MeGUI and High profile AVC level bitrates

[fields_g]

I wanted to make my DVD ripped x264 encodes conform to AVC levels.

It seems that level 3 is the lowest which support 720x480 @ 24 fps. MeGui was really good at telling me that I needed to remove P4x4 Macroblocks and that the bitrate was too high. Since I encode in high profile, I chose 12500 for the maxbitrate according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 (the big levels table). MeGUI however wouldn't let me select level 3 until I dropped the rate to 10000.

Am I correct in thinking that I should still be in level 3 conformity if I encode high profile at a max bitrate of 12500?

Any thoughts in general of restricting to level 3 as opposed to unrestricted?

[berrinam]

According to your wikipedia link, you may be right; it seems like MeGUI is just using the Main Profile restrictions. The problem with the Levels checker is I have no way of checking whether the files I output actually conform to the level I hope for.

[check]

x264 does not respect levels, therefore it's rather difficult to create a levels compliant encode with it. I'd suggest you not bother.

[fields_g]

Thanks for the replies. Thought something looked a little fishy.....

I entered an issue into the MeGUI bug tracker. Even though x264 level restrictions might not be enforced, having MeGUI ready for the time that x264 improves is important. Thanks for the confirmations!

[check]

Even though x264 level restrictions might not be enforced, having MeGUI ready for the time that x264 improves is important. Thanks for the confirmations!
Unless you plan on undertaking this improvement yourself, there are fewer than zero signs that this will occur at any point in the future :) The main dev has stated a few times he doesn't really care about levels compliance. Coding support into megui is therefore more or less nonsensical.

[foxyshadis]

The issue isn't that x264 might start enforcing them in the future, it's that you'll spend 8 hours encoding something and it won't play. In this case, it's not a particularly big problem since MeGUI is being too conservative, which is a lot better than too loose. Besides, levels as a minimum standard are fairly useless - you normally don't encode to target a level, you encode to target specific hardware, which will usually have at least some capability beyond its level minimums. I've yet to see any service say "will play on h.264 level 2 hardware and above" rather than "tested to work on these cell phone and handheld models:".