Thanks nurbs and CarlEdman!
I didn't mean to break rule 6, this is not about illegal content, I just wondered if the settings from the "scene" (who most probably have been spending quite some time finding good and compatible settings) might be useful for me.
So as long as I get something from x264 like:
x264 [info]: profile High, level 3.0
Up to 4.1 (or 3.1 for Apple) I should be good, right? I've now made some encoding lines for SD at 3.0, 720p on 3.1 and 1080p at 4.1. Although I likely won't be using 1080p as that'll take forever on my X2 5600+ 2.9Ghz.
CarlEdman, thanks for pointing out problems with Apple and 3.1. I'm not really planning on buying Apple, but it would be nice to stay compatible, just in case. Looking at the handbrake profiles, many (especially slightly older) Apple devices don't even support CABAC. Well I'm not going to turn that off.
The iPhone4/iPad profile does not have any special options. In fact, it passes no extra options whatsoever to x264. Only reference frames and B-frames are both set to 3, that could be either because that's the highest found in any Handbrake profile, or because iPad/iPhone4 supports no more.
I'll keep the SD-stuff to 3.0, that's what I'll be encoding mostly for the forseeable future.
I've made a 3.1 sample, this should play on an iPhone4/iPad/AppleTV2:
http://www.mediafire.com/?rrmp66hicfnznc3 (don't worry, it's Creative Commons!)
Mencoder lines used for this:
Code:
mencoder "input" -o "output" -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=3500:pass=1:subme=3:frameref=1:bframes=3:threads=auto:mixed_refs:b_adapt=2:direct=auto -nosound
mencoder "input" -o "output" -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=3500:pass=2:subme=6:frameref=3:bframes=3:threads=auto:mixed_refs:no-fast-pskip:8x8dct:direct=auto:trellis=1:vbv-maxrate=16500:vbv-bufsize=17000 -nosound
If it doesn't play I'm going to be confused.