale.

5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?

Crop away any black bars, as this will eat up your bitrate. mplayer -vf cropdetect does a good job of determining appropriate crop values as does handbrake.

6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?

128 or 192. If you use a different container (like mkv) then you could just copy the soundtrack without reencoding.

7. Would you do a 2nd pass?

No with crf, yes with bitrate.

8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?

The dvd's I've seen come in a few different flavors:
* 23.976fps film source soft telecined to 29.97 - encodes at 23.976 progressive without deinterlacing.
* 23.976fps film source HARD telecined to 23.976 - frames sequence is ideally [p p p i i] (p=progressive, i=interlaced) and can be reversed using the filmdint or pullup mencoder filter. Deinterlacing this source is unnecessary unless the filmdint filter has problems with the inverse-telecine, in which case you can use anything from a simple pp=lb to yadif,mcdeint.
* 29.97fps ntsc/25fps pal interlaced content - deinterlace for web, keep interlaced for tv viewing, keep interlaced for pc viewing but use a deinterlacing filter during playback.
* 25fps pal progressive - encodes at 25fps without deinterlacing.

9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?

mplayer or vlc

[Sharktooth]

some crap quality PAL DVDs are interlaced too

[Difatoni]

For quality, I'd take x264 and the various freeware preparation tools (but you need to learn how to use them to get the benefit). For workflow and productivity, I'd take AnyDVD + Nero over the freeware tools.

Does this mean the x264 codec produces superior quality than the ateme codec?

As for the bitrate questions, I just wanna know what you'll would encode them at personally. Thank you

[Difatoni]

Also on the aac would you use high efficiency or low complexity. Just your opinion.

[Morte66]

Does this mean the x264 codec produces superior quality than the ateme codec?

IMO, yes.

But more importantly, many people do some filtering AviSynth before the x264 encode (denoise, sharpen, advanced deinterlace, colour correction, stuff like that). If you get the hang of those, they make a substantial difference.

As for the bitrate questions, I just wanna know what you'll would encode them at personally.

At a given quality, you trade speed vs compression. With x264 I do 720x576 PAL DVD at about 1500kbps. I use fairly slow/complex encoder settings. With simpler settings, I could get the same quality at roughly double the speed and double the bitrate.

That's fairly high quality for a very revealing display. You might be happy with 50% of that on a regular PC.

Also on the aac would you use high efficiency or low complexity. Just your opinion.

I'm a hi-fi nut and I'd prefer not to encode audio at all, just mix it back in with the video encode. But since I'm usually converting PAL from 25 to 24fps I need to stretch and reencode the audio. So I use LC-AAC at about 160kbps for stereo, which is beyond the point of diminishing returns.

[Difatoni]

I'm personally not concerned with encoding time. But I was under the impression that the ateme codec was better than x264. Is handbrake a sufficient program to encode x264 or is it limited? My concern with bitrate is at what point can you in your own opinion tell a difference from the original quality that is worth increasing the bitrate over.

[Difatoni]

When I say ateme is better I mean strictly picture quality, not freedom to choose settings etc.

[Morte66]

IMO x264 makes better encodes than Nero AVC, though it's not a vast difference like x264 xs DivX or whatever.

Note: there's encoder time and there's user time. If you want to rip a four episode TV disc with DVD Decrypter and then encode it with MeGUI/x264, it will take you maybe 20-40 minutes of intermittent clicking between inserting the disc and leaving the encoder to run. With AnyDVD + Nero it's more like 2 minutes to chose content and filenames then walk away. The encoder might run for ten hours in either case, but Nero takes less of your time.

[Difatoni]

Any one else have an opinion?

[DarkZell666]

I doubt there is much more to say, what has been said is perfectly valid knowledge and advice.

[shon3i]

Crop black borders, but never resize. Encode the original pixels and set an aspect ratio on the final file.Do you think to use overcrop to mod16 Clever TM, or what, because if you only crop you will get some non standard resolution.

[Morte66]

Do you think to use overcrop to mod16 Clever TM, or what, because if you only crop you will get some non standard resolution.

I take the non-standard resolution to get the whole picture. I might undercrop modulo 2/4 and leave a few black pixels, because various stuff in the chain insists on that. But the picture is sacred, and I'm not going to lose any of it.

[shon3i]

I take the non-standard resolution to get the whole picture. I might undercrop modulo 2/4 and leave a few black pixels, because various stuff in the chain insists on that. But the picture is sacred, and I'm not going to lose any of it.
Very interesting, i not understand only one thing, did you make movie to have mod16 width and height, because encoders are very sensitive on that.

[Morte66]

Very interesting, i not understand only one thing, did you make movie to have mod16 width and height, because encoders are very sensitive on that.

No, if removing the borders from a 720x576 DVD leaves me at e.g. 720x500, then I encode 720x500. I won't overcrop because I want to watch the whole movie, not 95% of it. I could undercrop mod 16, but I was told (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=836272#post836272) x264 handles that in the background anyway.

[fofwp]

4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?

Crop black borders, but never resize. Encode the original pixels and set an aspect ratio on the final file.



How do you set the aspect ratio in the final file?

[DarkZell666]

@Morte66: I see we have very different ways of seeing things (litterally speaking again :p)

I would have chopped the black bars the most precisely that I can (manually, autocrop fails miserably on some sources), and resized to mod-16 afterwards (with correct picture A/R, not visual A/R), which means I have a *slightly* deformed picture, but I don't mind that because I know I won't notice ;)

[Morte66]

How do you set the aspect ratio in the final file?

If it's a tricky one, I do the math manually and specify it in MKVmerge GUI.

{edit: I was one of the few unhappy users when MeGUI went from Pixel Aspect Ratio to Display Aspect Ratio, because PAR doesn't change after cropping.}

[Seb.26]

If it's a tricky one, I do the math manually and specify it in MKVmerge GUI.
IMO : to simplify the job, always only crop top & bottom black borders, and encode (PAL) 720*size_y frames ...
... so the playback aspect ratio is 1024*size_y ( with PC-square pixels ) ...

432 is a common value for size_y ... autocrop() from avs script give it to me ...

NB: This produce anamorphic frames ( like in DVD ) ...

;)

[Morte66]

@Morte66: I see we have very different ways of seeing things (litterally speaking again :p)

I would have chopped the black bars the most precisely that I can (manually, autocrop fails miserably on some sources), and resized to mod-16 afterwards (wich correct picture A/R, not visual A/R), which means I have a *slightly* deformed picture, but I don't mind that because I know I won't notice ;)

That makes pretty good sense. I wouldn't mind the slight AR change either, but I always want to minimise the amount of resizing. I want a maximum of one resize in the whole rip-to-view chain. If it's a DVD for PC use I encode the original pixels and resize on playback. If I had a handheld, I would resize before encoding to match the display (adding black bars if necessary). If it's 1920xNNNN HDTV for my 1920x1200 monitor, no resize.

[Morte66]

IMO : to simplify the job, always only crop top & bottom black borders, and encode (PAL) 720*size_y frames ...
... so the playback aspect ratio is 1024*size_y ( with PC-square pixels ) ..

Me too. If you just crop the top/bottom (about 95% of DVDs), your DAR is:

PAL 16/9: 1024 x cropped height
PAL 4/3: 768 x cropped height
NTSC 16/9: 853.333 x cropped height or 640 x (0.75 * cropped height)
NTSC 4/3: 640 x cropped height

[Provided you don't get into that ITU resize business, which is a menace on some real world home theatre equipment.]

[Dead Morose]

Hello.

I am about to encode my little anime-clip (3 minutes, but very dynamical and detailed). So I want to know which settings is more preferable to use in x.264 cli-encoder. Clip should be bitrate-limited, so I prefer 2(or 3)-pass encoding with definite bitrate. The problem is that I don't know what settings will greatly increase decoding time, 'cause I want people with old machines (PIII, for example) have no speed problems . Also any decoding lags is critical, so I prefer to use only stable options, which cannot be the reason of b-frame decoder lag or any artifacts, even sligtly noticable. And, of course, the quality of output is the main priority, encoding speed has no meaning, I have enoughly quick cpu and a plenty of time.
What can you advice me?
What options can greatly increase cpu load while decoding?
What options might cause lags and artifacts?

[alec_robertson]

I had similar issues encoding for my archos 604 and found that the h264 baseline profile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles, basically no cabac and no b-frames) worked well and did not skip or drop frames during playback. These encodes also play fine on my old PIII-600 laptop...

[bananacreamandpeca]

I just want everyone's opinion on what they prefer. Just trying to get a general feel.

I'm surprised such a thread asked in this manor IS tolerated.

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
Dunno. But the feedback is pretty great for these. I would give them a try.

2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
Always the highest possible profile, no restrictions.
If it is overkill, I'm not sure.
I do not have to deal with compatibility problems, cuz I
do not watch AVC encodes on a standalone.

3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
I always do tests to see what bitrate the encoder chooses for the encode,
and then decide if it is enough or not.
Full DVD reso is pretty high and will need more bits to retain quality.
I always downsize a bit. But never go beneath 480.
Technically I dunno why, but it sounds pretty 'sound' to me.
720 is overkill, then you should rather play the DVD instead.

4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
I'm a resize noob. From what I learned you cannot overcome
errors in some cases. But as I gathered the picture will be
resized to proper AR upon playback. Though not always is
my experience.

5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
Autocrop is easy, but I always check.

6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
I'm new to AAC, and I dont care what they say about it.
I encoded some AAC files, and do not find quality to be transparant enough.
I know the sound of MP3 pretty good and it's familiar I know what to expect
Actually I find theres 1 LAME build wich is the best for me, and never failed me.
That is 387b from December 2000. On Hihats it never fails me. Stereo seperation retainment
even on joint-stereo is the best.
And Joint stereo encodes always sucks in my setup on newer LAME builds.
Never knew why they praised the newer joint stereo in LAME so much.
It destroys stereo information, no matter what they say.
They shouldnt have tweaked too much. Nerds.

7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
2 pass takes way too long, and from experiments 2 pass-
encodes never were really all that to my eyes.
I restautaurate AVI's done by others. Wich will have much artifacts and noise.
2 pass encodes never gained any much more Q for me. And it takes twice as long to encode.

8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
Always de-interlace unless I want to transfer to DVD.
Wrong De-interlacing can bring new problems wich you don't want
DVD -> pc deinterlace -> DVD could introduce faults
(I could be wrong)

9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?

I always use VLC or BSplayer.
They work fine becasue they are fast, small, do not have these quirks
players have like Mplayer.

[ageha000]

Hi,
I'm Mac user(PowerPC), Using MEncoder, ffmpeg and mp4box, to get x264+aac.mp4. and my Mac don't have Front Row.

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
No chance to test. ;)
2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
---(I prefer High Profile).
3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
1024kbps for Video stream.
4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
auto resize, if available.
for instance, 720x480 to 640x480.
cause MEncoder seems do not have sar option. and QuickTime Player can not understand some VUI infos.
5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
auto crop, if available.
6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
128kbps+
7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
I do 2pass only.
8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
deinterlace most of the videos.
9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?
VLC.
sometimes QuickTime Player Pro+avc1 Decoder (http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/)

[DarkZell666]

Lol here's my go at it (let's see how stupid I can be in less than 5 minutes) :

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
Certainly not, x264 rocks anyway. Even for it's ease of use, I wouldn't use Nero even if paid to do so :p
2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
Cinema AVC (I don't need HD yet)
3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
Anything that allows me to fit a movie in 700MB (see why in 4.)
4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
I always take the habit of downsizing to <= 640*y, which means the picture is free from artifacts even at 500kbps. I don't mind about too fine details btw (the TV doesn't show them up anyway, so why bother ?)
5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
Dammit stop asking questions about Nero and get real :p Manual crop never fails :p (whatever the encoding solution you choose).
6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
I use HE-AAC (or aacPlusV2, it's relatively the same thing), @ 64kbps or below (32kbps still sounds right for movies).
7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
Always, no matter which codec I use (except when I'll manage to get tyee's GUI to work with x264 for 1.1-pass CRF encoding :p)
8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
I'm usually a stupid guy, and blend-deinterlace everything I encode (even progressive stuff), just because I like the extra softness it gives to the source (and you'll never get aliasing or residual combing with it).
9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?
mplayer (with mpui GUI), because it just about reads anything anyway, and I don't need anything else next to it (oh yeah, maybe foobar2000 for the audio-only stuff).

See ? There as just so many ways of doing things, you'd better start trying some stuff, it's the best way to get the result you want :)

[Seb.26]

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
Never try Recode ... but for sure, I will choose the one with best quality.

2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
... never use ... next please ...

3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
I don't care about bitrate, only quality : 1 pass CQ @18

4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
no resizing : I encode anamoprhic frames directly from source.

5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
crop top & bottom borders myself in my .avs file
( sometimes in DGindex when creating .d2v file )

6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
mux original AC3 stream in final mkv ( or DTS when present )

7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
no ... 1pass CQ @18 ( sometimes lower ... )

8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
before encoding, or on playback ?!

9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?
one easy to install/activate : an old CoreAvc ...

[Dead Morose]

I had similar issues encoding for my archos 604 and found that the h264 baseline profile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles, basically no cabac and no b-frames) worked well and did not skip or drop frames during playback. These encodes also play fine on my old PIII-600 laptop...
Hm... Something tells me, that it is not good idea to disable cabac & b-frames, when the quality is the main priority.

[cacepi]

Hm... Something tells me, that it is not good idea to disable cabac & b-frames, when the quality is the main priority.
Both CAVLC and CABAC are lossless, so neither affect the quality of the bitstream. The primary benefit of CABAC is improved compression at the expense of encode/decode speed. If processing power is an issue like you said, turning off CABAC is probably your best bet.

[DarkZell666]

Both CAVLC and CABAC are lossless, so neither affect the quality of the bitstream. And where does the bitrate saved by CABAC go ? It goes into making the picture quality better (for 2-pass encodes only of course).

[cockpit]

1. Would you use Nero Recode over x264 programs if both were free?
depends entirely on it's functionality compared to the other free ones.
2. If using Recode, would you encode in Standard AVC, Cinema AVC, or High Definition AVC profile?
standard I suppose, not really sure what cinema avc is.
3. What bitrate would you encode the movies?
1300/1400
4. Would you auto resize or disable resize?
depends on wether or not I have to crop
5. Would you auto crop or disable auto crop?
depends on if it gets it right or not
6. What bitrate would you encode the AAC audio?
96 for 2.0, 196/220 for 5.1
7. Would you do a 2nd pass?
always
8. Would you deinterlace all, none, or some of the videos?
if they needed it, all
9. Which decoder do you prefer to play these videos?
ffdshow