Automatic choosing optimal settings for encoding??

[Lupissimo]

It's just a thought!

Having not too much experience in encoding I wonder:

1. Is it possible by some algorithm to determine the most critical parts in a video??

2. Is the "noise" PSNR a valid criterion for optimizing encoding??

If 1. and 2. is true I could envisage a prepocessor which scans the data for critical parts ( lets assume less then 10 each 5sec. long )and then optimizes the encoding parameters until the PSNR is max.

I know that all the gurus will clobber me and tell me I should just read the readmes etc and then just do this manually, but why should I spend hours trying to do what a computer can do for me!!

Certainly the experts know how set the parameters depending on the material, so all they need to do is formulate their criteria in a way a program could use them. The rest would be a fairly straight forward optimization.

Lupissimo

[Sirber]

IMO, a computer is not a humain, and there is no "optimal" setting. It's a matter of personnal preference. :)

[unmei]

basicly you already have that. you tell xvid/divx etc in their setup dialog what bitrate you want and the codec does adaptions, at least if it's not a pure cbr mode.
What you still could do were defining things like a "motion treshold" after which you want to enable/disable features (qpel,..), but for the preferences sake i like it when i can set such things when i want them on my own. and my eye is not a psnr-meter..:)

[SoonUDie]

1. As unmei said, codecs that use a 2-pass system try to keep optimal visual quality by prioritizing bits to different areas. So, I guess you could say "yes".

2. No. I don't think there are really any "good" metrics out there, as it stands.