FairUse question about archiving

[stiltman]

Well my 1tb external drive is full of ISOs of DVDs, so I thought I would reduce the size a little.

I'm taking just the movie and 1 audio track and running it through FairUse.
My conversions look pretty good on my standalone player.
I haven't tried any conversion back from AVIs to DVDs

What do you thing about my settings?
I always choose 720x480 in the previous screen and I've been clipping the credits off
I always set it 2gb file size too

Screenshot of the settings


Any other way to get better quality a 2gb usingXvid for a standalone?

[redwudz]

Looks good to me. What bitrate do you end up with? A Gspot screen shot would be helpful, though it looks like they are about 3126Kbps. If your set top handles that, great. I've been using FUW for H.264 and have been satisfied. Too bad there aren't set top players for that format.

[stiltman]

I never thought about too high of a bitrate

Here's just one screenshot. Most seem to be around 2500, one was 5600 though

[redwudz]

Just from what I've read on this site, I thought Xvid/Divx bitrates over about 2000Kbps were problematic with some players, though no personal experience.

[stiltman]

I guess I'll burn one of the highest bitrate ones to a DVD to see

Edit:
Just tried a movie burned to DVD that was 4856Kb. It also happened to be over 2gb

Can't figure out why, but most all have been 2048 or so. The last 2 have changed in size. One was 2366mb and the other was 2750mb. They were all done with the same settings

BTW, my standalone DVD player didn't have any problems playing it. However it did take it a little longer to read the indexing at the begining

[redwudz]

That's good that the playback works well. I picked up a cheap Philips 3960 Divx player a week ago, but haven't had any time to see what capabilities it has. Most all my Divx/Xvid/H.264 videos are on the servers, but I wanted something to test for compatibility on set top players.

One big advantage to the high bitrate is if you do decide to convert one to MPEG DVD, it should preserve most of the quality. Most of my Divx/Xvid encodes are around 1.5GB and I find that sufficient for my needs. But since they are DVD backups, no real reason to convert them back to DVD format.

I do plan to convert some of my older DVD rips on the server to H.264 and that will be at about 1.5GB also, so I should have a good comparison to the Divx/Xvid backups.

[stiltman]

That was another idea I had.
Use a high bitrate so if there was a case I HAD to convert it to DVD, it would look half way decent. Of cource it wouldn't be 5.1 anymore

I did try to keep the original audio streams using autoGK, but the audio sync was off as much as 20 seconds sometimes. This was the main reason I switched to Fairuse for a converter

[Almost Human]

stiltman - Why not keep the 5.1 track in FUW? On the last page before encoding begins, just select AC3 instead of MP3. FUW will not alter the orginal sountrack.

I keep all of the original AC3 tracks, but I use Quantizer 2 instead of setting my own size value. Each DVD is encoded at a different bitrate. Telling it what size you want is great for fitting on discs, but will produce various results. You may not be able to tell the difference between two DVD's, but coverted to Xvid may result in noticible quality differences. My videos converted at Quantizer 2 are stunning on a 32" TV, and some are considerably less than 2Gb.

[stiltman]

stiltman - Why not keep the 5.1 track in FUW? On the last page before encoding begins, just select AC3 instead of MP3. FUW will not alter the orginal sountrack..

DOH!

OK now using AC3, Thanks!

I trying a full test right now.
AC3 quantizer 2, it came out to be 1.3gb and the bitrate was around 1500
Now I'm trying the same movie but changing it 2gb size, 2 pass no quantizer

Want to see if the average bitrate will increase

Edit:
I set it to 2gb but it came out at 2.3gb
Bitrate went from 1500 to 3000

Edit 2:
I see what it's doing. If I set it to use the AC3 audio untouched, it just adds that on to the file size at the end.
In this case AC3 was 300mb and I set the file size to 2gb, so in the end the final file was close to 2.3gb

[stiltman]

How setting it to 2gb file size is pretty much random with the movies I've trown at it so far. I thought at first it wasn't taking the audio strean into account, but that's not it. I've been encoding movies 3 times each now to get the file as close to 2gb as I came

Strange

[stiltman]

Anyone know how to *force* Fairuse to stick to the set file size?
It seems to be a total crap shoot. All DVDs are in ISO form on my HDD

Last night I did the same movie 4 times before I got it to be close to 2gb
1st time set it to 1999mb and it ended up at 2568mb
2nd time set it to 1850mb and it ended up at 2307mb
3rd time set to 1750mb and it ended up at 2218mb
4th at 1700mb and it came out to 2107mb
All of them used the same untouched AC3 at about 400mb

Next DVD I tried I set it to 2gb and it came out at 2045mb
It had an AC3 of 360mb

Total crap shoot

[stiltman]

OK I seem to be having problems with a few encodes higher than 4000kbs burn to DVDs It will start out a little jercking (first couple a minutes) and then settle down a bit.

Is there a way to reduce the bitrate a little without having to go all the way back to the begining with fairuse (aka using the original DVD or ISO)? Some thing easier than putting the DVD back in a gain.

Looks like I'll be keeping all my encoides under 4K for now on

[edDV]

Why waste the time? Fry's has 1TB Seagates for $149 and rumor is they may be down to $99 by Black Friday.
http://www.slashgear.com/early-black-friday-forecast-149-blu-ray-player-499-40-inch-pl...ma-tv-1916790/

[stiltman]

Got a couple of questions, but first let me say my standalone has no problems playing either

I started out using FairUse with the defualt settings but upped the file size to 2GB
Then after someone posted that I could use the original AC3 audio I went with that.
However I didn't realize it also changed some other settings.

My questions

Whats the difference between:

MP3 Audio
Video
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Simple@L3
Format settings, BVOP : No
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD

and

AC3 Audio
Video
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Streaming Video@L1
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Muxing mode : Packed bitstream
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD


Namely what BVOP, @L1 or @L3, Simple vs Streaming, Packed or Unpacked
Also, even though I set the profile for "home" which shades out packed bitstream, it still encodes with packed bitstream for some reason.
If you need the whole media info text, just let me know

Newbie questions, I know, but hey the answers will sure help out others I bet

[RabidDog]

STreaming is for sending stuff over the webistan, so it try's to keep below a max bitrate and probably trys to keep a more constant bitrate. use unpacked and divx home theatre profile. keeping files under 4gb allows them to be burnt to a dvd-r.
There is no way of "shrinking" an mpeg4 file, re-do.

[stiltman]

use unpacked and divx home theatre profile. keeping files under 4gb allows them to be burnt to a dvd-r.
There is no way of "shrinking" an mpeg4 file, re-do.

Also, even though I set the profile for "home" which shades out packed bitstream, it still encodes with packed bitstream for some reason.

I set it to 2gb file size with AC3 audio. I noticed it will go to unpacked if I convert the AC3 audio to MP3.