XviD 1.0 - Low bitrate settings

[mkarolow]

I'll say this real quick. Please don't judge me based on my lack of previous posts. I am new, but I have done my research. Yes, I searched, I read, I fiddled with the options.

Whew! :cool:

Anyways, here's my project. I am archiving a series of cooking shows. I have extracted them from a Replay TV, so they are about 1.5GB per hour MPEG2. Because i want to archive them on my HD, I'm aiming for 50-75MB per 22 minute (commercials removed) episode. LAME 32 kHz, mono, 48kbit is the audio overhead. This leaves around 300 kbps for XviD.

The vast majority of the compression done with XviD is aiming for very high quality encodes. I’m more interested in “watchable” and small file size. I’ve had excellent luck so far with the following settings, but I’d love to hear input from others. I’m sure someone out there is interested in this as well.

Resize (and deinterlace) D1 NTSC to 320x240
XviD Defaults +:
H.263
Adaptive Quant
GMC
VHQ – 4
Turbo ;)
Trellis
Overflow upped to 10%

[kadajawi]

I'd give it lots of B-frames... push up the number of possible B-frames and the sensitivity, I've got them at 5 in a row and sensitivity 20, tho I'm aiming in higher quality encodes. Play around a bit :)

Oh... and you may make use of filters as lumafilter, undot, convulsion3d etc.

[RadicalEd]

One of the lower quality custom matrices would probably help a bit.

[crusty]

Well at that bitrate I'd say forgo on mp3 and use Ogg Vorbis or WMA, those sound far better at such a low bitrate. Keeping it mono is good, I wouldn't recommend stereo at any bitrate lower than +/- 100 kbps anyway, especially with mp3.

Another thing you could try is soften it up a bit with an avisynth filter like warsharp or unfilter. Even small values will give you much less blocking.
Give both the start and end credits less bits with zones or encode them separately, using some hefty noise filters and lower bitrate.
After all it's the main part of the show you really care the most about now isn't it?

[mkarolow]

Originally posted by crusty
Well at that bitrate I'd say forgo on mp3 and use Ogg Vorbis or WMA, those sound far better at such a low bitrate.

You know, I forgot to mention that I'd like to keep it "standards comliant". Something that, down the road, could be watched on a protable MP4 player or MP4 DVD player. MP3 seemed "safe".

[kadajawi]

oh, then forget the b-frames stuff... :(

[Wolfman]

and also forget about gmc, never gonna be supported on a handheld.

[mkarolow]

Well, I'm not convinced that, in the future, GMC won't be supported in hardware decoders. B Frames already are in the SIGMA EMM 8500 chipset (according to ChristianHJW from this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=45134))

But I do realize that I couldn't play them today. I just want to make sure I can play them in the future. I don't know abouit OGG, but I'm sure harware devices will choke on MP4 video and WMA audio.

[Wolfman]

I did mean a Handheld (archos/Ngage/Vphone/gameboy?)..
You could try drdivx as it has a "potable" profile 320x240 or similar.
v low bitrate.. ooops wrong thread

[BoNz1]

I would use hvsgood matrix and in the two pass set the min quantizer to 2. I would use 2 b-frames. Otherwise, your settings are pretty good.

[kadajawi]

the newer MP3 players from iRiver (well, actually almost all except mine) support OGG or will in a few months. As they intend to make DivX players (of course portable) too, I think they will get OGG support too. I wouldn't trust on what the hardware manufacturers are going to include tho. You never know.

[Nazgul]

I've actually done some encoding at 300kbps with XviD, and here's the settings I used:

H.263
Adaptive Quant,
Motion Precision - 6
VHQ - 4
Overflow upped to 10%
Quantizers min/max - 2/31
QPel
GMC
B-frames, 3/1.50/1.00
Trellis R/D

I'd taken the anamorphic DVD video and used BilinearResize in AVISynth down to 400x224(natural ratio is 400x225, error isn't noticable), followed by UnDot(), and I'm getting pretty darn good results considering the filesize. I may try the next batch with the HVS-Good matrix since it normally gives slightly better results in compressibility tests, but I didn't have great results the last time I tried to use it in really low-bitrate situations. I may have screwed up something in the .avs file though.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by mkarolow
You know, I forgot to mention that I'd like to keep it "standards comliant". Something that, down the road, could be watched on a protable MP4 player or MP4 DVD player. MP3 seemed "safe". Hi mkarolow. Welcome to the forum.

When you talk about MP4 do you mean the container or the Mpeg4 video stream?

If you are talking about the stream, please don't use the abbreviation 'MP4' as it's incorrect and can confuse the newbies!

Is there any reason why you can't archive your 22min episodes onto a cheap media like CD-R?

[mkarolow]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital

When you talk about MP4 do you mean the container or the Mpeg4 video stream?

If you are talking about the stream, please don't use the abbreviation 'MP4' as it's incorrect and can confuse the newbies!


I am refering to the stream, and did not realize the acronym was incorrect. I will only refer to MPEG4 as such from now on.

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital

Is there any reason why you can't archive your 22min episodes onto a cheap media like CD-R?

I'm looking for an "online" solution. I plan (hopefully) to integrate the video with a simple database that includes recipes. Thus, the low bitrate files will, in the end, only consume about 10GB of my HD space.

[crusty]

It's quite possible that new or existing devices could support the MP4
container format, as it's supposed to be the standard.
If you want to use the MP4 container and keep it standards compliant you should really use AAC, as that's the format meant for MP4. It's a good format and it's also quite good a low bitrates.
There are a few really good AAC codecs out there. The best are:

-The AAC codec that comes with Nero 6
-Apple's Quicktime AAC implementation
-Psytel AAC codec
They say that Nero's AAC implementation is currently one of the very best, but it's not free.
Only the Psytel codec is really freely available. Go to rarewares (remember: Google is your friend) and download the Psytel encoder. It even has a nice frontend like Oggdrop called Psyteldrop.
For decoding you can use the CoreAAC directshow filter.

[mkarolow]

Originally posted by crusty
It's quite possible that new or existing devices could support the MP4
container format, as it's supposed to be the standard.
If you want to use the MP4 container and keep it standards compliant you should really use AAC, as that's the format meant for MP4.

How well supported is that (both the container and ACC) in today's Hardware Decoders?

[bond]

i think the question which audio format to use for very low bitrates can be answered with this (http://www.rjamorim.com/test/64test/results.html)

if it would be my decision i would only choose vorbis or he-aac (which is 100% compliant to the mpeg-4 standard, tough i doubt that any hardware players supporting it exist atm)
imo this comparison once again clearly shows how crappy wma9 is

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hopefully, eventually, god willing, in the fullness of time, in the future, there will be such things as standalone and portable Mpeg4 players that will support the MP4 container!

And until such standalone players appear, in order to maintain total PC and standalone player flexibility you will have to stick to the AVI container I'm afraid.

Personally speaking, as an Mpeg4/MP4 fan I really like AAC audio - in both their LC and HE variants.

If in the meantime your only concern is keeping and watching your encodes on a PC, then you can mux your Mpeg4 video streams with AAC audio into either AVI, MKV or MP4 container.

Cheers

[Wolfman]

AAC can also be encoded in nero 5.5 with plug-in. SO, not free but most people already have nero5.5