ABR, VBR, min/max bitrate, quality

[sid]

Yeah yeah i know...the old subject on a group....please dont discuss how the group is, just answer my question in the following:

I am encoding divx 3.11 movies with nandub and now i searched especially for the way the group ViTE is encoding their audio...i always read in their nfos that they are using VBR 128-160 (mostly 1cd) and 160-256 or even -312 (for 2cd) or some other ranges. I have a few questions now, i am using BeSweet:

Which min/max bitrate do i have to set in VBR mode for both cases ?
Which quality (1-10) do i have to choose ?

I tried the alt-preset abr, but i want to use vbr..it has a standard setting in alt-presets, but if possible i want to make it like vite does...and since i am not so experienced with BeSweet and audio encoding in general i need to know how they make it...

[pacohaas]

first, don't mess with the max bitrate, limiting it to 256 instead of 320 will not save you more than 1MB for a 2 hour movie.

second, ABR IS VBR, and since you are looking for a specific range, something like --alt-preset 140 might be just what you're looking for, it will give you a nice VBR mp3 in the range you want.

If you really want to follow this group's specs, you'll want to find out if they keep the 48KHz or use 44.1, in the latter case, you'll need to add ssrc to the BeSweet command-line.

I haven't done many complete movies with --alt-preset standard, but I would guess that it might come out in the range you want. Some things you can do to help the bitrate down would be:

--alt-preset standard -Y
--alt-preset standard -b 80
--alt-preset standard -Y -b 80

both are endorsed by Dibrom over at hydrogenaudio.org

Having said all that, you're probably best off going with the --alt-preset 140 or whatever you'd like your audio to come out to.

[sid]

but what is meant if they write that they use 128-160 (if they do 1cd) or 160-256 (or sometimes even -320)(2cds) ? do they really use something like

--scale 1 -v --vbr-new -V 5 -b 128 -B 160

or

--scale 1 -v --vbr-new -V 5 -b 160 -B 256

?
or is somethin else meant with
Audio Format: (128-160kbps VBR )
?

[pacohaas]

most likely they mean that they use full VBR and it just happens to come out between 128-160 average bitrate. At least this is my hope, because certainly a file that contains only 128kbps and 160kbps frames is going to 1, sound worse than a full range VBR mp3, and 2, waste space at times.

[sid]

what switches do you think they use to come out at a range of 128-160
or 160-256 (-320) ? (using BeSweet)

[Blueseb]

I never used besweet command line, but documentation says it uses lame switches so, if u want ~160 Kbps, simply use --abr 160; -q0 is the best quality setting. That's all! setting max and min bitrate is a bad idea, because lame defaults works very well

I have done a lot of mp3 encoding with music with vbr at high quality, and the average bitrate rarely exceeded 196 Kbps but, to be honest, it is oversized;
you will barely hear the difference if you go beyond 160 abr: you must have a fine ear and a great audio subsystem, including your listening room(it's not a joke):sly:

I can't tell you about downsampling (guess why?:D), but, about all the rest, don't fool around and use standard settings, you'll never regret.

btw, if u want better quality/size ratios, start using ogg vorbis; I did and on my opinion it's cleary better, try to believe.

[pacohaas]

yeah, actually if you want to use abr, the best LAME setting to use is:

--alt-preset 160

and -q0 has some problems right now as stated by the LAME developers, so --alt-presets don't use it yet, but don't worry, they're highly tuned presets that will give you the best quality for their given ABR. Now VBR as I said before, would be a better way to go, just try out those commands I gave earlier and see what bitrates they come out to. BeSweet is nice in that it will tell your average bitrate after it's done converting.