XviD Settings

[Rice_Boy]

Hi all, i know i shouldnt use the phrase "show me your best settings" and im not going to.

My delimma is that when i encoded in xvid back in the beta days i understood (mostly) about what the settings did and what was best for each type of video encode, but since the introduction of official Xvid 1.0 i havnt been able to make heads or tails about the new setiings and options, even with the current doom9 explainations.

So im asking you encoders who have been able to make (what you think is good) qualty conversion please post or email your settings in screenshot or text, id like to use these settings as a guide or clue to what i should be doing,

thanks for listening

Rice_Boy
Rice_80y at hotmail.com

[JarrettH]

I think most everyone can agree on...

- 2-pass
- Q-Pel on
- Motion Search=6
- Changing the Aspect Ratio to suit the release...some DVD features are in 4:3 while the movie is in 16:9
- Chroma Motion on
- MAX I-Frame interval should be 10x your frame rate
- and Trellis on

Everything else is pretty much subjective after that.

[Teegedeck]

Yeah, there's not much important to add; except for 'set VHQ as high as you can endure' and perhaps for the usual 'don't change the default b-frame settings!'

Aside from that, GMC has also positive effects, but costs a lot of time.

Adaptive quantization is liked by some, distrusted by others. I always use it.

[pelle412]

Unless you're trying to squeeze movies into CD-R disks I would run encodes in a single pass with quantizer 2. I encode to store on DVD-R so if a movie becomes 1000MB as opposed to 700MB it's not a big deal plus I'll save the time of one extra pass. The settings I use are:

1-pass Q2
AQ
QPEL
GMC
VHQ4
Chroma Optimizer On
I frame interval 10x framerate
+ everything else at XviD defaults

I also encode unresized/uncropped sources with aspect ratio set in XviD.

[JarrettH]

Does AQ only lower quality because "perceptually" we don't see it? Based on that understanding, I just leave it off.

[Teegedeck]

If you encode with AQ, you might have some macroblocks in a frame that have quantizer=3, some that have quantizer=4 and some that have quantizer=5.

If you don't use AQ, you are likely (in a 2-pass-encode) to have the whole frame encoded with quantizer=4.

A bit rough of an explanation but I believe you get the point.

You cannot simply say that AQ lowers quality.

[el_rico]

I do not see how a movie (assuming usual duration) can fit into 1GB with these settings. Also, what is the point of not cropping the source? I see this as a waste only.

IMHO 2 passes are always a gain, even (or especially...) when using DVD-R: if you can squeeze a movie a little more with the same quality, then you can add more redudancy information (using Parchive2, e.g.) to increase the chances to rescue a dying DVD-R. It is not worth archiving movies if you do not try to minimize the risk of having them unreadable after 1 year.

But, yes, a major drawback is the time. I generally set the compression process to a low priority, to let the PC usable if needed and I generally don't stay in front of my machine.

Originally posted by pelle412
Unless you're trying to squeeze movies into CD-R disks I would run encodes in a single pass with quantizer 2. I encode to store on DVD-R so if a movie becomes 1000MB as opposed to 700MB it's not a big deal plus I'll save the time of one extra pass. The settings I use are:

1-pass Q2
AQ
QPEL
GMC
VHQ4
Chroma Optimizer On
I frame interval 10x framerate
+ everything else at XviD defaults

I also encode unresized/uncropped sources with aspect ratio set in XviD.

[pelle412]

Originally posted by el_rico
I do not see how a movie (assuming usual duration) can fit into 1GB with these settings. Also, what is the point of not cropping the source? I see this as a waste only.


Some very light noise removal helps me get 3 - 4 movies onto a DVD-R with those settings. I see your point about cropping, it is a waste.

Originally posted by el_rico
IMHO 2 passes are always a gain, even (or especially...) when using DVD-R:

My own tests showed me that the best result 2-pass can possibly achieve is that equal to 1-pass Q2. For a filesize limited encode 2-pass is the obvious choice.

[Teegedeck]

Keep in mind that GMC doesn't work if you leave the black borders.

[pelle412]

Originally posted by Teegedeck
Keep in mind that GMC doesn't work if you leave the black borders.

Do you crop mod16 to get rid of the border?

[Teegedeck]

Usually, yes. If that would mean cropping too deep into the picture for my taste I settle for mod8 (that's seldomly the case).

[loni_blues]

@Teegedeck,
Since you encode anamorphically to max out quality, how do you resize? I used the matroska AR flag before but have been told that the resizing performed during playback probably is not as good as Lanczos resizing anyway.
Thanks for any help,

loni_blues

[Teegedeck]

You can try to resize using Lanczos with ffdshow. It was too slow for my liking though. BTW, your movies always get resized when you go into full-screen mode anyway (in order to adjust to the display resolution); there are worse things in life.

I use the pixel-aspect-ratio flag in XviD which mkvtoolnix uses to set an output resolution for the mkv. So the flag is set in both the stream and the container.

[loni_blues]

Thanks!

Is there any substantial difference if I just set the AR flag in the container and not in the stream?

[Teegedeck]

If you set the AR in the stream you'll be able to get automatic resizing on any Linux mplayer setup without matroska-splitter; and it also would make for remuxing to mp4 if you might want to do that one day. IMHO the AR belongs into the stream and setting it in the container is just a workaround.

[ChronoCross]

I'm going to agree with teegedeck. from my experience if you don't set it in the avi file using xvid even the latest mkvtoolnix will get confused and try setting it to an incorrect resolution.....something odd is going on here in the code of mkvtoolnix...I haven't figured out what yet but it must be related to the crashing of the program when I use it more than 5 times in a row without closing it. if you set the aspect ratio in xvid mkvtoolnix doesn't set it's own defaults automatically and just uses the avi's AR.

[Teegedeck]

BTW, I have found out where the 'only works with H.263'-confusion stemmed from: XviD's Trellis was implemented for H.263 before it was implemented for MPEG (and MPEG quantization means all kinds of MPEG matrices). Some of these temporary caveats alas survive the problems that initially made them necessary (the same goes for some users' suspicions about higher VHQ-levels).

[loni_blues]

@Teegedeck,
Thanks for the advice.
Still wondering whether to set the AR in Xvid as Pixel-aspect-ratio or Picture-aspect-ratio. What´s the difference?
Thanks a lot.

[Teegedeck]

There is a guide (http://seemoredigital.net/03_Video_Only_Info/What_is_an_anamorphic_encode.html) by SeeMoreDigital which will tell you about the differences.

And perhaps reading this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=537503) will let you think that the standards are not adhered to and it's all a bit messy and complicated.

[Rice_Boy]

thanks for you help guys