Issues regarding H.264 bitrate control and subtitles w/ 9t

[xoa]

Hey Major,
First, thank you for all your work on this latest release, it is a significant improvement and now ranks easily as one of the best video programs available for OS X. I have however had a couple of issues using the H.264 encoder in the latest version.

1. The first and more serious is that I can't seem to gain any control at all over final bit rate or quality in the final encoding. Even if I check the "Constant bitrate" option, the bitrate I choose under the Video tab has no impact at all on the resulting size or quality of the encode. In my case, for a test encode of 23 minutes, the encoder always seems to encode using the recommended setting of 1429 kbps at 848x480 even if I manually set it to be higher. I then tried to get some change by unchecking constant bitrate and setting qmin and qmax to the same high value, but this merely caused the final bitrate to go down by about 50%, even though I set the quality level to a high value (45).
-There seems to be some more basic underlying bugs here, though I have no idea if they all come from the same source or not. For example, much of the info stuff seems off. I am not encoding this from a video_ts or anything, but rather from a single VOB. The info button with that VOB selected shows a "Estimated Duration" of 08:25:00.12s, and I know for a fact that the duration is 23 minutes 29 seconds. The audio tracks are 48kHz AC3 at 192 kbps, but the "Audio:" says Mpeg 2 layer 2, 48 kbps, 22kHz.
-If you have any suggestions for something I might be doing wrong or need more information please let me know.

2. Minor, but is the requirement for multiple 16 width values hardcoded into mencoder? I wondered because while 848 is almost the same, 16:9 really should be 853, but that doesn't appear supported here. No big deal, just curious.

3. Regarding subtitles. When using the burn option under filters to create subtitles, and then previewing the result, they display (as expected from previous versions) as having a white outline with translucent light color. This looks fine and is readable. However, after actual encoding to H.264/MP4, the subtitles are burned with the same outline, but are colored solid black. It seems like there is some sort of bug with whatever code is supposed to be creating the text color. Is this underlying to mencoder? Are there more command line options in mencoder with regards to subtitle burning (ie., color, transparency, etc)? Incidentally, using the previous version (ie., H.264/AVI experimental) with the same basic set up the subtitles burned correctly.

Thanks for your help and hard work.

[major]

[..]for a test encode of 23 minutes, the encoder always seems to encode using the recommended setting of 1429 kbps at 848x480 even if I manually set it to be higher.

If you use a bitrate unnecessarily high the encoder will refuse it. It would be like putting more water in an already filled tub. You must first enlarge the tub, eg. use a lower qmin (not higher) or a bigger image size.

.The info button with that VOB selected shows a "Estimated Duration" of 08:25:00.12s

The duration is shown in the video tab under the "min" field, other info is shown in the summary tab. The info button is rather useless, I plan to remove it soon.

is the requirement for multiple 16 width values hardcoded into mencoder? I wondered because while 848 is almost the same, 16:9 really should be 853, but that doesn't appear supported here. No big deal, just curious.

It is the mpeg standard itself that encodes the image in blocks of 16 pixels.

3. Regarding subtitles. When using the burn option under filters to create subtitles, and then previewing the result, they display (as expected from previous versions) as having a white outline with translucent light color. This looks fine and is readable. However, after actual encoding to H.264/MP4, the subtitles are burned with the same outline, but are colored solid black. It seems like there is some sort of bug with whatever code is supposed to be creating the text color. Is this underlying to mencoder? Are there more command line options in mencoder with regards to subtitle burning (ie., color, transparency, etc)? Incidentally, using the previous version (ie., H.264/AVI experimental) with the same basic set up the subtitles burned correctly.

Was it a VOB subtitle or a text-based subtitle? In the first case you should load a color palette (IFO file).