Thinking of re-encoding for x264

[magnetite]

I'm thinking about re-doing my library for x264, however, I'm wondering how well some of these DVDs will look? Not sure if they will just be smaller in file size or is there a huge difference between x264 and Xvid? I plan on watching these upscaled through my PS3 on my 46" 1080p LCD TV.

A lot of my DVDs I bought were shows from the 1990s, although there are some like 24, Fringe and such which are newer, and might benefit from x264, although like I said, most of my stuff is older, which means it was probably shot on 16mm or 35mm film or has a bunch of artifacts already within the source.

I remember Stargate SG-1 looking kind of grainy through the first 3 seasons and I think that was when they used either 16mm film or super 16mm. Later they switched from super 16mm/16mm to 35mm and finally HD in season 8.

Perhaps I can get an expert's opinion on this who's re-encoded from Xvid to x264?

[creamyhorror]

Perhaps I can get an expert's opinion on this who's re-encoded from Xvid to x264?
Despite your phrasing here, I assume you're not actually considering re-encoding from an XviD source to x264. That would just be plain dumb.

If you encode your DVDs to x264, you'll no doubt receive somewhat-to-significantly better quality for videos, but it'll take a really long time. You may be better off using MakeMKV or manually remuxing the DVDs to MKV. Or simply keeping the existing XviD encodes and doing only the new ones (and your old favorites) in x264.

[Trahald]

Reading through his whole post, I believe he means encoding from the DVD.

[magnetite]

You're right. I'm basically taking my DVD and putting it into x264.

[nurbs]

MP4 got better hardware support (PS3, XBox360,...), but that may change because DivX7 uses MKV and Webm is basically a MKV container as well. MKV offers more flexibility with what audio codecs you can use and supports more subtitle formats. That you can put transfer sub/idx directly from DVD to MKV is very convenient.
If you go with H.264 video and AAC audio that would allow for both MP4 and Divx7 compatibility and you can always change the container by remuxing.

[magnetite]

I'll do a few tests of my older stuff and see how it looks. If it's the same, then I'll do the newer stuff in x264 and leave the older stuff as is, as someone pointed out.

[Malic]

Well, how big are your xvids? You can preserve quality even w/ that codec if the files are large enough. If they were too small, though.. moving to x264 could really help.

[CpT]

I bought the complete set of sg1 - atlantis and now sgu "as their released" on dvd/blu-ray where available.
But I wanted them accessible on my media center pc aka stored on hard disk for both backup reasons and quick viewing access.

After encoding one or two episodes per season to check the output and adjust params I encoded them all.
On a 120Hz hdtv I couldn't tell the difference if I had to.

I use a 1 pass --crf 18 encode with 0 resizing or cropping - using NeroAac and the .mp4 container.
The end result video is 450Mb -550MB per episode and its damn near lossless.

Even using moderately aggressive encoding settings the output IMO is far better than xvid. Though I suppose it depends on how picky you are.