X264 Ultra vs Turbo Profile

[Beak]

Hello. This is my first post in this section.

I have been using x264 to create avchd backups of my bluray discs for the car.

The gui I use is Xvid4psp. It offers turbo and ultra profiles with a huge speed increase for turbo. I keep the core DTS stream and on a two hour movie, I get a video bitrate of about 7000 burned to a DL dvd. I use 2 pass.

The question I have is this. I have encoded several movies with both ultra and turbo and they all look great, difficult to tell from the original.
My backup of Knowing,done in turbo, shows no sign of breakup or pixelation even in high motion scenes with fire,smoke,rain,and a steady cam running scene, all at the same time.

Is it worth using the Ultra preset at all given the time tradeoff? Is there a type of artifact I am missing?

Thanks for any and all opinions.

[RunningSkittle]

trust your eyes ;)

[Dark Shikari]

We are not Xvid4PSP devs, so we have no idea what "ultra" or "turbo" actually mean. I can only give you advice on actual x264 parameters.

[Astrophizz]

Ditto the above and this would be better in the GUI sub-section.

[Beak]

Hi. Sorry if I posted in the wrong spot.

The encoder was using the following arguments

First Pass

x264 [info]: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x1:0 me=dia subme=1 psy_rd=0.0:0.0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=0 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=2 thread_queue=2 nr=0 decimate=1 mbaff=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=1 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40(pre) rc=abr bitrate=4120 ratetol=1.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30 aq=1:1.00

...last pass...

x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 Cache64
x264 [info]: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x1:0 me=dia subme=1 psy_rd=0.0:0.0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=0 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=2 thread_queue=2 nr=0 decimate=1 mbaff=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=1 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40(pre) rc=2pass bitrate=4120 ratetol=1.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 cplxblur=20.0 qblur=0.5 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30 aq=1:1.00


There is a lot of flexibility in changing setttings. Generally a 2 hour movie has a six hour encode time.

Which setting will improve quality the most and keep encoding time around 12 hours?

Thanks very much

[JohannesL]

Use x264.exe (http://x264.nl) and a preset. e.g. x264 --preset fast --crf 22 -o out.mkv
Or MeGUI.

[Forteen88]

subme=1 and me=dia sucks for quality/bitrate. I'd at least use default.

[ajp_anton]

If that's your "Ultra", I'd like to see your low-quality settings.

[Beak]

Use x264.exe (http://x264.nl) and a preset. e.g. x264 --preset fast --crf 22 -o out.mkv
Or MeGUI.

Thanks for your advice. Megui with unrestricted 2 pass HQ setting is yielding super quality in about 10 hours rather than 24.

The quality is much better.The fogbank battle scene in Master and Commander is pretty challenging for any encoder but there is no gross blocking like I see with Xvid4Psp.

Not sure why the other Gui and software is so slow, but I don't care either. Megui allows me to cut credits and add filters with ease.


Thanks for your advice and thanks to any developer of this great software and anyone who helped in the tuning phase.