Best/Fastest video encoder for linux...

[cyrofilho]

Hello all,

I want to create my dvds in linux only, my source video will be from my dv camera and i want to burn dvds with menus and ac3 audio. I can use dvgrab or kino to grab the video from the dv camera, and avidemux2, kino or cinelerra to edit the movies and encode the videos to dvd (mpeg2) format, but my doubts start here. Which one of these 3 softwares are the best to work with, by best i mean the best quality and the fastest. How these softwares compare with tmpgenc encoder quality and speed, are they much slower than tmpgenc? Are the quality of the encoded videos worse than tmpgenc ones?
Avidemux2, kino and cinelerra use the same encoder (mpeg2enc)? Or any of them use a diferent one? Is ffmpeg quality better than mpeg2enc? And what about transcode? Does anyone have make a comparison about avidemux2, kino and cinelerra encoding speed and quality? Which one is the better?
About authoring i am thinking in keep windows, because dvdauthor is very complicated at the moment, and i need to have menus. Is there any Gui or script simplify to dvdauthor dvd image creation process yet?
Sorry for so many questions, and tanks for the time. Bye

Cyro

[DarkShadow]

Here are my ansers as best I know them

mpeg2enc I heard is awesome quality but it is the slowest thing in the world as such I never had the time to encode more then 30 seconds of video which is not to good to base anything on

ffmpeg I would suggest if not for one problem that may be fixed soon. As it stands I can get awesome looking REALTIME 720x480x6mbps dvd from my tv capture card *no hardware encoding just raw uncompressed* and that is not even multipass or postprocessing but then again I said there was a problem and that is that it doesn't honour that max bitrate yet which causes short spikes above 10mbps and may cause problems on some dvd players

tmpgenc probably the best idea out of your list until the problem with ffmpeg is fixed

cce faster and better quality the tmpgenc or anything but costs a couple thousand

[courtrrb]

Where did you find tmpgenc for Linux? I thought he wanted to stay in Linux. the only thing I do in windows any more is the capture. I use avidemux2 for all encoding. My DVD look fine family & frinds can't tell the difference between the tape or DVD.

[DarkShadow]

I have used tmpgenc under winex and had it worked fine. just that it takes work to install codecs

[rekonrad]

Mencoder as part of mplayer is amazingly fast. You'll need to download the lastest cvs version though. There are a number of scripts available that automate and optimize the results. You'll find some at http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=170
and
http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=189

I have a athlonxp 2500 (1800mgz) and I encode a kvcd anywhere from 70 to 130 frames per second! Its really true.

You'll find information on how to get the lastest mplayer at the first link.

[nomad311]

it looks like all the threads on the 'best' linux encoder are pretty old so could anyone tell me whats the best as far as quality today ...and if possible the best in terms of quality for speed -as in app1 is lossless and takes 10 days for a dvd and app2 is indistinguishable on a tv and takes 2hrs :->

a second question: are there any programs that simply give you information on videos like avicodec on windows. if you dont have windows avicodec tells you everything ie bitrate, height, width, video/audio tracks, weather or not you have the codec, etc . im sure you can find this info in several of the encoding programs out there but its a hassle to figure it out for each one

thanks ppl
-nomad311

[courtrrb]

On your second question that would be idvid. One of the tools from tovid.
As for speed. It realy depend on the video clip your converting.
I still use avidemux. The last time I had to convert a video
was when I was using windows to capture but that iwas a long time ago.
I record directly to mpeg ,

[nomad311]

ha it would be tovid ...im still working on getting all its dependencies ...ubuntu is great as far as installation and usage but when u dont have a nice .deb package u gotta work pretty hard since most of the compiling software isnt included

...ah well thanks
-nomad311

[binks120]

im with courtrrb on this one avidemux 2 rocks i also hear that kino and lives should encode but ive not trodden that path yet