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Originally Posted by Digital Corpus

I have deblocking turned up dues to the nature of MPEG-2 video from my local networks. What is broadcast in my area always has some minor blocking issues and depending on which network I'm recording from, it can actually be pretty bad. That seems to be my optimal range from the tests I've done and it doesn't affect quality more than the visible macroblocks already present.

Have you tried deblocking the source with MEncoder's filters? That should give better results.

Generally true, but I see VBV as a two fold option. As kinda hinted at, I have this setup for friends/coworkers that don't have their own DVR and would like to grab shows to watch. I'm mostly targeting the Xbox 360 and the iPhone/iPod Classic. Since this kind of requires web access, I thought I might as well make things streaming compatible if I could. That and if I can guarantee that a CRF encode won't surprise me with a large file size, then VBV will serve a purpose there. Unless you have a better suggestion.

You also need VBV for device compatibility, even when using ABR or 2-pass rate control.

If you can provide some help with me getting mplayer to pipe to x264, I'm all for it. My current attempts have failed, but there has to be a way.

There are many ways, but using yuv4mpeg and a FIFO is pretty easy on Linux:

mkfifo pipe.y4m
x264 --preset fast --crf 22 -o output.264 pipe.y4m &
mplayer -really-quiet -vo yuv4mpeg:file=pipe.y4m input.ts

Audio needs to be encoded separately and then muxed with the video to an appropriate container.


Or just copy the preset settings over to MEncoder as Dark Shikari suggested. Remember that the defaults (no settings) are the same as the medium preset, also in MEncoder, so you only need to add settings listed by x264 --fullhelp for each preset.

For example, to encode with the fast preset, put rc_lookahead=30:ref=2:subme=6 to x264encopts. The following command does the same thing as the piping procedure did above:

mencoder -ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=22:rc_lookahead=30:ref=2:subme=6 -nosound -of rawvideo -o output.264 input.ts