good codec to use for burning lossless video to dvd at good quality

[bringthenasty]

i've started a vhs-to-dvd project that's been met with nothing but problem after problem. i use virtualdub to rip vhs with h.264. the resulting quality and file size is great. however, i want to burn these rips to dvd while retaining the quality without using multiple dvds.

i've used cinema craft encode sp (cce) and tempgenc. cce seems to want to split the source file into separate audio and video files and tempdenc... well, i just don't know which technical settings to use.

what i am looking for is one-click conversion that requires no further editing/processing/etc. it was a pain in the arse getting these from vhs to h.264 in the first place. all i want to do now is get two to three hours' worth of footage on one dvd.

that shouldn't be too much to ask, should it?

[mariush]

Get HuffYUV or Lagarith codecs and use them to capture the VHS video in Virtualdub, they will give you about 50% reduction in file size compared to lossless capturing in Virtualdub. Leave the audio to PCM audio, uncompressed... If your tuner is capable record straight to 720x576 or 768x576 or 720x480, use those resolutions...

That probably will take about 1.2 GB a minute a 250-500 GB drive is very cheap these days and it's worth getting one if you'll have several tapes to convert.

Then just create the AVS (Avisynth) script to open the video, crop the junk out and the black borders, deinterlace, make sure the width/height are multiples or 4. Once you do the first script, it only takes a couple of minutes to adjust it for the second tape and so on.
Once you have the avisynth script, get MeGUI, open the script with megui, select one of the presets it has (for example DXVA-SD-Fast is good enough for vhs transfers, and does two pass automatically so it's good quality), and last select the bitrate you want the movie to have.
You can determine the bitrate you want using the MeGUI calculator, but a very rough approximation ... for a 3 hour video with 128kbps mp3 audio to fit on a DVD the maximum bitrate would be around 3200 kbps, so if you set 3000 kbps you'll probably be safe. I think 3000 kbps is also more than enough for h264 for SD resolutions.
Run the same script a second time through MeGUI to encode the audio to mp3 128 kbps - this will be done in about 5 minutes - and then mux the video and audio in an MKV file using the MeGUI muxer (it's in the Tools menu).

[Audionut]

All codecs work, not all have the same quality or speed.

[Inspector.Gadget]

mariush, MeGUI profiles no longer work.

[mariush]

I'm using x264 1259 with the latest MeGUI and I find it works just right. Well, anyway, it's the last x264 version MeGUI reports anyway and I assume it's the one before weighted prediction but for a VHS I don't think it matters much...
If I'm wrong contradict me, by all means...

[aegisofrime]

It seems to be my understanding that all MeGUI does is to pass settings to x264. That is, if you are using Presets, it's all good since Preset settings are most likely stored within x264 itself...

If I'm wrong please correct me, I'm here to learn!

[bringthenasty]

Once you have the avisynth script, get MeGUI, open the script with megui, select one of the presets it has (for example DXVA-SD-Fast is good enough for vhs transfers, and does two pass automatically so it's good quality), and last select the bitrate you want the movie to have.

so i created my avs and loaded it with megui. i saw a list of presets to import while megui was updating, but i canceled all that bcuz i wasn't sure if should be making any selections at that stage. still, though, i didn't see anything about dxva-sd-fast at that time, nor can i seem to find it anywhere else. i am going to experiment a bit with it, but any more info you can throw at me would be appreciated =D

edit: btw, i am using the h.264 encoded files for this bcuz i didn't want to encode them with another codec. would this have anything to do with why i can't see those options?

[bringthenasty]

also, what's this about megui profiles and them not working? i guess i will run into any problems along the way

[Inspector.Gadget]

MeGUI's old profile system passes only

program --profile high --level 4.1 --preset fast --pass 2 --bitrate 1000 --stats ".stats" --slow-firstpass --thread-input --output "output" "input"

to x264 no matter the profile you select, UNLESS you manually set all the parameters you want to use.

For example:

http://i34.tinypic.com/14ctt8o.png

[mariush]

... or just make sure you click on the "Advanced settings" button before you close the profile so that the template settings are added to the command line.

bringthenasty: you don't see the DXVA-SD-Fast preset because you didn't add any presets when you installed the software. you were supposed to right click and select "Check all" and import them in the software, after that they're available in the selection menu..

[qyot27]

Really, all the talk of H.264 and MeGUI here is misplaced, and only relevant because the initial problem were the H.264 copies that were made from the VHS transfers before. You're essentially telling them to do VHS->Lossless->H.264->MPEG-2. They stated in their first post they want these on a DVD (which I'm assuming means standard DVD-Video because of referencing CCE and TMPGEnc, not a DVD as a data storage medium).

Hence, the proper method would be:
VHS->Lossless (HuffYUV or Lagarith or FFV1 video + PCM audio)->MPEG-2 video + AC3 or MP2 audio meeting DVD spec compliancy

As to the plea for a one-click solution (and DVD authoring to boot), then DVD Flick (http://www.dvdflick.net/) might be what you're looking for. Just record the VHS to a lossless file with HuffYUV or whatever, and then hand it over to DVD Flick to do the rest. Or, for that matter, give it the existing good quality rips - just be aware that fitting 2-3 hours on DVD-Video requires transcoding to MPEG-2, and in many cases using bitrates that might show some artifacting (although I've fit 3+ hours on a disc before and it was relatively unnoticeable, even though the max bitrate was somewhere between 4000-4500; if you're using 352x480/576 or 352x240/288, then it would be trivial to fit 4 or 5 hours on a single, single-layer DVD, as for 352x240/288 you can safely use 2000kbps and not really have to worry about degradation - it'll just look a little blurry on a big screen or HDTV, but it would do that anyway, being sourced from a VHS tape whose native resolution is comparable to about 200-240 vertical lines as it is).

My workflow for DVD authoring is more intensive, and nowhere near one-click or even GUI-based (except for certain tasks). So any other suggestions I might give would be out of place here.

[bringthenasty]

marisuh.. got the video portion working just fine it seems. i am impressed with the size of the resulting mkv file. the original avi is 1.47gb, but the muxed mkv is 33mb. i did a side-by-side visual comparison, too, and the processed video seems to have retained much of the same quality =D.

however, the audio is not right after the mux. sounds like the pitch has been lowered so that everything sounds as if you slowed the video way down. i listened to the ac3 file and it sounds fine. it's the muxed file that sounds like that. it the audio encoder setting i am using is aud-x mp3: *scratchpad* and it uses all default settings. any idea what i am not doing right? thanks for your help so far. you're getting me in the right direction ;)

[Inspector.Gadget]

Don't use Aud-X, it's an unusual "surround" extension to MP3 and widely incompatible. Use LAME if you want MP3; and for sheer compression efficiency, Nero AAC seems to be the choice.

[bringthenasty]

qyot27 - that's exactly how i ripped the audio/video (pcm/ffv1).

the video was ripped at 720x480 and is interlaced, so it seems i am going to have to go about advanced methods such as what has been discussed in this thread rather than using a commercial application if i want to achieve optimal results, correct?

so should i use mp2 or mp4 for burning these videos to a dvd?

[Inspector.Gadget]

Are you hoping to watch these vids on a DVD player, or just use the disc for storage and do PC-only playback?

[bringthenasty]

Don't use Aud-X, it's an unusual "surround" extension to MP3 and widely incompatible. Use LAME if you want MP3; and for sheer compression efficiency, Nero AAC seems to be the choice.

ah... that was the problem. thx =D. now to process a test file and see how many dvds i can waste before getting everything just right =\

[bringthenasty]

Are you hoping to watch these vids on a DVD player, or just use the disc for storage and do PC-only playback?

dvd player

edit: turning a bunch of old home videos into dvds for the family

[Inspector.Gadget]

Then skip MeGUI, etc. entirely. You can only use MPEG-2 video and AC3, LPCM, or MPEG-1 Layer II audio within the DVD spec (I assume you'd rather skip MPEG-1 and don't own a commercial DTS encoder).

[qyot27]

qyot27 - that's exactly how i ripped the audio/video (pcm/ffv1).

the video was ripped at 720x480 and is interlaced, so it seems i am going to have to go about advanced methods such as what has been discussed in this thread rather than using a commercial application if i want to achieve optimal results, correct?

so should i use mp2 or mp4 for burning these videos to a dvd?
The simplest way for all this to be one-click is DVD Flick, then. It's free (as in beer and speech), so that's not something to worry about. It should accept FFV1 and PCM without problem, and convert properly to MPEG-2 and AC3. I don't know how DVD Flick (or rather, the ffmpeg routines it's set to use) handle interlacing, so you might want to deinterlace and give it Progressive video instead, just to be extra-safe (DVD Flick does accept AviSynth script input, so those .avs files should work fine).

Just be sure to use the right standard - PAL or NTSC - for your DVD player (NTSC for North America+Japan generally, PAL everywhere else).

I can't recall how the length/quality settings worked in DVD Flick, but either choose a bitrate around the 4000kbps mark (for 2h22m; 2700kbps for 3h30m), or tell it to fit to 2-3 hours, or however much you need.

[mariush]

qyot27 - that's exactly how i ripped the audio/video (pcm/ffv1).

the video was ripped at 720x480 and is interlaced, so it seems i am going to have to go about advanced methods such as what has been discussed in this thread rather than using a commercial application if i want to achieve optimal results, correct?

so should i use mp2 or mp4 for burning these videos to a dvd?

Ok, so you capture them in ffv1/pcm at 720x480 interlaced.

AVISynth has some built-in deinterlacing functions... here's the page with them: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Deinterlacing

If I were you I would try LeakKernelDeint, just add it after you load the avi file in the script, something like this:

LeakKernelDeint(0)

Where the value between brackets is 0 or 1, just watch the movie and you'll see which value is right. Or just follow the instructions in the documentation.

Documentation page is here: http://leak.no-ip.org/AviSynth/LeakKernelDeint/LeakKernelDeintHelp.html
You may need to download it and copy it into the plugins folder of avisynth first. Link for download: http://leak.no-ip.org/AviSynth/LeakKernelDeint/LeakKernelDeint_1.5.4.zip

Now at this point if you want to actually have a video DVD that you could play in a DVD player, you'll have to encode the video in MPEG2 and the audio in AAC. For this, you can use lots of software and I haven't done much work with mpeg2 lately so I can't give any advice.

If you just want to store the videos on DVD, encoding the video to h264 and audio to mp3/ac3/aac and mux video and audio to MKV file and you're done.
You could also choose aac for audio and then mux the h264 video and aac audio to MP4 format, which maybe you'll prefer because it runs on Playstation 3, iphones and other Apple crap.

[kypec]

Now at this point if you want to actually have a video DVD that you could play in a DVD player, you'll have to encode the video in MPEG2 and the audio in AAC.
AAC audio is NOT SUPPORTED in standard DVD-Video discs. Use only LPCM or AC3 (Aften can be used for encoding).
You may want to give a try AVStoDVD (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=126647) application to create your DVD easily.

[mariush]

I meant to say AC3... was thinking in advance at how to write the next paragraph (as English is not my native language) and I wrote AAC insted of AC3... my bad.

[bringthenasty]

looks like my next actual step is to encode to mpeg2 rather than go through all this other stuff. downloaded dvdflick and will give it a try tonight. will also be posting a new thread in the mpeg2 forum since this one is headed in that direction.

so thanks to everyone for the help =D

[type1encryption]

although i dont think this is the right forum, I will enrichen you with my experience with a similar problem.

I encoded a lossless video via avisynth filtering and HCenc, got a DVD-compatible mpeg2 file. (I resized correctly - that is inverse - to ITU-xxx)

I reencoded a AC3 file to 25 fps via avisynth and megui with aften.

Then I used the super simple AVS2DVD (where I had to manually disable resizing) to custumize a menu and produce a iso to burn it with my current iso burner.

[type1encryption]

With VHS source: look into deinterlacing (if necessary) and definitively consider (test it!) MDegrain1 to degrain your losslessly captured source.

I (using Win7 RC1) had some problems with source filters. Directshowsource didnt work in all steps of my processing scheme, so I had to rely on ffdvideosource or whatever it was called.