AVI(w/ High Quality) to FLV issue

[btmdan]

New Here
I was given an avi to encode into a FLV. The avi was created with windows movie maker using some 'Hi Quality' Setting. I encoded to flv using ON2 flix Pro , VP 6 at 512 k and the result was resonabley good aside from textual labels in the avi come out completely illegible in the flv. When I view the the avi in quicktime on a MAC they actually dont look any better than they do in the flv until I click on "use High Quality Settings" in quicktime's prefs. When viewed with " High Quality" checked, the labels become sharper but still are not that great. Regardless , when encoded into an flv the become totally blurred. Can anyone please help me understand what the "High Quality Setting" means in QT and how, if any affect it can have when encoding to an flv.

Im assuming it doesnt make any difference, and the high quality setting only applies to playing it back in QT or WMP, but I dont know how to explain this to the client I am creating the flv for. Im really stuck in a hard spot here as the people who created the source avi are saying "looks great in WMP or QT(with use high quality checked)". Aside from explaining (again, again , and again) that I am taking a 280 mb avi file and scrunching it down to 9 mb flv to serve on the web, how do I explain that "use High Quaility when Available" setting has no bearing on how the avi encodes into and FLV? Is there a better way to encode than using Flix Pro for such a situation?
Thanks
D

[Soopafresh]

Load the AVI in Gspot and post a screen capture. We'll figure it out. It could be the source file is interlaced - a big no-no for flv transcoding.


Look here if you need instructions on how to do that

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic271697.html

[webvideopro]

btmdan, what is the WxH of the source file and what WxH are you encoding to? You should post your exact FLIX settings and also the Gspot or MediaInfo settings so we can see the exact info about the source file.

It could be that it is interlaced, the bitrate you are using for the encode is too low for the WxH or that the target size is not evenly divisible by 16, or you have a invalid PAR.

[btmdan]

"G-Spot" hehe I knew I was going to like this place. First let me clarify I am on a mac and running gspot in parallels. Honestly not sure if that has an affect on how one might diagnose the results displayed but here is what I got.

(alt+p)

also noticed a little green text box indicating I/L. Rolled over it and it said something about the file being interlaced

(alt+p)

thanks for your help guys. Glad I found this place. Great wealth of information.

[btmdan]

@webvideopro
FLIX:
Using preset 512k Broadband High Video (VP6-E FLV)
Video settings: Im basically just check use source where ever applicable and leaving everything else default, although I have played with some settings but with no improvement on final outcome
(alt+p)

[btmdan]

Didnt think of the interlace issue before - Ill re-encode In Flix with de-interlace checked to see if it maeks a difference and post my result here shortly

[tarrickb]

My two cents...

I've recently been doing the same type of encoding as you (AVI -> FLV) and have realized that for the best results you should de-interlace your interlaced source AVI before encoding to FLV. De-interlacing with the FLV encoder did not yield adequate results in my tests, especially compared to when I did the de-interlacing myself.

Good luck!

[btmdan]

Yup, Checking de-interlace in flix resulted in no improvement. googling "de-interlace avi" now

[Soopafresh]

JES deinterlacer is supposed to be pretty good for OSX. And free

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13069/jes-deinterlacer

DV footage (which is what you have, according to Gspot) doesn't take too well to deinterlacing. You lose a lot of crispness to the image. You'll see. Not much you can do about it, unfortunately.


Another thing to consider is that if you're transcoding to flv, the aspect ratio specs might not work. I think 640x480 would be your desired output dimensions (although I could be wrong, and have been, many many times). If it looks funny at 720x480, redo it at 640x480.

[poisondeathray]

I'm not a Mac/OSX guy, but did you consider using h.264/aac in .mp4 to stream? Adobe Flash Player 9 supports it, and the quality is significantly better than VP6, or h.263 at the same bitrate

If you are going from 280MB => 9MB .flv it sounds like you need the best compression you can get. I'm unsure of what your other client requirements are, or if .flv is a mandatory container.

[btmdan]

Thanks Everyone for your helpful replies - Because of your assistance I am now armed with a much more vast array of tools to deal with video/web applications.

I finally was able to get reasonable results comparable to source avi i was given by de-interlacing the avi and then re-encoding into flv ( see http://www.100fps.com/). Its worth mentioning that since most of the required software was Win compatible, that I performed the re-encoding in parallels on the MAC.

@->poisondeathray - Its also of interest to note that the person who provided the original did create h.264 version and encoded into FLV using moyea. The results were even better than the original avi! But since I was not tasked to create the source AVI, only take what I was given and serve it up as an FLV, Im not going to go that route for this task. Still worth further investigation.