Xvid & FLAC in Matroska will be my choice later this year

[callmeace]

Though I am a newbie I have followed & read up about video encoding for a few years. This is what I hope to encode to when I begin my encodes:- Xvid for video & Flac for audio, in a Matroska container.

What I am waiting for though is Xvid to reach at least 1.0, & for FLAC & Matroska to mature a little and a few issues to be dealt with & greater support to be in place for them.

I like the quality of Xvid at medium & higher bitrates, & of course I like the quality of FLAC :) . I like the ideology mostly of the Matroska project as well as of course the playback benefits, I am confident they will be realised soon. Probably I think it will be at least summer 2004 before the above becomes so. We will begin to see a rule with using the above for it to be the norm for 1.2 gb per hour of video considered average normal quality (800mb Xvid video 400mb FLAC audio). I believe if I go for that setup (XviD & FLAC in Matroska) I should have better cross platform support for playback (is that correct?)

Because of increased hard drive & backup media storage space, & of course increased takeup of Broadband, it seems there is less reasons to 'put up' with lossy audio when there are excellent lossless codecs like FLAC available. Lossy codecs were great in their time & for the purpose, but now I see less reason to use them over something like FLAC. Sure there are still plenty of cases when speed of download is of greater importance than having better quality audio, but generally I am talking about archiving or sharing video where quality of enjoying the experience of viewing is important; or it being desired to retain as closely as possible the original quality.
Bearing that in mind, Matroska should do away with some of the annoyances of the AVI format (usually with MP3), because after all when you watch something you don't want your experience to be spoilt. You want to be immersed in the movie. Poor quality sound, or sound that loses synch with the video so you notice it can snatch you out of your mood & back to reality :(

Well anyway, there's some of my thoughts & my reasons why I hope very soon to be going with Xvid, FLAC & Matroska as my choice. I just await some progress and then I look forward to enjoying what the developers of those great projects have given. I am not knocking the older formats, but I like to move on to better quality when it is available naturally. I also thought it would be nice to give some praise to the FLAC, XviD & Matroska developers. As far as I reckon those three will have a big future and I wondered how many others are considering using these 3 as their choice from later this year? :)

[Danzel]

im not sure of the current state of flac decoding on linux.

Where are you going to be getting the audio for this FLAC file from?
out of an ac3?
wouldn't of been better to keep the ac3, with its potentially 5.1 audio and at a smaller size.
Transcoding from AC3 -> FLAC wont make it sound better.

I think that it would be better to keep the original audio for DVD Rips, but for a TV capture or the like then you could convert to FLAC, although most people would prefer a quite smaller file with slightly lower quality audio rather than lossless audio.

What i'll be doing is sticking with Xvid and ogg audio, currently using ogm, but I will definately move to mkv for my permanent encodes in the future, once I feel more confident in my using it.

Remember, most people dont have huge hard drives, lightning fast internet or dvd writers.

Danzel.

[celtic_druid]

Yeah, but if your source is DVD or HDTV then surely you would be better off just keeping the AC3 audio?

[Kurtnoise]

Well.....we can mux already FLAC files in MKV container ;) With the great MKVmerge from Mosu :D

To transcode AC3 files to FLAC or OggFLAC files, you can use fb2k, the most beautiful audio player.:cool:

[tiki4]

Originally posted by Danzel
im not sure of the current state of flac decoding on linux.


Danzel.

FLAC in MKA works for me on Linux with MPlayer 1.0pre3 and installed libflac.

Cheers,

tiki4

[Blight]

There should be no reason to use FLAC in any format unless the source comes uncompressed (Home Video and CD-Audio).

If your source is DVD, use AC3, it's smaller and you won't gain any quality from converting to FLAC. If your source is HDTV, either use AC3 or MPEG Audio, whatever the source came in...

This whole discussion is pointless.

[callmeace]

Ah yeah Denzel, my bad :o Should have stated that I will be encoding from captures of VHS & LaserDiscs of PCM Wave & Lossless (huffyuv)compressed AVI -----------------> FLAC & XviD --> Matroska

I have lots & lots of videos I need to get done before they deteriorate and that is what I hope to do before this year is out, a project :) Also LaserDiscs.

For DVD backups I probably would demux the AC3 audio & 'not touch' it as preserving good quality is important - or if there might be a reason not to keep the ac3 audio format, decode to wave & losslessly compress to FLAC (would this result in no further quality loss?).
I would reencode & compress the video to XviD to get the smaller size I need.
Then as above FLAC/AC3 plus Xvid into Matroska.

[callmeace]

^:p we posted at same time ;)