[HELP] Good settings for 720p

[gioppatta]

how to choose the number of reference frame and the other important settings?

[SassBot]

You don't unless you have to meet specific requirements for playback such as for Blu-Ray authoring. Just use the presets and tunes.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yep. You're really best off if you use the slowest preset you can tolerate and an appropriate tune setting.

Are you planning on software playback or hardware playback? Will you be streaming over a network? If so, what's the available bandwidth?

[gioppatta]

the target is a 720p rip in DVD5 muxed in mkv container.

[Blue_MiSfit]

If you're playing on a software player (i.e. MPC-HC or similar), then use 2 pass VBR. Use a bitrate calculator to determine the correct bitrate for your chosen output. For example, assuming your movie is 90 minutes long, and you have a 448 kbps AC3 file, and are targeting DVD5, your target bitrate should be about 6348. I'd be conservative and round down to 6300, just in case.

So, an example command line would be like this:


x264.exe input.avs --preset slower --tune film --bitrate 6300 --stats .stats --output nul --pass 1

x264.exe input.avs --preset slower --tune film --bitrate 6300 --stats .stats --output output.mkv --pass 2


Use a faster or slower preset if you want.


If you want hardware playback, I'd probably suggest using VBV to limit yourself to 2x DVD transfer speeds, since apparently some hardware players don't like to spin faster than this.

Add the following to both passes:

--vbv-maxrate 15000 --vbv-bufsize 15000


If you're playing this DVD5 on a BluRay player that happens to support MKV, you might get better results if you encode an AVCHD compatible disc. This is basically BluRay structure on a DVD5 disc. If so, you might want to read this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=157935

[gioppatta]

thank you!