MPEG4 vs. CCE/robshot/4-pass

[Italbar]

All,

First, the preamble (Skip to the asterisked lines if you don't care and assume I know what I'm talking about):

1. I'm a newbie - first post but lurking for about a month.
2. I've read the guides, searched this board, and looked elsewhere (VCDhelp, etc.)
3. I've done several MPEG2 encodes, using DVD2SVCD as well tweaking the Avisynth file myself. I've made several DivX 4.12 movies using Gknot/Virtualdub.

My Equipment:
P4 1.7Ghz ripping/encoder
HP 100i DVD+RW drive (man that media is expensive)
Sony 30 inch TV w/ SVCD capable DVD player (no miniDVD)
Sony HDTV w/ progressive SVCD capable DVD player (no MiniDVD)
Enough parts and pieces lying around to make a decent HDPC for non-standard playback.

My Goal:
My main goal is to archive the main movie on my DVD's on a cheap media like 1-2 CDRs with Transparent Quality (in other words you can't tell the difference without *really* looking) assuming that I will be able to transfer these to DVD+R or DVD+RW when the price of that media goes down.

Criteria (in priority order):
1. Excellent Video Quality, even on HDTV
2. Excellent Sound Quality, 5.1 a plus
3. Ease of transfer to DVD+RW
4. Standalone (SVCD) compatibility.

Observations...

1. DVD2SVCD is a **great** program!
2. However, the SVCD maximum bitrate limitation and the required resize hamstrings encoding with transparent quality. Fast motion scenes just don't cut it, the Q factor (when looking at bitrate analyzer) for those sequences often goes up into the low teens.
3. Robshot's method seems like a great way to optimize non-SVCD compliant MPEG2s, at least as a starting point.
4. MPEG4 standards appear to be still in a state of flux - DivX 3, DivX 4, etc. with no "true" standard forthcoming anytime soon.

***************************Questions**********************
***************************Start reading here*************

Is there a clear MPEG4 vs CCE/robshot/4-pass bitrate crossover point?

My current premise is that multi-pass CCE with a low-bitrate matrix is as good as or better than a DivX 4.12 at the same bitrate.

Based on my (limited) encoding experience these two settings appear to provide my with the same visual quality:

DivX4.12
--------
Avg. Bitrate 2363 (calculated for a particular movie to fit to 2 CD's - I assume most DivX encodes are +/-1000 of this bitrate)
2-pass VBR encoding in VirtualDub (from Gknot w/ .24 bits/pix)
AVS file created by Gknot (cropping, etc. with some revisions by me - Graft's Telecide [anime for one movie] and using Simple Resize)
Only minor resizing (7xx by 4xx)

CCE
--------
Avg Bitrate 2363 (**same** as above), min 800, max 9000
4-pass VBR encoding
Andreas SVCD matrix
**Same** AVS file for each test

Assume audio, muxing, etc. all equivalent - but really only care about visual quality at this point. This just assumes that both would fit on 2 CD's.

Has anyone else done a similar test?

If this is normal (and robshots' claim that he could fit 3 full length movies on on DVD-R suggestes that this kind of result is not impossible) then why in the world would I ever encode a movie using MPEG4?

Is there some type of scene type that MPEG4 is clearly superior to CCE 4-pass w/ low-bit-rate matrix using the same filters/etc.?

Considering I can get the same quality, the same filesize, isn't MPEG2 a better method (assuming I don't care about true SVCD compatibility)?

For those grizzled veterans of the MPEG2 vs MPEG4 - what are the fatal flaws in my assumptions? Am I just not good enough at DivX encoding? All the clips looked to be at or near transparent quality to my eyes, though I haven't checked on my HDTV yet.

Thanks for reading.

Italbar

[buba king]

ok.. its impossible to make transperant encodes of dvd atm.

If you want 6 channel audio you need to use the ac3 file in a XviD or DivX(3/4) file Since SVCD does not support multicahannel audio. Another Soulution, If you wan't higher video bitrate you should rencode the ac3 to a multichannel Ogg Vorbis file and mux to a OGG Media Stream (very beta though).

Side Note:(I've been thinking though, if you could mux the ac3 in the svcd the standalone decoder should be able to decode the ac3 (since dvd uses ac3).. donno.. never tried :P )

[orbit-r]

hi
i tried to mux the ac3 stream with the mpv and it went fine
but the standalone wasn`t able to play it
i think the svcd spec. don`t allow dd5.1
another thing is multichannel sound which is possible to make
but will not play on many standalones(only 2 phillips i believe)

gruss
orbit-r

[Italbar]

Thanks for the responses guys. :D I've tried 5.1 on my player as well and it doesn't play it.

I am wondering, however, if anyone else has tried a direct comparison between:

1. Standard DivX two-pass encoding with optimization by GKnot at an SVCD bitrate (~2,300)

and

2. CCE 3-4-5-pass at the same SVCD bitrate, source, filters, etc. however, *without* the handcuffs that SVCD places on maximum bitrate (in other words VBR 2,300 with 9,000 as maximum) and resolution.

I plan on doing what others in the forum do: One SVCD compliant set of discs for my standalone, one set of discs with either DivX or a non-SVCD compliant MPEG2 stream for computer viewing or HDPC viewing.

My testing of the above conditions shows them to be equivalent or MPEG2 slightly better - I don't see any reason why I should encode the second set of disks in DivX if I can get the same quality using CCE (I don't really care how long it takes) and have a DVD-compatible MPEG2 file that I can just import and master when the cost of DVD+RW media goes down.

Has anyone done this sort of test and can confirm to me that I am not missing something? I would love to hear other people's results of a comparison between the DivX codec and a CCE encode at the same (SVCD-ish) bitrate. The last thing I want to do is put my movies in the wrong format.

Thanks again for the responses.

Italbar

[orbit-r]

hi
i think for pc viewing is divx the best since it`s designed for it.
for my divx movies i used the fairuse wizard which produces high quality that most fits on one cd(i remeber up to 110mins on1cd)
naturally you can go higher with the #of cd`s...

for me its like following:
svcd+divx watched from pc to monitor or tv---best divx
svcd on standalone----better than divx
(for svcd i mean mostly used numbers of 2(sometimes 3)cd`s)

but when i had known that i will buy a standalone in the near future
i maybe only did svcd`s:o

sorry for my english
gruss orbit-r