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  1. I have managed to capture and store all of my family videos (VHS/Hi8/DV) to my computer in avi format. I now want to encode these to MP4 or some other format so that I can share the videos with members of my family (I intend to give them the MP4 files on USB drive or something similar as they can plug it straight into a LED tv).

    Obviously I want to keep the size down as much as possible whilst keeping decent quality. What would be a reasonable bitrate to encode at?
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  2. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Only you can judge 'decent quality' since you probably mean how the video looks rather than the encoding quality.

    You can use a bitrate calculator to establish a target size/bitrate. While not a precise science, 700 meg for one hour of video is reasonable.

    The better option is to use target quantizizers (lower is better) but then you have no control over bitrate.

    But before you do any encoding, make sure what formats can be played by the family's tvs.
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  3. Originally Posted by akkers View Post
    I have managed to capture and store all of my family videos (VHS/Hi8/DV) to my computer in avi format.
    By AVI I hope you don't mean some XviD/DivX garbage. What kind of AVI? DV-AVI, something lossless, what?

    As DB83 suggests, just do quality-based 1-pass encodes for ... say ... CRF 18 (or 20), see if you like the quality, and then do them all that way and be done with it.
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  4. I think it s MS lossless codec for avi files. Mediainfo shows following:

    AVI (OPenDML)/DVCPRO
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  5. Banned
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    That's lossy DV encoding. It is designed for PC-only playback. Set top players and TV can't play DV-AVI. 50% of the original color and some other data are lost with VHS->DV capture, not to mention encoding VHS noise and defects as digital artifacts. Be that as it may, you can't go to other encoded formats without re-encoding and incurring a generation loss. The extent of quality loss depends on how the tape source was captured originally to DV-AVI and how it's re-encoded to other formats. Smaller file size = lower bitrate = additional loss. Editing the videos as DV-AVI involves re-encoding, although many NLE's use smart-rendering for DV editing (not all of them do. Depends on the NLE). DV-AVI capture usually involves audio captured at DV sampling rates, which is not standard for other formats such as DVD. Depends on how audio was configured for DV capture.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 07:22.
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