Have expirence with AVI, never encoded in MP4 before

[Cyber Akuma]

Ive been encoding DIVX/Xvid AVI videos for a while now, and made a few h264 AVI videos.

But everything seems to support mostly MP4 now, and some of my meda players, though they can play AVI and h264 MP4 files.... cannot play AVi files encoded in h264.

So I figured now would be the time to move on to MP4.

I assume I can still use VirtualDub to encode the video stream into a H264 AVI to use later in the MP4 right?

So then, what audio format should I encode the audio in? What encoding app should I use?

And once I have encoded and audio and video, what app should I use to mux them together into a MP4 file?

Thanks

[Baldrick]

Yep, you can still use virtualdub and convert to h264 with the x264 vfw.
I would use AAC audio. I think the Nero AAC Codec is one of the best AAC converters.
And mux to a mp4 using YAMB.

Or switch to an editor or converter that can convert directly to h264 mp4 like avidemux(also editor) or handbrake or xvid4psp.

[mh2360]

You need to create MP4 files that will play on as many players as possible, present and future?

I went through the same dilema when I started converting my vast AVI collection to MP4 a while back (still havent finished).

I decided to go with what would play on as much present technology as possible, such as the Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows 7. Basically anything encoded with an Xbox 360 MP4 template (H.264 with 2 channel AAC-LC audio), will play on all of the above.

If you want 5.1 AAC audio, then things are not so simple. The 360 can't handle it, and i'm not sure about Windows 7.

[Cyber Akuma]

You need to create MP4 files that will play on as many players as possible, present and future?

Well, I personally believe that "future proofing", especially when it comes to media formats, is impossible, at least to an extent.

I just want to encode it as a standard MP4 file that most players expect.

I went through the same dilema when I started converting my vast AVI collection to MP4 a while back (still havent finished).

I decided to go with what would play on as much present technology as possible, such as the Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows 7. Basically anything encoded with an Xbox 360 MP4 template (H.264 with 2 channel AAC-LC audio), will play on all of the above.

If you want 5.1 AAC audio, then things are not so simple. The 360 can't handle it, and i'm not sure about Windows 7.

Windows 7? Shoulden't it be the codecs and player, not the OS, that matters in what you can and cannot play?

To be honest, I have no idea how to tell how many channels an audio file/stream has, or how to retain those channels when encoding.

Most of my files, if not all of them, will likely be 2.0 audio though.

How CAN I tell how many channels audio is, and successfully encode it to another format?

[Baldrick]

How CAN I tell how many channels audio is, and successfully encode it to another format?

MediaInfo.

[mh2360]

Windows 7? Shoulden't it be the codecs and player, not the OS, that matters in what you can and cannot play?

That used to be the case with Vista and XP, but with Windows 7 MPEG4 and AAC codecs are integrated, and MP4 files are now recognised in its media center and WMP12 without the need for any third party codecs.

MPEG2 as well as H.264, Divx and XviD all now play "out of the box" on Windows 7. I have even had some success with my older Div3 encoded files.

The way I see it is, that if you encode your MP4 files to be acceptable to Windows 7's integrated codecs, then future third party players and devices will be a little more likely to accept them as well. Of course that may turn out not to be the case, we can only make an educated guess as to which formats will be popular in the future.

[Cyber Akuma]

Thanks for all the input guys

I quickly recorded some gameplay in FRAPS just to do a test encode to make sure I got it. Overall it was successful, but I have a few questions:

----------------------The x264 encoder----------------------

I am using x264vfw by Laurent Aimar

I noticed some differences when encoding with this compared to Koepi's Xvid codec that confused me, I always used to use a 2pass.

1: I noticed that the encoder has a target bitrate, instead of target filesize. Are there any guides or general guidelines so I can more accurately tell what kind of bitrate I would need, or how large the file would end up?

2: I noticed it had a Nth pass instead of second pass, how many passes do I need to go through?

3: With the Xvid codec, as long as I did a first pass for that video, I could do as many second passes as I wanted without having to redo the first pass (unless I had to do a different video file), is it the same for this encoder? I used to create several second passes of different filesizes to eyeball which one had the best quality while still being of smallest filesize, is there an easier way to do this?

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----------------------Nero AAC----------------------

A few questions with this too, I used to use LAME to encode my MP3 audio.

The command I used to use for lame was: "lame -t -V 0 -b 128 -F input.wav output.mp3"

Which would set it to make a VBR MP3 at highest quality settings while setting the lowest possible VBR bitrate at 128.

I tried the LampXP and eac3t0 GUIs, but they were just confusing, so I just stuck to commandline.

1: I typed -help and noticed that it seemed to have far far less options than LAME, is there no way to do a VBR audio with this encoder?

2: The quality option does not describe what the quality settings mean, and stated they could only go between 0 through 1,,, I tried 0, 1, and various others and got incredibly terrible audio output as a result. What setting should I use for the best quality?

3: I also could not do a 2-pass without specifying a bitrate (again, no VBR?), but I have NO idea what the bitrates for this audio format are and how to know which to choose.

4: By the way, what is the audio format that Nero AAC encodes in called? And what extension should I give the resulting output file?

Any manual settings I tried resulted in a 54K file that to my surprise actually played................. terribly........

I finally gave up and just gave it nothing but an input and output file, letting it do an automatic single pass that came out sounding good at just under a meg, but I would still like to know how to manually tweak it for best quality and how to use 2 pass.

-----------------------------------------------

----------------------Yamb----------------------

Didn't really have any problems with YAMB, just some questions.

1: Is there any disadvantage to using the option "Store file with all media data first (useful for streaming)"? Any reason this shouldn't be on the whole time?

2: Can this app be used to directly convert .3gp files to MP4 without having to re-encode them?

3: The app warned me about using a H264 AVI as the source video, is it ok that im doing this? Is there a better way to encode a h264 video stream to use in Yamb to mux it? I asked about MP4 encoding at doom9 and the people there were rather vocal about not using VFW codecs at all, why?

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=148210

-----------------------------------------------

The resulting MP4 file played fine on this laptop, my older desktop. my PS3 and my Xbox360 (though it needed to download an AAC update) so I assume this is the standard way MP4 files are made.... are they?

Is h264 video and AAC audio the standard for MP4? Or are there other, better options? Is there even a standard for MP4 files?

Also, another thing that came up while I was doing this:

I ripped a VOB file from a DVD that I wanted to encode, The VOB file is unprotected and played just fine in Media Player Classic Home Cinema.

However, I could not get thie file to load in vdub natively.

What would be the best way to demux this file so I can then encode it to an MP4 using these tools? I don't need to cut/filter/crop/or otherwise edit it in any way.

Yes, I know, this is kinda an overly complicated post, sorry.

Can anybody help me?

[Cyber Akuma]

Ummm, anybody?

Also, I found a MPEG2 version of VirtualDub that was able to load the VOb file, but I coulden't get it to encode well. I am aware that you cannot possibly have 1:1 quality when encoding and there WILL be quality loss, but its pretty significant.

Whenever there is motion, there is a sorta interlaced/analyzing-like effect on the edges of objects, which is actually not there in the original .VOB. The original VOB does not appear to be interlaced.

Even when I set the bitrate high enough for the encoded video to be 1/3rd the size of the orginal VOB its still there.

I tried VirtualDub's de-interlacing filter, and although ti helped, it made the overall video fuzzy and while the interlacing effect was gone, some diagonal lines now had a pixelated alised effect.

Any suggestions?

[mh2360]

You seem to be making it far more complicated than it needs to be. Using Vitualdub/Yamb/Nero AAC gives you complete control over the conversion, but for simple video conversions you probably dont need that much control.

I use Handbrake to create MP4 files. I just rip the DVD to my hard drive and point Handbrake to the DVD folder. I have tested Handbrake's files in an Xbox 360, PS3 and most popular media players and they work perfectly.

The one thing MP4 has over AVI is that you can keep DVDs in their anamorphic aspect ratio, so I dont bother with any cropping or resizing, i just encode at full 720x576 (PAL) with the PAR at 16:9. For audio I use 2 channel 160k AAC-LC (for Xbox 360 compatabilty).

What I end up with is a video that looks identical to the DVD version, but is less than half the size.