trying to start using vorbis

[shpanks]

hi i'm sick of mp3 and am trying to do everything vorbis but before i get started i heard vorbis actually offers better compression than mp3 (which is primarily why i'm converting myself)so... i want to know which settings to use. I've also been told that vorbis is only good using vbr.

At the moment for my audio cd's i encode mp3 files @ abr192kbps whats the equivalent for vorbis in quality??

For my divx movies i encode abr128kbps mp3 files for the soundtracks whats the equivalent in quality??

I've been told that 128kbps mp3 files delivers near-cd quality and 192kbps offers cd quality. Since i'm trying to keep the size down on video files i tend to use 'near-cd' quality instead of cd quality but i would love not having to sacrifice any quality or channels for that matter. Please could you offer some advice.

also when using gknot which option do i select for interleaving and avioverhead. i use abr mp3's so does that mean i select 1x ac3 because its only the 1 stream or 1 vbr mp3 because abr is a form of vbr; or does the term vbr strictly only apply to vbr encoding??

thanx shpanks

[ivan_alias]

The best thing is to do some searches in the forum and have a read. This is covered over and over again.

Having said that I'd suggest trying q0.2 for soundtracks and perhaps 0.4 for audio backups. You really have to try yourself and see what you like.

To answer your main point, vorbis does indeed give the same quality as mp at lower bitrates in all my tests.

[The Belgain]

You might want to go for -q5 for your audio CDs (the scale normally goes from 0 to 10, though some programs scale it to be from 0 to 1). That would give you a bitrate averaging at 160, and should almost certainly sound better than 192 mp3. Having said that you may find that -q4 (128 average) is enough; different people are more or less sensitive to different codec's artifacts (for example I'm quite sensitive to mp3 and aac artifacts, but not so much to ogg so I can use fairly low -q settings).

I haven't tested as much for movies, but -q2 (80 average) might well do the trick, and if not -q3 (96 average) should. As for the muxing overhead, GKnot won't calculate it accurately for you since you won't be using avi, you'll be using the ogg container. The overhead will be much smaller than in an avi container (but there is still a muxing overhead).

[shpanks]

thanx 4 that i made some .ogms outta some video clips i captured and i used q 2.5 and it seemed pretty much the same as the raw .wav so yea... mayb i need a phatter soundsystem but i've yet to rip another cd but when i do i'll try q 5 prob the idea is too get lower bitrates then mp3 so if i do something higher even though i know the quality is better i was still satisfied with the 192kbps on my mp3 files 4 music and 128 4 movies