Encoding settings from scene releases for private use?

[ashrobb]

Hi... So basically, after a while tweaking with MeGUI (I tried handbrake previously) I hit the exact same settings of YTS for their 720p encodes according to mediainfo

https://i.imgur.com/dllGWVW.png

I do know they aren't the best around, but they are nice for phones and stuff which is where I watch movies since I travel a lot.

Thing is, my sources are pretty good, over 12 gb files with nice bitrate like several of the common WEB-DL sources found online, some of them are remuxes, but what I encode look considerably worse to theirs, very blocky and shitty.

If I'm hitting the same settings according to mediainfo at the same bitrate, what gives? What am I missing? Filters? I can't get any info online about the exact settings used by these people, or RARBG for example, or any other group. Seems to be a private thing out of competition or something.

I know I could just pick a constant quality and a preset and get pretty encodes, I'm not new into this, but I would like to be in control of the filesize/bitrate WITH an acceptable visual quality like these groups do, and their encodes don't look extremely blocky or shitty specially on low res screens. Can I get some guidance here?

[benwaggoner]

It's very hard to say without some examples of sources and output to compare. Animation content can also be pretty sensitive to scaling algorithms if you are reducing size a bunch.

There is some oddball stuff in there, like chroma_qp_offset=-3, and only three b-frames, that seem likely to be very content type specific but not generally optimal.

[Emulgator]

bitrate=1150 seems starved to me @720p, I would just give more bits.
qpmax=69 opens the door to blockiness, I would limit that to qpmax=48, if you allow for bitrate
open_gop=0 forces bits into closing a GOP. You would gain a few bits for that if you allow open gops.

And what Ben said about nature of sources.

If you NEED to stay at 1150, you NEED to preprocess, degrain everything into utter smoothness,
and encoder may see more chances to drop high frequency coefficients without destroying details.

[VoodooFX]

YTS/RARBG are not from the scene, and those settings are crap.