VirtualDub Video/Audio Quality help?

[lilkimmy2468]

Hey, I'm a newbie here (I persume I can post this here)

I'm not surprised if this is going to be a dumb question to ask, but I'll ask anyway.

I've recently started using VirtualDub to compress videos that i've made subtitles for. I'm having trouble with the quality of them though. I'm not specifically using any other filters other than a subbing one to compress the subs to the video with the right codec compressors (mind you there are alot of different codecs to select from), and my videos are kinda pixelated (circle-like pixels to be specific) and the subs are a little hard to read due to that. The sound is also dodgy and sounds off (pixelated sound basically), the video is of a very nice quality before it's put through virtualdub and then it comes out sketchy in both visually and sound wise.

So my question is are there any main settings or something for virtual dub videos to get them crystal clear and keep there quality both in sound and video (HD Quality?)? I've spent way too much time finding specific programs to sub and doodiling around ALOT trying to find codecs for this and that to get the video working in VirtualDub, so I don't really want to have to use another program...but so be it if there is no other option.

I've also tried the codec compressor "Huffyuv" mainly since I've read a few articles saying that it's supposed to produce high quality videos although they take up lots of space. But to no avail the video is still a not-so-good quality along with the sound so I'm guessing the configuration for these may have certain settings to keep it pristine and clear? So does anyone know how to configure these settings or something for better video? Cause I'm sucking at this so far LOL! Help ASAP (haha)!

[jagabo]

Simply adding hard subtitles with VirtualDub shouldn't effect the sharpness of the video unless you are using too low a bitrate in the output compression codec. And that's not an issue with HuffYUV anyway. Are you doing some other filtering? Resizing the frame? Noise reduction?

If your source is RGB HuffYUV (and pretty much all high compression codecs) will blur small colored objects (like small text) on colored backgrounds because of the chroma subsampling of YUY2 (and YV12 with MPEG family codecs). Some examples:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/319360-DVD-LAB-PRO-color-map?p=1977264&viewfull=1#post1977264

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/320242-Conversion-causes-only-red-text-to-be-smeare...=1#post1983066

Another possibility to consider: don't open two media players side-by-side to compare videos. One player will get the system's video overlay feature and the other won't (only one player at a time can use it). Video overlay can use the graphics card's hardware to enhance the displayed image so the two players are likely to look different even if they are both playing the same video.

When possible, you should leave audio in "direct stream copy" mode so it doesn't get reencoded. That will prevent any quality loss there.

[jagabo]

Oops, wrong thread.