Mian Concept Mpeg Encoder for AVI to DVD conversion

[raj777]

I have been looking for a good and fast Mpeg encoder for a few months. After a lot of trial and error, here is what I an keeping.

http://www.mainconcept.com/downloads.shtml

I have tried this new MPEG encoder from Main Concept. It’s a bit tricky to use, has no automated wettings but it wonderful in terms of quality and speed. I am wondering if other people have had any experiences with this. The only difficulty was figuring out the correct settings for the aspect ratio calculation. But again in the end this was better than others in this department also.

Most Mpeg encoders will give you a small number of choices of aspect ratios 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 2.21:1 etc and you will be close enough to the original aspect but not exact. But this one will give to infinite scaling to exactly match the original movie.

I have found it to be most useful for making downloaded movies into DVDs and Playing them back accurately on my 16:9 home theatre projector. I was always bothered by the stretching or squishing of the movies to some extent caused by most mpeg encoders. This is very easy to use No AVIsynth scripts to run (tried frameserving with avisynth, never worked for me, tmpgenc would hang everytime.), and most of all, it is FAST even at the highest quality settings. Just load the Avi film into the encoder and it will spit out a mpg film or a video elementary stream only.

I don’t know if this is the right way but I find it easy and accurate. I am not a video expert, just a regular user looking for a good encoder. I may be worng on some fundamental technical aspects but this works for me so I am sharing it with everyone. Please correct me if I am making any major mistakes doing this. I only found this out by trial and error.

Here is the working of the encoder:

From main window (After loading any movie) go to Details

Check the 2 pass encoding box
Set the search method to 11 or 12
Set search range to 23 to 25

Go to Crop and Scale
(here is where most of the work is to correctly play it on a 16:9 TV)


Uncheck the Keep Proportions box

You should know the aspect ratio of your AVI film. Divide the width by height or Use Gpot to get that info.

WIDESCREEN(aspect ratio 1.77 or more):
720 = WIDTH
720 divided by Aspect ratio multiply by 1.185 = HEIGHT

NORMAL(aspect ratio less than 1.77)
480 = HEIGHT
480 multiply by aspect ratio divided by 1.1851 = WIDTH

Dvd is 720 by 480 ratio is 1.5 and 16 by 9 ratio is well 16/9 = 1.777 so playing a dvd compliant film directly on 16:9 screen will stretch by 1.777 / 1.5 = 1.185. That’s where the 1.185 correction comes in.

Make sure that all the Crop values are at 0 “zero”

Next go to Advanced settings

Make the display to 16:9
Seletc VCSD in Auto GOP
Change bitrate according to your calculation.

I hope you know the bitrate calculations and I am not discussing those here.

I wanted to paste some pictures but this is my first post on this forum and could not get the pictures in.

Finally my moives are not stretched or aquished when I play then on my HT projector.

[guns1inger]

I'm glad you found a solution you are happy with, and it's nice to see advice from a first post where you have obviously put some time in yourself. I wish more posters would go to these lengths first, rather than starting with "Whats the best way to do X ? - hold my hand and guide me"

For what it's worth, I find the Mainconcept standalone a little soft in it's output, however the version that has been tweaked within Sony Vegas does not seem to have the same problem. Even Premiere's version of Mainconcept seems to be better than the one Mainconcept sell themselves.

You might also look at FitCD to help you calculate your resizing. It has a few options that can be helpful in some cases, including optimising for encoding, and adding borders to adjust for overscan (something that seems to cause some people here an inordinate amount of concern). Even if you don't use the avisynth scripts it can produce, it might save you some time and pencil scratching.