Dealing with Blocks

[Lorek]

I'm kind of new to encoding with x264 and i've been running up against a problem with blocks in my gradients, shadows, and dark colors. Typically I encode from a DVD progressive source so no de-interlacing takes place. Upping the Bitrate seems to have no effect, i'm usually encoding @2500, and having more reference frames seems to only make the blocking worse. My encodes with a CE-High Profile seem better and more clearer then my encodes on HQ-Insane. I only seem to run up against this with animated content though. Are there any suggestions I can use to clear up this annoying block issue?

[Dark Shikari]

Adaptive quantization is your friend, use --aq-strength 0.5 or higher.

[Lorek]

That's odd its saying unknown command when i add that to my CLI. I must be doing something wrong.

[Zanejin]

AQ (adaptive quantization) is not available in the SVN builds of x264. It's a patch that's included in builds by Cef (http://mirror05.x264.nl/Cef/).

[vpupkind]

AQ (adaptive quantization) is not available in the SVN builds of x264. It's a patch that's included in builds by Cef (http://mirror05.x264.nl/Cef/).
Where can I get the patches themselves?

[Sagekilla]

You'll find the patches under the "patches directory" if you checked the link out.

[Zanejin]

For clarification, the said patch's file name is "x264_aq-brdo.diff".