Best settings for archiving/Why does x264 not mux?

[leaded]

Hey guys. I haven't posted here in a loooooong time. I'm looking for the best settings for archiving video. I'm sure this is asked a lot, so I'll be more specific. Each Sunday at church we record our service to standard definition DV (not to tape but right to DV with a FireStore, which rocks!) and it totals to about 16GB per week. I did some playing around with ffmpegX and it appears that the H.264 codecs yield the highest quality. I used the x264 codec and set the bitrate high, around 6 mbps video and 448 kbps audio, chose deinterlace, and let it go. The result is two files, an audio and a video file. I don't understand why they aren't muxed together; is it because it's bigger than 700mb? Originally, I tried the auto calculating buttons to find the highest bitrate at 700mb and I was left with one file with audio and video, not two.

Also, I used the MOV mpeg4 preset, set the video bitrate to 8 mbps and audio to 448 kbps and did de-int and 2pass and the resulting filesize was 2.63 GB. The video alone on the x264 file was 3.56 GB. Should I just use MOV mpeg4?

Thanks in advance!

[Case]

For the SD resolution of 720x480 at 29.97 fps, 1335 kbps is just about "too high" for the x264 codec, and 2559 kbps is likewise "too high" for the ffmpeg mpeg-4 codec, according to the color indicator in ffmpegX. Using 6000 or 8000 respectively seems kinda over the top in comparison. These codecs do not need MPEG-2 bitrates.
Not sure if that causes muxing errors, tho'.

[reallynotnick]

^I totally agree with him, you are throwing way to much information into that file.

Also there is no need for that much bitrate for the audio, if you want it to sound super duper good 256k is perfect to 99.99% of people. iTunes songs are 128k right now and I think they sound great (not perfect).

[leaded]

Cool, thanks for the replies. I'm new to this, so the explanation and the chart were really helpful. I'm going to cue up some conversions tonight. The last time I did any extensive converting was for DVDs and to get good quality MPEG2 files they had to be around 6-8Mbit, but it looks like MPEG4 and h264 are significantly more efficient.

Basically what you're saying is that there is NO additional quality gain with h264 greater than 1216Kbits and mpeg4 greater than 2326Kb? Anything more than that is overkill? I don't mind going a little higher for the sake of quality, since we may go back and edit these for full quality videos.