NERO Digital

[we7313]

I'm looking to turn my movie collection into mpge4 nero digital files. I'm going to be running windows Media center 2005 with about a terrabyte of space. My main concern is keeping quality (trust me I know nero digital is not a lossless codec) But, is there a bitrate that I should choose to assure quality and save space. Space is secondary (but also the reason I am doing this).

Thanks in advance

[akupenguin]

:readrule:
Don't even bother asking what the "best" bitrate is.

[trott]

surely it should be possible to know what bitrate _should_ give okay results for a given resolution?

[Elias]

Well, if you've got that much space, use very high bitrates. I would. Like 3 mbps for ASP. I wouldn't lower the resolution either, nor would I crop it.

[trott]

The idea is, in fact, to take a video clip in its original proportions and just compress it without making it look bad. I sometimes get the impression that there really is an obsession with making things 'fit on one cd'. If it's a 3-hour movie, 'just take 2 discs'. Some movies will fit on one cd in good quality while other movies of the same length may not look good on one disc.
There are guidelines for everything else out there:
* dvd: 2 hours on one disc in standard quality.
* vcd: fixed bitrate@1150kbit/s so 80 minutes on an 80-minute cd
* svcd: vbr preferred, but keep it above 1850 kbit/s.
And this is just if you want to play it in a standard player, for computer playback you can use quantizers to select the quality.
in contrast:
* divx/xvid/nerodigital: just keep it on one disc and hope it's okay.

I did find quantizer settings in xvid but not really any guideline as to what to use for reasonable quality. I also found it in nero (minimum/maximum quantizers) but also no guidelines as to its usage. I even found this setting (for nero) in both single pass and 2-pass encoding.

[SBaT]

There is just sooo many differently compressing movies that you cant make that simple of an rule for mpeg-4 if quality is your aim. Just encode few samples of the movie and check how well it handles. If you arent going for a target file size you can always just make low quant encodes.