xvid bitrates for restoration?

[timmus]

I am encoding DV from an NTSC 720x480 29.97 source (AG-1980, old videotapes) into AVI/xvid and I'd like to know what a good video bitrate ballpark is if I want excellent quality with minor lossiness.

So far I am using 3000 kbps, which produces 4 GB files for a 2-hour VHS tape. The slider goes all the way up to 10000 kbps and I assume that's overkill. I am encoding in VirtualDub 1.9.10, with ffdshow xvid codec, min quantizer=2, H.263 quantization, and am using one pass average bitrate, which I don't know whether is good... I believe I tried 2-pass a few weeks ago and it caused VirtualDub to consistently crash.

I tried the search engines for posts about xvid bitrates and could not turn up a clear answer. I don't want to go to h264/x264 as I tried those already and they have audio sync problems, which I don't have the time or patience to debug; xvid seems to be rock solid with no sync issues.

Has anyone here encoded in xvid and if so what kind of settings were good?

[deadrats]

I am encoding DV from an NTSC 720x480 29.97 source (AG-1980, old videotapes) into AVI/xvid and I'd like to know what a good video bitrate ballpark is if I want excellent quality with minor lossiness.

So far I am using 3000 kbps, which produces 4 GB files for a 2-hour VHS tape. The slider goes all the way up to 10000 kbps and I assume that's overkill. I am encoding in VirtualDub 1.9.10, with ffdshow xvid codec, min quantizer=2, H.263 quantization, and am using one pass average bitrate, which I don't know whether is good... I believe I tried 2-pass a few weeks ago and it caused VirtualDub to consistently crash.

I tried the search engines for posts about xvid bitrates and could not turn up a clear answer. I don't want to go to h264/x264 as I tried those already and they have audio sync problems, which I don't have the time or patience to debug; xvid seems to be rock solid with no sync issues.

Has anyone here encoded in xvid and if so what kind of settings were good?

your current settings aren't bad, but instead of using virtual dub with xvid in an avi container (i'm assuming you are using mp3 for audio) i would use media coder with x264, ac3 audio muxed in a mkv container, i've used it with various sources and have never had any sync issues.

[jagabo]

Forget bitrate. Every video is different. Some require more bitrate, some less. Set Xvid to Single Pass, Target Quantizer (constant quality) mode, with a quantizer of 2. That will be nearly indistinguishable from the source. You can go up to 3 for good quality -- just a little macroblocking and loss of detail. This way you will always get exactly the quality you ask for, regardless of the properties of the video itself.

If you use x264 use CRF mode (similar to Xvid's Target Quantizer). Try CRF values between 15 and 21. Lower values give higher quality.

[timmus]

Thanks all. I am going to give MP4/x264 one more try. The barrier so far has been that VirtualDub will not output MP4/h264, and you guys specifically recommended against creating AVI/h264, which I will heed. Also I have had audio sync problems trying to capture in AVI/DV/Type 2 (sync that is ok at first but gets progressively worse over a 2-hour capture). However, Type 1, which is rock-solid, is not acceptable in AVIDemux. Geez. So I am going to give AVI Type 2 one more try and see if I can get this working. If not, I'll go back to xvid.

Too bad all this stuff is so incompatible... that's always seems to be more of a problem than codecs and drivers.

[jagabo]

There's no real problem with h.264 in AVI. The issue is that Windows' VFW library doesn't handle it well. But media players (DirectShow) do fine with it.

A bigger issue is that interlaced video can be a pain to work with on computers.

[timmus]

Well, good news... I started dabbling with ffmpeg last night and found it accepts Type 1 AVI/DV and also creates good MP4/libx264 output. So I'll experiment a bit with this and only go back to xvid if I have problems. My only hesitation is I read somewhere that ffmpeg had issues supporting AAC, so I'm anticipating problems if I want to go whole hog and support PS3 compliant MP4s.