x264 encoding help!

[mCmAl]

Is there any simple way of adding borders while preserving quality?

[Keiyakusha]

There is Avisynth command AddBorders() but I don't understand how adding borders is related to x264.

[mCmAl]

Sorry for my not-detailed post.I want to change the resolution of the video I am testing from 1280x544 to 1280x720,just by adding borders (in order to keep the AR).The video I am using is encoded in x264,and I have already experimented with avisynth.I wanted to know if there is any faster way,which doesn't include re-encoding.

[Dust Signs]

I want to change the resolution of the video I am testing from 1280x544 to 1280x720,just by adding borders (in order to keep the AR)
Why don't you let your playback software do that for you? All good players support adding borders while keeping the original AR at playback time. So there is no need to reencode anything - this would be a stupid idea anyways if you consider the inevitable quality loss and the effect of unnecessary borders to the bit rate required.

Dust Signs

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Blu-Ray requires fixed resolutions, like 1280x720 or 1920x1080. So adding black borders is your only option here...

[mCmAl]

Well,whenever I re-encode a 720p movie,I seem to lose quality.Am I doing something wrong?

Should I use filters,a specific profile in MeGUI?(using avchd one now)

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Well,whenever I re-encode a 720p movie,I seem to lose quality.Am I doing something wrong?

Re-encoding is inherently lossy, unless you re-encode to a lossless format! The latter will result in a file MUCH bigger than the source was, of course.

Should I use filters,a specific profile in MeGUI?(using avchd one now)

First of all: Give it enough bitrate to minimize the additional loss caused by the re-encoding step.

Furthermore some denoising (e.g. MDegrain) may be helpful to improve the compressibility of your source video...

[Snowknight26]

The latter will result in a file MUCH bigger than the source was, of course.
*most of the time.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

*most of the time.

Show me a source taken from real life (not some synthetic one) that is stored in a lossy format and that does not become significant bigger when converted to a lossless format ;)

[Adub]

Show me a source taken from real life (not some synthetic one) that is stored in a lossy format and that does not become significant bigger when converted to a lossless format ;)

I second this request. All lossless encodes (by definition) are freakin' huge in comparison to a lossy rendering.

[Snowknight26]

Show me a source taken from real life (not some synthetic one) that is stored in a lossy format and that does not become significant bigger when converted to a lossless format ;)

Though I don't have any video samples on hand, but it was of a video of a desktop capture.
I did, however, have the same thing happen just today with audio. 1536kbps E-AC3 -> FLAC resulted in a sub 1200kbps bitrate. Granted, E-AC3 is decoded to floating point and was dithered to 16-bit, but smiliar concept.

</tangent>

[Comatose]

It's only really perfectly smooth surfaces like desktops or whatever... for example, a completely black 7680x4320 image is 4KB as PNG (and 700 bytes if you RAR that PNG), but about 11KB as quality 100 JPG.

[Dark Shikari]

It's only really perfectly smooth surfaces like desktops or whatever... for example, a completely black 7680x4320 image is 4KB as PNG (and 700 bytes if you RAR that PNG), but about 11KB as quality 100 JPG.Both of them are lossless in this case--the only difference is that JPEG doesn't have run-length-encoding in the same way PNG does, so it's really an issue of entropy coding.