Encoding quality

[NiteFlame]

Hello,

as someone with an increased vision, I am not very good in rating quality of my own encoded material so I'd like to have some opinneons on what You could tell me about it.

At the moment, I am using SVCD-PAL settings with 2pass VBR and bitrates to fit about 50 mins onto a 80min cd-r media.
Well, I have very much material to encode and it takes aproximately 9 hrs to encode 2 hrs of avi material with my 1.4 GHz athlon cpu.
Is the quality much lower when using CBR instead of the 2pass vbr and is there a bitrate that I shouldn't fall below when using CBR?

Thanks for any comments and hints!

Regards,
NiteFlame

[fantomlord]

Hello,

as someone with an increased vision, I am not very good in rating quality of my own encoded material so I'd like to have some opinneons on what You could tell me about it.

At the moment, I am using SVCD-PAL settings with 2pass VBR and bitrates to fit about 50 mins onto a 80min cd-r media.
Well, I have very much material to encode and it takes aproximately 9 hrs to encode 2 hrs of avi material with my 1.4 GHz athlon cpu.
Is the quality much lower when using CBR instead of the 2pass vbr and is there a bitrate that I shouldn't fall below when using CBR?

the difference between CBR and VBR isn't necessarily quality--it's more that you will be able to fit longer videos onto a CD with the same quality with VBR as you will with CBR. if you encode a file with CBR and then with VBR with avg. bitrate the same as the previous CBR setting, you should see basically the same quality, with the VBR file smaller. so, what that also does for you is allows you to get higher quality with the same file size using VBR as you would with CBR. the downside is that VBR takes much longer to encode due to the multiple encoding passes it requires. hope that helps

[kinneera]

For 50 min. on a disc, I would stick with 2-pass. 9:2 encoding time actually isn't too terrible if you are using TMPGEnc.

[NiteFlame]

thank You, that helps a lot!
Of course, my vision is decreased, not increased :-).

Regards,
NiteFlame

[NiteFlame]

[quote="kinneera"]
For 50 min. on a disc, I would stick with 2-pass. 9:2 encoding time
I've done most of my encoding with 2pass vbr with TMPEG, but what do You mean with "9:2"?

Yours,
Niteflame

[burned_once]

By 9:2, he means 4.5 x real time -- 9 hours for TMPGenc to encode 2 hours of video. It sounds good to me.

I run a 1.6 GHz P4 with 640MB PC800 on a 400MHz bus. My TMPGenc encoding runs 10 x real time for MPEG-1 XVCD @ 2.35 Mbps CBR -- 3.5 hrs. to encode 21 min. Guess I should have got an Athlon!

[fantomlord]

By 9:2, he means 4.5 x real time -- 9 hours for TMPGenc to encode 2 hours of video. It sounds good to me.

I run a 1.6 GHz P4 with 640MB PC800 on a 400MHz bus. My TMPGenc encoding runs 10 x real time for MPEG-1 XVCD @ 2.35 Mbps CBR -- 3.5 hrs. to encode 21 min. Guess I should have got an Athlon!

that seems a little too slow to me
I just did a 2 pass VBR on a 1 hour clip, avisynth frameserving with a bicubicresize, and virtualdub plugin subtitles in under 7 hours on my PIII 800 MHz w/512MB SDRAM!
have you tried increasing the task priority of TMPG under options?
if you set it for high when active, you can leave the window maximized when you are doing nothing else with the computer, and it seems to give a decent increase in encoding speed(I don't have any hard numbers to give you, but comparing our encoding speeds...)

[SatStorm]

Hmmm....

With my Athlon XP 1700 I encode 1 hour avi/mpeg-2 in 2.45min....
So, 9 hours is slow I guess.

It is the use of filters that slow down the encoders. Only de-interlace and cropping don't take time....

Also, with the new tmpgenc 2.54 plus, adjust your templates, 'cause using older ones, don't work right.

[goranlucic]

I think encodng also depends from other things, not just CPU.
I have Sony, Tv490, P4, 1,7 Ghz, 512 RDRAM, Maxtor 80 Gb and WD Caviar 120 Gb.

With the same TMPGsetings settings (create awesome quality) I encode avi/mpeg2 aprox. 1 min 1:40 min on Maxtor drive (5400 rpm) and aprox. 1:10 min on WD drive.

I found out that changing the priorty does not improve the encoding time. However, if you do oher stuff besides encoding e.g. burn dvd, encode DVD movies, and play the game on the web; it can be hassle.