Garbage In = HQ Video Out?

[Pratticus]

I'm curious as to how many passes one would reasonably perform on a 700Mb .avi.

The quality of the .avi is quite good, worth converting to DVD format and burning. From GSpot, the bitrate of the film is somewhere around 1Mb.

Question: How many passes at what AVG/MAX/MIN bitrate would an experienced user perform, since I assume I can never increase the quality of the original .avi.

Thanks in advance.

[Pratticus]

Bump. I'd really like to know the answer to this. I would perform a few tests myself, but viewing .m2v files on my monitor never look as good as they do on my TV.

[segfault]

From GSpot, the bitrate of the film is somewhere around 1Mb.
I assume you mean this is a DivX, which is a quite noisy codec. The rule is garbage in = garbage out. However, that being said, if you put it through the right set of AVISynth filters for cleanup, you can get pretty good results with a DVD or SVCD.

The bitrate at which it should be encoded is a function of the length of the movie and the size of your media. There are lots of bitrate calculators on the net that should tell you what to use for that, or you can try a program called FitCD. About passes, the general consensus is that anything above 3-4 passes in CCE will produce minimal to no quality improvement. Considering the low quality of your source material and the amount of artifacts that will already be present in it, I would say that anything over 3 passes is probably a waste of time.