Philips 5960 USB and AVI ReComp

[Trac]

I've been trying to tweak the 5960 to play videos at a higher bitrate through the USB to improve video quality. Most readers aren’t aware that AVI ReComp has a nice tool built in; Bitrate Spike Control (XviD only).
http://videopedia.pl/avirecomp/e107_plugins/faq/faq.php?0.cat.4.7
By eliminating the spikes, you can increase the bitrate/quality of the entire movie.
Action movies in particular, have a lot of spikes, and it’s like hitting a speed bump during fast frame sequences.
Once the spikes are eliminated, the entire movie plays more smoothly, and I have increased most of them by 35%.
As a general rule, action movies will play flawlessly, if the bitrate is below 2500kbps with spike control.
Dramas and other slower paced movies will play much higher.

I also tried using a SATA hard drive with 16MB Cache, paired with a great sata/usb external enclosure.
There was really no improvement between this drive and the ATA133 8MB drive I was using before.
I really thought the extra cache would improve the USB interface.

BTW; my original conversion is AutoGK, auto width, 160VBR MP3 audio, with the quality setting between 65 and 100%. From there, I reduce it down to the appropriate bitrate with AVI ReCode.

Would like to hear other ideas, or easier/faster techniques.
Anyway, hope this helps.

[jagabo]

I don't know exactly how AVIRecomp does it but you can probably do much the same thing by specifying higher Minimum Quantizers in Xvid.

However it's being done, you're sacrificing quality during those high bitrate scenes to get higher quality during others.

I usually use single pass constant quantizer encoding with the quantizer set to 2 or 3 (I usually don't use b-frames either). At 2 I suspect the DVP 5960 would stutter at times via USB. 3 is probably pretty safe.

[Trac]

Thanks jagabo
I'll have to check that out.
I'm currently at a different computer, so I don't have access to look up the info.

[jagabo]

To set the Min Quantizers: press the More... button to the right of the Quality Preset pulldown, then select the Quantization tab on the dialog that pops up.

[Trac]

What conversion software are you using to keep your defined Xvid presets?
Reducing quality during high bitrate clips, seems to be a necessary trade-off to prevent stutter, but I haven't looked at other options like quantization.
I have browsed an Xvid guide:
http://www.divx-digest.com/articles/xvid_setup_page1.html
Any others I should look at?

[jagabo]

I use AVISynth and VirtualDubMod most of the time.