encoding Sopranos DVDs for Eyehome

[sdm]

This following points are relating to Handbrake as an encoder. I have also used ffmpegX's 'xvid mencoder' and 'Divx mencoder' presets and others but had poor results.

I'm in the process of ripping/encoding all five seasons to watch on my Eyehome. I'm trying both Xvid and Divx with AC3 passthrough with video bitrate at 1650 kbps, 2 pass.

Some things I've noticed:
- xvid encodes choke on the Eyehome during the HBO intro, but not ffmpeg encodes - then things return to normal. (they seem fine in quicktime)

- the Sopranos intro section for each episode is definitely interlaced but I don't think the rest is. Is that possible/likely?
If I choose de-interlace the intro looks good, but the the main episode looks the same to me. I don't want to de-interlace source that isn't interlaced. I'm not sure what I should do.

- ffmpeg (divx) encodes have a flaw (large pixelated area) in one frame in the episode intro. Xvid encodes don't have this problem.

- the encodes look darker on my tv (through eyehome) than the original dvds did. When I compare frame to frame on my mac using Quicktime on the AVI and DVD Player on the dvd, the avi is a tiny bit darker but not as much as on the tv. Any suggestions on this?

- I've also encoded one of the dvds using D-Vision (Xvid - 2pass, high quality). It doesn't have the same stall during the HBO intro.

Curiously though, when I open the resulting AVIs in Quicktime, the framerate is reported as 24fps (23.976). In mpeg streamclip it says 29.97 fps. In ffmpegX it says 29.97 fps.
I always let Handbrake or D-vision choose the framerate for me. Now I'm wondering if ffmpegX, streamclip, and handbrake are all reporting 29.97fps when the avi is really 23.976 with 3:2 pulldown. Or I wonder if the source is really 23.976 with 3:2 pulldown and the avi is really 29.97fps with NO pulldown. In which case I should have been encoding at 23.976 fps!

- Now I just ran another test - I ripped one chapter from one DVD and put it into ffmpegX. It reports the framerate is 23.967 with 3:2 pulldown!

What the heck is the framerate of these DVDs? And does anyone know if its the same for all five seasons?

As is probably obvious, I am wanting high quality encodes, ones that I can watch on a larger higher-res TV when I get one (right now I just have SD tv). File size isn't a big issue, as long as they are smaller than the mpeg2 originals.

Can anyone shed some light on these questions?

Thanks for reading such a long post!

-sdm

[Spoffo]

I don't know about ripping from the DVDs, but the intros and outros to Sopranos and other HBO series have caused me all sorts of grief when I've tried to capture them (from the broadcast HD down-convert) on a DVD-RAM disk, transfer them to my Mac and then clean them up in streamclip. There are always timecode breaks and other video junk in the transition between the 4:3 intro and the 16:9 HD main program. Streamclip tries hard to fix them, but they still cause the encoder to drop off and report an error.

The only work-around I found when encoding was to completely strip off the intro and outro, and just encode and burn the main episode itself.

(I've since just taken to editing them on the hard disk of my stand-alone recorder and then just doing a copy of the complete Video TS to my Mac just to re-set the widescreen flag and re-burn. No encoding, so no problmes with the intros. It wastes a -R blank, but at 20 cents, who cares?)

[sdm]

Hi Spoffo

I think you mean the HBO intro, right? Not the intro to the episode (Tony driving through new jersey and arriving at his house).
Anyways I've had trouble with both.

Do you happen to know if they are broadcast with NTSC film framerate - rather than standard 29.97?

Thanks, SDM

[Spoffo]

Yeah, I mean the "last week on . . . " piece from HBO.

The problem isn't with the intro itself, it's the cut between the intro (or the "next week" outro) and the episode. The intro is a SD 4:3 piece of video produced as standard NTSC. It goes through some kind of up-converter to turn it into a 1080i feed for the HD channel, then at the end, they cut over to the actual 1080i video of the episode itself. When I'm watching, this is usually an ugly jump cut, where the timing isn't quite right at the beginning and end.

Streamclip reports time code errors at these transitions, and at these points the encoder in Toast sometimes quits and reports an error even after Streamclip has supposedly fixed teh timecode breaks.