H.264 vs. XVID for ripping TV DVDs

[murky44]

Hi, basically I have a bunch of House MD DVD's I wanted to rip to my hard drive for easier access. What would be a better option, H.264 or XVID, in terms of quality/file size? I know H.264 uses a lot more CPU power, but that doesn't really bother me. They are about 43 minutes each and my target file size for each is about 350MB (is that too small?). Thanks.

[redwudz]

With that target size I would recommend H.264. But why not try each codec and see what you're happy with? With Divx/Xvid, that would give you about a 925Kbps video bitrate at 192Kbps audio bitrate. You could reduce the audio bitrate a little and do a two pass encode with Divx/Xvid and it would probably come out fairly well. Or if you reduce the framesize to about 300 X 200 or so, you would have more bitrate available.

And welcome to our forums.

[murky44]

Thanks!
I actually just finished an H.264 encode I was doing, and it has more detail than the XVID encode I did earlier, but for some reason it looks a bit noisy at times too. On both, I used a 720 fixed width, which came out to 720x358 for H.264 and 720x400 on XVID (w/ AutoGK). I usually watch my videos in fullscreen mode, so I tried too keep the size to the highest I could so as not to lose as much quality when going fullscreen on a 22" monitor.

The audio for the H.264 was just the default of the Television preset in handbrake (AAC, Dolby Pro Logic II, 48KHz, 160kbps). With the XVID, I just used MP3 audio at 128kbps, 48KHz, which sounds just fine to me (the AAC was a bit quieter).

What software would you recommend I use? For this one, I used Handbrake, which seemed okay, but I don't know if I got the settings right. Is there anything I could do to make it better?

[lordsmurf]

Given hard drive sizes, I think ripping out episodes as the source MPEG-2 is good enough. Re-encoding seems like extra work.

[murky44]

Given hard drive sizes, I think ripping out episodes as the source MPEG-2 is good enough. Re-encoding seems like extra work.

True, hard drive space is getting much bigger, but I still think it's better to save as much space as possible for other stuff.

I just re-encoded w/ XVID4PSP, and I gotta say, the quality is great, especially for the file size. Much better than the encode I got with handbrake. I even got to keep the 5.1 channel audio. Does anybody know any guides I can use for XVID4PSP so I can use it to it's full potential?

[creamyhorror]

You can select audio passthrough in Handbrake to keep the AC-3 track. And I doubt Handbrake is any worse than Xvid4PSP; you just have to choose a better preset and quality level. For one thing, the Xvid4PSP encode probably doesn't have the same filesize and resolution as the Handbrake one.

[murky44]

The XVID4PSP encode has the same filesize (350mb) as the handbrake encode and the resolution was 720x400 in XVID4PSP as opposed to 720x358 in handbrake, which is why I'm amazed at how much better the encode turned out. But yeah, like I said before, I knew I didn't get the right settings in handbrake. But I'm just gonna keep using XVID4PSP, since w/o tweaking the settings, it still gave me good quality. I just need to know how to tweak the extra settings it has. Can anyone help me with that?

[murky44]

What would be the best AAC bitrate to encode at for 43 minute 5.1 channel audio on a video with 350mb target size?

[johns0]

If you want to get better pq then set the size to 500mb,350 will give you too much artifacts.Also if you encode to H.264 with ac3 then you could always author the files to avcdhd later on without any re-encoding.

[murky44]

If you want to get better pq then set the size to 500mb,350 will give you too much artifacts.Also if you encode to H.264 with ac3 then you could always author the files to avcdhd later on without any re-encoding.

The thing is that I'm actually pretty happy with the video quality I'm getting @ 350MB. You're right, there are artifacts at times, but most of the time it looks just fine. The only thing I want to improve on at this point is the sound, which I know will take up more space with a higher bitrate. 128kbps sounded OK, but I read that around 320kbps is better for AAC with 5.1 channel audio (some kind of x3 rule where you multiply 128kbps stereo by 3 to determine 5.1 channel audio).
Regarding the authoring to avchd, could you elaborate? What would I use to do it, and how would it help?

[johns0]

Authoring the H.264 encoded file can be burned to dvdr without re-encoding and watched on select blu-ray players,my sony 350 plays 720x480 avchd files which are originally sd dvd,the only thing is if you did want to author to avchd later the file resolution would have to be 720x480 to play properly on most blu-ray players that play avchd.

What i like about this setup is i can watch up to 6 hours of decent 720x480 without having to switch discs when watching a series episode run.

[creamyhorror]

What would be the best AAC bitrate to encode at for 43 minute 5.1 channel audio on a video with 350mb target size?

If you want to keep 5.1 channels, leave it as AC-3 instead of re-encoding. I bet the original AC-3 stream doesn't take much bitrate anyway, and you'd retain full quality. Decoding 5.1 AAC is only a computer thing as of now, AFAIK.

I suggest not being too rigid about file sizes; just go with whatever is convenient.

[Scarpad]

Authoring the H.264 encoded file can be burned to dvdr without re-encoding and watched on select blu-ray players,my sony 350 plays 720x480 avchd files which are originally sd dvd,the only thing is if you did want to author to avchd later the file resolution would have to be 720x480 to play properly on most blu-ray players that play avchd.

What i like about this setup is i can watch up to 6 hours of decent 720x480 without having to switch discs when watching a series episode run.

My Panasonic plays AVCHD files can you point me to any good guides on doing this I have no experience with AVCHD.