720x480 at 480x480 bitrates?

[brett]

I've had very good luck doing single-disc 352x480 and 480x480 SVCD's. The quality's just fine. The problem is that I'd like to be able to also drop these MPEG2's into a DVD authoring package (like TMPGEnc DVD Author) without having to recompress.

I can make 352x480 rips that work great as SVCD's (or XSVCD's?) and can be burned onto 100% compliant DVD's. That works great. The problem is with regular anamorphic DVD's. I'd like to encode in anamorphic, but the DVD spec doesn't allow 352x480 anamorphic. So, I can just letterbox things and it works out fine, but I'm trying to see if there's any hope for making XSVCD's in 720x480 anamorphic.

I'm not trying to get amazing quality; I just want it to be a 720x480 stream. I'd be perfectly with quality that was the same as a 352x480 movie.

I tried using my standard heavy filtering that I use for single-disc SVCD's, but I still gave tons of blocks if I use 720x480.

I tried making my script process the whole movie at 352x480 then resize to 720x480 before giving it to avisynth. I was hoping this would just make 720x480 with the quality of 352x480, but it didn't work out too well -- it still has tons of blocks. D2SRoBa had to take the Q up to 281.

Is there any way to make things easier on the encoder?

Next I'm going to try processing at 360x480 and using PointResize to 720x480, so it doesn't introduce any blurring... maybe that'll help.

[brett]

FACAR was somehow screwing up my letterboxing, so I made a new script
that functions the same. It doesn't bother with horizontal overscan,
and it simply forces the letterboxing to either 0, 16, 32 or 48 pixels
on the top and bottom.


[AVISYNTH_Brett's 720 Anamorphic Crunch]
0=# based on Manolito's Homie FR QMF BlindPP FACAR script (FACAR was between QMF and 2nd UnDot)
1=DetectedTop=^DetectedTop. + (^DetectedTop. % 2) # if odd, round up to next YV12 Chroma block
2=DetectedHeight=(^DetectedHeight - (^DetectedTop. % 2)) DetectedHeight=(DetectedHeight - (DetectedHeight % 2))
3=DestinationWidth=^TargetWidth DestinationHeight=^TargetHeight
4=LBox=Int((DestinationHeight - DetectedHeight) / 32) * 16
5=LBox=(LBox > 48) ? 48 : LBox # max aspect is 2.22:1
6=NewHeight=DestinationHeight - (LBox * 2)
7=CropWidth=Int(Float(DetectedHeight) / Float(NewHeight) * Float(180)) * 4
8=CropX1=(720 - CropWidth) / 2
9=Import(!qmf15b1.avs)
10=BlindPP().BilinearResize(360,360 - (LBox * 1.5),CropX1,DetectedTop,CropWidth,DetectedHeight).UnDot().STMedianFilter(8,32,0,0).QMF().UnDot().Deen().Temporalsoften(2,3,3,mode=2,scenechange=6).BilinearResize(DestinationWidth,NewHeight).AddBorders(0,LBox,0,LBox)
11=function Low_Motion_Filter(clip c) { c = FluxSmooth(c,14,0) c = UnFilter(c,-10,-10) return c }
12=function Medium_Motion_Filter(clip c) { c = FluxSmooth(c,7,7) c = UnFilter(c,-20,-20) return c }
13=function High_Motion_Filter(clip c) { c = FluxSmooth(c,0,14) c = UnFilter(c,-30,-30) return c }
^DetectedTop.=56
^DetectedHeight=362
!qmf15b1.avs=C:\DVD\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth2.5 Plugins\FACAR\qmf15b1.avs

[AVISYNTH_Brett's 720 Anamorphic Crunch DetectBorders]
0=LoadPlugin(!AutoCrop.dll)
1=AutoCrop(threshold=20, outFile=!ThisFile.ini, outSection="AVISYNTH_Brett's 720 Anamorphic Crunch", outKeyTop="^DetectedTop.", outKeyHeight="^DetectedHeight")
2=BilinearResize(^TargetWidth, ^TargetHeight)
3=AddBorders(0, ^BorderTop, 0, ^BorderBottom, $A0A0A0)
!AutoCrop.dll=C:\DVD\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth2.5 Plugins\AutoCrop\AutoCrop.dll
!ThisFile.ini=C:\DVD\DVD2SVCD\AVISYNTH.INI


See, it's doing all the filtering in 360x480, then at the last step
does a PointResize to 720x480. It does a pretty good job with 1-disc
anamorphic XSVCD, and the MPEG is also a valid anamorphic file which
can be dropped into TMPGEnc DVD Author so you can put 5 movies on a
DVD with the same encode as the XSVCD.

The Q is getting up to about 120, but the final result still seems as
good as a standard SVCD with a Q of around 35-40.

I suppose this is mostly useful for people with set-top players that
can handle SVCD's with anamorphic 720x480 MPEG2, like the newer
Pioneers.

[tylo]

Just to examplify the new feature in D2SRoBa 3.1.5, you may now add this in D2SRoBa.ini, and get automatic transfer of avisynth script after preview. You can have up to 10 (0-9). :)

avisynth_transfer_0=FACAR DetectBorders|FACAR
avisynth_transfer_1=Brett's 720 Anamorphic Crunch DetectBorders|Brett's 720 Anamorphic Crunch