Better rip quality- how?

[mst]

I have a DVD that I need to encode, to save some space. When I did that however, the quality, especially the smoothness of the lines, was lost. There was marked jaggedness even at high bitrates.

Incidentally, I've seen the same DVD, already encoded by another "party", and the lines were perfect, just as in the original DVD. And it was only 300MB.

How did he do that?

[manono]

How did he do that?

This is a joke, right? You expect people to diagnose what you did wrong and someone else did right just from a written description? Who knows, maybe you handled the interlacing wrong? If you have some short samples to show us, then maybe someone can actually provide some informed advice. Samples from the source, the one you messed up, and the one you say was done correctly.

[mst]

Sorry, I didn't provide enough info.

I only wanted some good tutorials on encoding. Not just the basics, but explaining more in-depth what each parameters (like "interlacing") and others do, and how to do it.

[jman98]

Please understand the difference between "ripping" and "encoding". The title of this thread is misleading, which may cause some of our more experienced members to skip it. Ripping is simply the process of decrypting (if necessary) and copying from CD or DVD to a hard drive. That's it. No conversion/encoding involved. What you have is a conversion/encoding issue.

What format is this other party's encode in? Usually they shrink the resolution, which hides flaws inherent in using low bit rates to encode. If you take the video and watch it in full screen mode on your PC, I'm sure you'll notice some flaws such as macroblocks.

You're still not providing enough info. We don't know what format you want the output in. There's no point in anybody going to a lot of trouble explaining how to encode with H.264 if you want Divx output or vice-versa. What did you use to encode already? What settings did you use? Installing Media Info and looking at the differences between your encode and the one you found might be a helpful starting place to give you some ideas on what they did right.

[Nelson37]

Did you by any chance notice the "How To" section on the left? Detailed, step-by-step instructions with more complete info than you will ever need.

Since no one has any clue whatsoever EXACTLY what you are trying to do, you may need to put forth some actual effort and time to determine what you really want to do and how best to do it.

This procedure is what you did NOT do, and what the other party DID do.

300 MB and it looks great, right? Did you watch this on a phone, or a wristwatch?

[mst]

Please understand the difference between "ripping" and "encoding".

Thanks for the tip.

What format is this other party's encode in? Usually they shrink the resolution, which hides flaws inherent in using low bit rates to encode. If you take the video and watch it in full screen mode on your PC, I'm sure you'll notice some flaws such as macroblocks.

The (unknown) other person had it encoded as XVID. I tried watching it not only on the PC but on the *TV* and didn't find any problems.

You're still not providing enough info. We don't know what format you want the output in. There's no point in anybody going to a lot of trouble explaining how to encode with H.264 if you want Divx output or vice-versa. What did you use to encode already? What settings did you use? Installing Media Info and looking at the differences between your encode and the one you found might be a helpful starting place to give you some ideas on what they did right.

Well, XVID. What I did (some time ago), was, as I recall, run the third-party encoding thru GSpot and MediaInfo, note down any settings and values I found, then feed them into my usual software encoder (that takes DVD's and encodes them to any video file type I choose), in an attempt to make my own copy, identical to the first.
Every time, there was jagginess in my copy.

[davexnet]

Does your "usual software encoder" deal with the interlacing and/or 3:2 pulldown?
Perhaps try something like AutoGK and open the main IFO.

[mst]

Did you by any chance notice the "How To" section on the left? Detailed, step-by-step instructions with more complete info than you will ever need.

I did try them but they left out many advanced explanations.

Since no one has any clue whatsoever EXACTLY what you are trying to do, you may need to put forth some actual effort and time to determine what you really want to do and how best to do it.

I tried to encode my own version of the DVD with just about every combination of encoding parameters possible. For further details please see my reply to jman98.

300 MB and it looks great, right? Did you watch this on a phone, or a wristwatch?

I found this very strange, too. I couldn't say it was legitimately *great* but the smoothness and accuracy of the lines- the contours- was, at ~300MB, better that I could obtain at 1000MB.

Some more details: I've tried to replicate many parameters- video codec, video size, bitrate, framerate, aspect ratio.
There are some parameters which I don't know what they do- and maybe you do- which could prove to be the answer to this problem.

They are: Encode mode (VBR or CBR)- neither GSpot or MediaInfo could tell me what was the good video encoded with; 2-pass (does this help?); pixel format; bitexact; do_deinterlace; do_interlace_dct; GOP; Q scale; do_interlace_me; Use only intra frame; Q min and Q max, L min and L max; qdiff, qblur, qcomp; rc_init_cplx; b_qfactor; i_qfactor etc., etc.

My converting software doesn't explain any of these, and on the Net I found them only mentioned in codec source-code files.

[manono]

As davexnet suggested, give AutoGK a try and let us know if it handles the 'jagginess' correctly. Since you seem unable or unwilling to provide samples of the videos, that's about all I can suggest at the moment.

[Nelson37]

If you did not find the advanced explanations, you did not read enough. Keep going. If you did not find out whether or not a 2-pass encode will help, you did not put forth any significant effort.

Which guides to read? ALL of them. Many assume that you already know certain things, a few explain some details. Keep reading. When you no longer have any questions, then stop.

Haven't done any XVID in a long time, but at a guess, it was likely resized to 320x240 or thereabouts and deinterlaced, using a 2-pass encode. When you learn how to do it right, you won't put up with such crap, except for a phone or similar device.