Software MPEG-1 encoders - Quality.........

[TheInformer]

I'm in the process of comparing various software MPEG-1 encoders to determine which gives me the best consistent quality.

The three encoders I plan to compare are:
- TMPGEnc v2.01
- Panasonic v2.51
- LSX v(I forget)

I chose those three because they seem to be the most commonly used encoders. TMPGEnc is free, while the other two can be "found" on the internet if you have reasonable skills with a search engine.

The source material I'm using is titled "Monsters of Swing '98" by the Flyin' Lindy Hoppers of Ventura CA. Lots of action on the screen as the dancers are moving all around the floor and lower than normal light levels make this a test for the encoders, IMHO.

The destination format is a NTSC VCD. I am going to view the MPEG-1 files on my 19" monitor, and the VCD on a 13" TV via my APEX-1500 DVD player.

I've captured the video in segments in AVI format using HuffYUV 2.1.1. Segments were captured with VDub @ 352x480 then were reduced using Chris LaRosa's 2 to 1 reduction filter to end up at 352x240. I applied the 0 filter, cropped the image by 4 on the top and bottom of the image to get rid of clutter (352x232), and then applied the resize filter to bring the size back up to 352x240. No other filtering was applied.

The segments average 1-2 minutes apiece, with a few going up to 5 minutes or so. This was done so that the tests could be performed on a Win98SE setup. I know that I could have used VDub's segmenting feature, but I wanted to avoid that for the time being.

My hardware of interest is: T-bird 1.2 Ghz, Gigabyte 7XIE4 mobo, 256 megs SDRAM, ATA/100, 20 GB 5400 RPM Maxtor primary drive, 60 GB 7200 RPM Maxtor capture drive, WinTV PCI/FM capture card, Fisher Hi-Fi VCR.

The AVI files averaged 1 dropped frame for each 600 frames captured. I suspect my sound card (Philips PSC704) is the culprit here.

All encoders were used at their defaults with changes such as enabling noise reduction in TMPGEnc, highest motion detection in Panasonic, etc in an attempt to get slightly better output.

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I encoded the first segment (about 90 seconds long) last night in all three formats and then burned the resulting three MPEG-1 files to a VCD with NERO.

All three had trouble with the constant motion and lower than average lighting conditions.

LSX fared the worst. I'm not using it to encode any more segments since the quality to me was visibly inferior to the other two on both the 19" and 13" screens.

Of the other two, TMPGEnc seemed to do a better job of encoding. Both Panasonic and TMPGEnc did not get rid of macro blocks but that was to be expected in the video due to the source material. TMPGEnc produced smaller blocks and they were softer which caused them to not be as obvious.
No audio sync problems occured. In general, I liked the TMPGEnc output better when viewing it on my monitor and my TV.

One problem I encountered was how Panasonic dealt with black. At the start of the segment the image was completely black (supposedly) on the tape and then the scene faded in. Panasonic produced large *faint* macro blocks in this spot. It also cut the segment short when it was fading out to black.

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As I convert more of the video I'll share my experiences.

Hope some of this helped!

BTW, I plan on getting a Sony DVMC-DA2 media converter to convert the source tape to DV format, then convert that to VCD. I also plan to use my Sima CopyMaster to enhance the signal between the VCR and the DVMC-DA2 with the hopes that the output will be better. If and when I do go this route I'll post about those experiences as well. The conversion using the DVMC-DA2 seems to be the way to avoid all these problems that people keep having.

[suriyan]

This will definitely be helpful. I look forward to more of your experiments. It would be nice if we could also see the output of your conversions.

[TheInformer]

UPDATE
I've now encoded about half the VHS video, using both TMPGEnc and Panasonic.
TMPGEnc's output looks better, plain and simple, on both my PC and my TV.

I'm using an option in TMPGEnc to reduce noise a little and enabling floating
point DCT (?) for better quality but that's about it in terms of tweaking.

As of now I'm dropping Panasonic and sticking with TMPGEnc solely. It will be
interesting to see what kind of results I get when I get a Sony DVMC-DA2
media converter to first convert the tape to DV format.

Suriyan - sorry I can't post any files...
(1) the MPEG-1 files are too big with the smallest being 17+ megs in size, and
(2) the video is copyrighted :^)