Dumb question, but should be easy to answer :). Re DVD Flick high quality

[cognus]

Simple, dumb question from one still trying to learn. I have played around with DVD Flick quite a bit and had varying results, mostly depending on the quality of the source file.
What I don't know, and am asking here is this: What would be the settings I should use in DVD Flick Project/Menu settings, to achieve the very highest Quality playback. In other words, sacrifice all else for the sake of video fidelity?
My playback unit is a Sony BDP-N460, primarily, and various PC based players [MPCHC, Vlan, whatever]. And I'm making a huge assumption with the Sony unit, just based on three weeks of using it: it seems to do its best work either with a good quality blu-ray disc [another issue, i know...] or a good quality DVD which it then upscales. I have not had a good controlled test of it using either USB stick or network-attach yet. I have noticed that some regular dvd's, when played on that unit, produce spectacular image quality, really quite stunning. others not so much.

so, pls tell me the high Q settings and I shall use them. thanks

[guns1inger]

Quality is as much, if not more, to do with your source material as it is to do with your encoder. That said, Project Settings -> Video -> Set Encoding to Best.

personally, I think HCEnc is a better mpeg-2 encoder than ffmpeg, so I would use AVStoDVD, which uses HCEnc and gives you a bit more control over the encoder settings than just fast/normal/best. It also allows for tweaking of the avisynth script that loads and resizes the video, so you can make substantial improvements there as well.

What sort of source are you working from ?

[cognus]

Thank you for helping, gunslinger.
my sources are all over right now - I'm just trying to 'get smart' on this tech area that I have such spotty acquaintance with. I have a few movie files that came to me already authored up to High Def - my favorite being an upconverted Lord of the Rings - Fellowship - Extended, and I've been trying to figure out why it looks so stunning in the state I have it [an AVI file around 4gb or so], and why it look so inaccurate when I cut it down to standard DVD.
Then, I have a regular DVD of another old movie that I'm pretty familiar with, visually. When I try to unpack that and enhance it, it doesn't do well. The applet that is doing the pixel color triangulation is missing - like dark areas [a scene with Clint Eastwood running through a darkish forest full of shadows, for instance] is "splotchy". Pardon my terms - I do not know the correct lexicon yet.

I'm wanting to try taking a DIVX source and making it playable on that Sony Unit I referred to, just haven't tried yet. Supposedly the burner that is packaged in the DIVX wad is pretty good, but I have not tested. The player is a tad notorious for not liking many of the USB sticks that are out there, and I'm trying to get a wireless bridge setup so I can get it on the net. once that's done, I hope to DL some freebie HD programs, sports, that sort of thing, and maybe Netflix material, but I hear the latter has quality issues. The cable is pretty good generally - Time-Warner. I'm in a rural area so if I use Antennae I gotta find some darn good ones.

I'll go find the package you mentioned.

Quality is as much, if not more, to do with your source material as it is to do with your encoder. That said, Project Settings -> Video -> Set Encoding to Best.

personally, I think HCEnc is a better mpeg-2 encoder than ffmpeg, so I would use AVStoDVD, which uses HCEnc and gives you a bit more control over the encoder settings than just fast/normal/best. It also allows for tweaking of the avisynth script that loads and resizes the video, so you can make substantial improvements there as well.

What sort of source are you working from ?

[guns1inger]

Post a mediainfo tree view of a sample source file so we can see it.

Note : most Divx/Xvid files suffer from a lot of problems, not all of which are immediately apparent on a PC, but which become so when converting. These include :

- being over compressed and full of artifacts, especially action scenes
- Divx/Xvid show a lot of artifacts in area of low contrast, including things like walls with no patterns, and dark area like night scenes
- Divx/Xvid hides a lot of it's problems behind the fact that most PCs run a much lower gamma than TVs
- Most of these files have been resized down, often to a large degree, and undoing this not only reduces quality, but makes problems like compression artifacts much more apparent

However having a great source, such as HD material, doesn't always make your life easier. For example, a full bluray HD version of LOTR would occupy around 10 x the amount of space as your file, so your file is already heavily compressed. You are then resizing it down from probably 1280 x nnn to 720 x 480, and then heavily re-compressing it to make it a standard DVD video disc. It is never going to look as good as the source file you have.

If your Sony can handle the AVCHD format then you are better off using this format for HD material. Look at MultiAVCHD or AVCHDCoder as ways to convert and author HD material for burning to DVD. The quality will be far higher than scaling down to DVD and then having the player scale back up again.

Always burn DVD or BD material with Imgburn. Nothing else is good enough.

[cognus]

Always burn DVD or BD material with Imgburn. Nothing else is good enough.

at least I got that part right! yay.

your advice is terrific. If I can figger out how to post what you asked for, I'll post two of them: one of them looks visually pretty darn good but I have not tried transporting it over to the BDP yet... it looks great on my high def monitor [23" asus ] sounds great also. i have no idea about the audio stuff... i'm not going there til i get 'learnt' about vid quality.
The other one I'll post is the Clint Eastwood thing: it comes out looking to my eye like its artifacts gone wild - not BAD to look at, it just doesn't look like the settings were any good. it looks like an aged celluloid shown in a theatre through a projector with bad bulbs.

[cognus]

ok... first try at this, in html format. this is LOTR-Extended version, and I ASSUME the original source was DVD rip. i don't actually know. this one looks ok on the BDP, but not stunning. I'll post the better one in the next post:


General

Complete name : \dvd-1\dvd\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1.VOB
Format : MPEG-PS
File size : 1 024 MiB
Duration : 45mn 59s
Overall bit rate : 3 113 Kbps

Video

ID : 224 (0xE0)
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format profile : Main@Main
Format settings, BVOP : No
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Duration : 45mn 59s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 2 835 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.274
Stream size : 940 MiB (92%)

Audio

ID : 128 (0x80)
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension : CM (complete main)
Duration : 45mn 59s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Stream size : 63.2 MiB (6%)

Menu

[cognus]

and the other one


General

Complete name : Fellowship of the Ring (ExtEd) HD 1080P Xvid AC3.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 7.86 GiB
Duration : 3h 28mn
Overall bit rate : 5 401 Kbps
Writing application : VirtualDubMod 1.5.4.1 (build 2178/release)
Writing library : VirtualDubMod build 2178/release

Video

ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Custom
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 3h 28mn
Bit rate : 4 947 Kbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 800 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.40:1
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.134
Stream size : 7.20 GiB (92%)
Writing library : XviD 1.2.0.dev47 (UTC 2006-11-01)

Audio

ID : 1
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension : CM (complete main)
Codec ID : 2000
Duration : 3h 28mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 448 Kbps
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Stream size : 667 MiB (8%)
Alignment : Split accross interleaves
Interleave, duration : 96 ms (2.30 video frames)
Interleave, preload duration : 96 ms

[guns1inger]

The first one is a DVD that has already been encoded at a pretty (actually, very) low bitrate and the audio has been butchered. Frankly, I can't imagine that it looks or sounds very good.

The second on is an Xvid avi taken from a 1080 source. The audio is OK - standard DVD 5.1 AC3 - nothing special, but at least it hasn't been hacked like the first disc. The video is more of an issue. It really won't play in much. If you have a Divx HD certified player it might play it. The best option would be MultiAVCHD to create an AVCHD disc, and burn it onto a dual layer DVD blank with Imgburn. You can preserve the full 1080 resolution and most of whatever quality it has. Anything else you do to it will substantially reduce the quality.

[cognus]

I am not surprised about the first one. it seems to take a lot of heavy lifting on part of the players to get it to look ok. the volume is really pitiful also. the second one looks sparkling played with just about any of the soft players, even hapless WMP [in the 64 bit Win7 package].
VLAN probably renders that one the best, but I cannot find any controls in VLAN that allow me to turn off closed captions! do they refer to that category as "subtitles" perchance?

one other question while I'm thinking 'players' - is there a decoder ring somewhere that would help guide me through the maze of option switches in MPCHC and VLAN? I am totally bewildered by the plethora of decoders, audio options, et etc.

one more: can you point me to a FAQ or tutorial on the various settings of "Aspect Ratio"? I thought I comprehended this simple issue but in playing around with settings on two different sony players [hardware] I see much to stumble over. I had an issue with one of the projects displaying in a manner that made it look just wrong, like letterbox that had been 'stretched' to go full screen on a conventional TV, so all the characters are tall and skinny . it seemed immunized against any thing I tried to do to display it differently. in fact it may have been that first project above, and if so, may have been unmanageable. I shall send that one to the bit bucket.

[cognus]

could you tell me what happened here?

[17:12:00] *** Stand-by for indexing (ffms2)...
[17:12:00] *** Encoding : One pass - content: [02:20:05]
[17:12:00] *** Encoding : x264 options: --preset veryfast -B 571 --interlaced --direct spatial -I 25 --level 3 -i 8 -b 3 -r 3 -m 2 --mvrange 256 -A p8x8,i8x8 --ipratio 1.1 --pbratio 1.1 --vbv-bufsize 12500 --vbv-maxrate 12000 --qcomp 0.5 --threads auto --thread-input --aud --nal-hrd vbr --sar 16:11 --b-pyramid strict --slices 0 --weightp 0 --rc-lookahead 25 -o "c:\multiAVCHD\_TEMP\multiTEMP-20100613\Man.on.Fire.[2004].DvDrip[ENG]-P4DGE_[www.superfundo.org].[720x576-25.000].264" "c:\multiAVCHD\tools\20100613-171200-uncrop-running.avs"
[17:12:00] *** Speed : 2235372.34 fps (elapsed: 00:00:00 - Realtime x 89414.89)
[17:12:00] *** Transcoding failed!
[17:12:00] *** Check ffdshow/avisynth/haali (reinstall)!
[17:12:00] >>> Download links: http://multiforum.deanbg.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17
[17:12:00] *** DEBUG: Try to play [c:\multiAVCHD\tools\20100613-171200-uncrop-running.avs] in MPC or other player, which supports AviSynth scripts and report the error to the author!
　
[17:12:00] tsMuxeR failed to process [C:\Users\Public\Videos\Man.on.Fire.[2004].DvDrip[ENG]-P4DGE_[www.superfundo.org].avi]...
[17:12:00] No compatible folders/files processed...

[multiAVCHD]

Install AVISYNTH (and ffdshow if needed):

[17:12:00] *** Transcoding failed!
[17:12:00] *** Check ffdshow/avisynth/haali (reinstall)!