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  1. With DVDs I usually convert to MP4 as the files are lower then 4gb. I try to keep the audio intact, if i cant then I use AAC.
    I wouldn't, the compression schemes used for DVD are so obsolete and flawed that the artifacts mitigate so much of the H264 compression and denoising is difficult without scrapping the quality. Blu-rays on the other hand retain much of the quality including the grain.

    The original poster is asking us which codec he should use inside .mkv. Why would you not consider compatibility?
    I just realized this thread is a year old so posting here has lost its purpose, but...

    He was lectured on compatibility already and then said is AAC not a superior codec, so I presume he meant quality. I know that's what I meant when I asked way back in 2006-2007 what the most superior audio codec was and I kept getting showered with endless, scattered information of possibilities and preferences. Eventually I had to do what I always do: figure it out on my own and trust my instincts. It worked. Nero AAC happened to be the highest quality and compatible on even my circa-2006 cell phone that supported HE-AACv2.

    By the way, torrenting is illegal. Stop stealing and just buy the stuff.
    They can first learn to properly post-process their shit so we don't end up with blurred upscaled-appearing shit falsely advertised as 1080p detail and then I'll consider spending my hard-earned money that's gonna go to their worthless asses.

    I've lost countless opportunities for jobs in the computer repair industry in favor of some dumb **** who gets thrown out a month after he's hired and the company sustains $1000 worth of damage.

    Meanwhile, I'm gonna work my ass off and be double-taxed and receive only a fraction of their pay? Either they work 10 times as hard or I pay nothing for their shit. I don't like being stolen from either, you see.

    I would imagine that a BD shoved down inside 1GB doesn't look very good.
    You'd be surprised how awesome it looks after we clean up after the useless overpaid shitheads from the mastering studios. The most difficult is undoing the damage from their lowpass filter that effectively halves the resolution. I've seen a few cartoons deblurred extremely well, not many films.
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  2. Originally Posted by Mephesto View Post
    With DVDs I usually convert to MP4 as the files are lower then 4gb. I try to keep the audio intact, if i cant then I use AAC.
    I wouldn't, the compression schemes used for DVD are so obsolete and flawed that the artifacts mitigate so much of the H264 compression and denoising is difficult without scrapping the quality. Blu-rays on the other hand retain much of the quality including the grain.
    That doesn't correlate with my DVD conversions using x264. Even using the default x264 settings and a CRF value of 18, my average DVD encode wouldn't be any more than 2GB (keeping the original AC3 audio) so there's definitely a possibility to reduce the file size considerably without reducing the perceived quality. And I generally resize DVDs "up" rather than resize "down" or use anamorphic encoding.

    Originally Posted by Mephesto View Post
    I would imagine that a BD shoved down inside 1GB doesn't look very good.
    You'd be surprised how awesome it looks after we clean up after the useless overpaid shitheads from the mastering studios. The most difficult is undoing the damage from their lowpass filter that effectively halves the resolution. I've seen a few cartoons deblurred extremely well, not many films.
    What sort of filtering do you use when encoding Bluray discs and what sort of resolution do you use? I generally resize to 720p (I'd agree most Bluray video doesn't contain 1080p worth of picture detail, often it's just 1080p worth of noise) but I can't imagine squeezing the average 720p video down to 1GB without introducing compression artefacts.
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  3. Originally Posted by hello_hello View Post
    That doesn't correlate with my DVD conversions using x264. Even using the default x264 settings and a CRF value of 18, my average DVD encode wouldn't be any more than 2GB (keeping the original AC3 audio) so there's definitely a possibility to reduce the file size considerably without reducing the perceived quality. And I generally resize DVDs "up" rather than resize "down" or use anamorphic encoding.
    A codec two generations ahead of MPEG-2 and only reducing by half? That's nothing and a clear sign that you shouldn't be compressing. It's not uncommon sometimes for x264-compressed output to be larger than the mpeg-2/xvid input because of how bad it is. Getting a Blu-ray down from 25 to 2.5GB without visible loss a 10x decrease in filesize, THAT's what I ******* call compression.

    Originally Posted by hello_hello View Post
    What sort of filtering do you use when encoding Bluray discs
    I aim for 700MB final output, so I remove as much illegal entropy as possible. With most mainstream blu-ray releases I just remove all the grain but rarely have to do much else with them as they are more commonly overfiltered than underfiltered. Sometimes I don't even have to do anything besides downsample.
    Fringe releases on the other hand need a lot more attention. Some are worse than their DVD counterparts.

    Originally Posted by hello_hello View Post
    and what sort of resolution do you use? I generally resize to 720p (I'd agree most Bluray video doesn't contain 1080p worth of picture detail, often it's just 1080p worth of noise) but I can't imagine squeezing the average 720p video down to 1GB without introducing compression artefacts.
    720p is the real resolution in most cases, your choice is valid. It depends though. I analyze the picture and continue downsampling until I find the real level of detail. Sometimes it's as low as 400p on some scenes. For movies a couple decades old, the entire thing can be as low as 480p which fit nicely in 700 megs.
    Actual 720p detail might fit in 1GB but even with all the tricks up my sleeve I'd go for something closer to 1.5GB or 2.

    But I'm really picky about quality and many filesharers don't mind YIFY's really bad 700MB 720p encodes so 1GB might pass with the general crowd.

    With H.265 poking its infantile head out of the uterus, 720p feature film will soon be possible to fit on a CD. I can't wait for a good implementation.
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  4. Originally Posted by Mephesto View Post
    A codec two generations ahead of MPEG-2 and only reducing by half? That's nothing and a clear sign that you shouldn't be compressing. It's not uncommon sometimes for x264-compressed output to be larger than the mpeg-2/xvid input because of how bad it is. Getting a Blu-ray down from 25 to 2.5GB without visible loss a 10x decrease in filesize, THAT's what I ******* call compression.
    Yeah, but keeping the original 5.1ch AC3 accounts for around 300MB-400MB of that, plus generally I'm taking a 720x480 DVD (for example) and resizing it to 854x480 for encoding (I gave up worrying whether devices support anamorphic video correctly) so the increase in the number of pixels being encoded needs to be taken into account.

    I just looked at the last half a dozen or so DVD encodes (PAL and NTSC at various resolutions) still sitting on my hard drive. They range from 1.1GB to 1.9GB (all CRF18), so I guess we just disagree whether it's worth re-encoding already heavily compressed video for that sort of file size reduction. Personally I think it is, but each to their own.....

    Originally Posted by Mephesto View Post
    720p is the real resolution in most cases, your choice is valid. It depends though. I analyze the picture and continue downsampling until I find the real level of detail. Sometimes it's as low as 400p on some scenes. For movies a couple decades old, the entire thing can be as low as 480p which fit nicely in 700 megs.
    Actual 720p detail might fit in 1GB but even with all the tricks up my sleeve I'd go for something closer to 1.5GB or 2.
    I can't say I've ever tried to go below 720p.... well with maybe one or two exceptions.... the occasional old movie which doesn't have any more than 480p worth of detail..... but generally I just compare 1080p to 720p, with and without noise filtering etc, and go for whichever combination produces the most pleasing picture detail to noise ratio result (it generally needs to be fairly noisy before I consider noise filtering).
    I mostly use light noise filtering if required (fluxsmooth) and pretty much always CRF 18 with Tune Film and Preset Slow for 720p (CRF20 for 1080p). It wouldn't be too often I'd end up with a 720p encode as small as 2GB (AAC 5,1ch audio). At a guess, maybe 3.5GB would be the average. The movie I'm encoding at the moment looks like it's going to come in at about 4.5GB (1280x694).
    My last 1080p encode came in at just under 10GB (although I forgot to increase the CRF value to 20 for that one and couldn't be bothered re-encoding it, so I left it at CRF18).

    1.5GB to 2GB for 720p still seems a bit optimistic to me. What sort of noise filtering do you use and which x264 settings? I'm just curious as to what other types of tricks you have up your sleeve etc as I'm always keen to try something different.
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  5. Member TB Player's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by hogger129 View Post
    By the way, torrenting is illegal. Stop stealing and just buy the stuff.

    No, torrenting is not illegal. There is plenty of legally distributed software (i.e. Linux) that is distributed via torrents.

    What is illegal is downloading (torrent or not) software/music/movies/etc that you don't own and didn't pay for. Or even burning your friend's CD/DVD for yourself. Using torrent technology has nothing to do with the legality of your download.
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  6. Originally Posted by TB Player View Post
    Originally Posted by hogger129 View Post
    By the way, torrenting is illegal. Stop stealing and just buy the stuff.

    No, torrenting is not illegal. There is plenty of legally distributed software (i.e. Linux) that is distributed via torrents.

    What is illegal is downloading (torrent or not) software/music/movies/etc that you don't own and didn't pay for. Or even burning your friend's CD/DVD for yourself. Using torrent technology has nothing to do with the legality of your download.
    Yes and that's the point I was attempting to demonstrate, thank you.
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  7. Originally Posted by hello_hello View Post
    Yeah, but keeping the original 5.1ch AC3 accounts for around 300MB-400MB of that, plus generally I'm taking a 720x480 DVD (for example) and resizing it to 854x480 for encoding (I gave up worrying whether devices support anamorphic video correctly) so the increase in the number of pixels being encoded needs to be taken into account.
    HE-AAC can fit 5.1 nicely in 192 kb/s but HE should be avoided in some cases.

    I can't say I've ever tried to go below 720p.... well with maybe one or two exceptions.... the occasional old movie which doesn't have any more than 480p worth of detail..... but generally I just compare 1080p to 720p, with and without noise filtering etc
    Tricky part is that many films have variable quality. 400p on some scenes, 1080p on others, 720p on most etc. Credits and text tend to be true 1080p and most blown-up scenes for obvious reasons are less detailed. You have to resize to 320x240 then back to 1280x720 and do a global SSIM scan. Find the frame with the lowest score and then find the real resolution of that frame. That's the resolution I then resize the entire film to. If majority of the film is really 480p with rare 720p parts then I resize to 480p, possibly try and recover some detail with deconvolution/deblurring but this does little.

    1.5GB to 2GB for 720p still seems a bit optimistic to me.
    Depends on the content really. Cartoons are easy, films only 90 minutes fit well on a CD. Films with lots of rain scenes or snow are a HUGE drag especially when over 2 hours long. What's worse is that denoising tends to remove much of the rain as noise but this still doesn't help the compression ratio. Some films that SEEM compressible due to lots of static scenes actually suffer because tiny details like pores and wrinkles in the skin are more visible during non-movement and look really bad with low bitrates.

    What sort of noise filtering do you use and which x264 settings? I'm just curious as to what other types of tricks you have up your sleeve etc as I'm always keen to try something different.
    NeatVideo for noise, occasionally accompanied by deflickering/deshimmering but usually only NV for grainy Blu-ray releases.
    Maximum x264 settings, sometimes TESA and 24 me-range, 16 refs for cartoons, 8 for films.
    Rip out all duplicate frames from animated videos and convert to VFR.

    DVD, VHS and LD rips need a lot more tricks to master though.
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  8. Cheers,
    I'd not come across NeatVideo before. I'll give it a spin as soon as I get a chance.
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    Originally Posted by hello_hello View Post
    I use the Nero AAC encoder and the default Q0.50 quality setting.
    .... but aside from that AAC is fine and probably more widely supported by media players than DTS.
    Personally I don't care about passthrough options as I just downmix multichannel to stereo for playback anyway, given multichannel audio is just a silly gimmick . But each to their own.

    I've yet to read an AAC encoder comparison which doesn't concentrate solely on low bitrate encoding which for me makes them irrelevant. At higher bitrates each encoder is probably about the same. If someone knows of an AAC encoder comparison using higher bitrates I'd be interested to see it.
    Actually most older receivers don't support AAC, perhaps the newer ones do, but not the older ones.
    As for Multichannel audio, if you were to watch Star Wars on my buddies 7.1 DTS Surround System, where it feels like the the ships are wizzing past you, you wouldn't think that Multichannel support is a simple Gimmick. Even on my 5.1 Surround system, I can DEFINITELY tell which movies have the 5.1 encoding, vs which ones simply have stereo sound. Of course, if you don't have the hardware for it, then it really doesn't matter.

    I've noticed also several posts here about AAC being superior to MP3 or AC3 or whatever, it's all a bunch of bull. 256KPS PCM per channel is superior to anything, but the files are MASSIVE, especially in a 7.1 surround sound system. This is what MOST MOVIES are originally encoded with, and what you hear in the Movie theaters. Because if the huge file size, before Blu Ray, this information was always compressed to AC3 to fit on a DVD, however now with Blu-Ray, we can now have that original sound. MP3 is a great COMPRESSION format, specifically designed for Music and was never intended to have multi-channel support, so if you're ever interested in playing it through a surround sound system then that's DEFINITELY not the way to go. AAC is a LOSSY compression format (so MP3 is BETTER in this respect for music), which can use 6 channel discrete encoding for movies, but can't pass the 6 channels through HDMI (it gets downmixed to simple stereo), so you need hardware on your PC to hard wire EACH of the 6 channels to your Sound system. You can also encode AAC with Pro Logic II Dobly Surround Sound, but you might have problems with compatibility with your Receiver.
    This brings us back to AC3. If you're playing on a Google TV Box, DTS isn't compatible you won't hear any sound, and if you're playing on a ROKU, the DTS just gets transcoded to AC3, so the question is, do you want to keep that DTS file which makes your movie files 3 to 4GB in size, or would you rather cut it down to half that size by going with AC3. If you're playing directly off your PC and have your PC connected to a modern DTS compatible 7.1 reciever, then I say YES Definitely. But if you're stuck with a regular system or just playing sound from your TV, you might as well drop it down to AC3 Audio. Later when you finally get that surround system, you'll be happy you did. The space savings you get from AAC just isn't worth it.
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  10. Originally Posted by NextechNetworks View Post
    Actually most older receivers don't support AAC, perhaps the newer ones do, but not the older ones.
    That might explain why I referred to media players and not receivers.

    Originally Posted by NextechNetworks View Post
    As for Multichannel audio, if you were to watch Star Wars on my buddies 7.1 DTS Surround System, where it feels like the the ships are wizzing past you, you wouldn't think that Multichannel support is a simple Gimmick.
    Yeah I would. I don't even particularly like surround sound in theatres. To me, things "wizzing past" audio-wise is a distraction.

    Originally Posted by NextechNetworks View Post
    I've noticed also several posts here about AAC being superior to MP3 or AC3 or whatever, it's all a bunch of bull.
    No it's not. It's fact. AAC is the encoder intended to replace MP3 and as such, it's better. Even in respect to quality at lower bitrates. Wikipedia agrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
    I couldn't really comment on AC3, except to say at a high enough bitrate most lossy encoders are "transparent" and AC3 generally uses a high bitrate.

    Originally Posted by NextechNetworks View Post
    AAC is a LOSSY compression format (so MP3 is BETTER in this respect for music).....
    Errr.... are you aware MP3 is a lossy format too?

    Originally Posted by NextechNetworks View Post
    But if you're stuck with a regular system or just playing sound from your TV, you might as well drop it down to AC3 Audio. Later when you finally get that surround system, you'll be happy you did. The space savings you get from AAC just isn't worth it.
    Well given most discs contain more than one audio stream and generally one of them is AC3, I'd agree to a certain extent. I just keep the original AC3 audio. No point converting it to AAC. However if that's not an option then converting DTS etc to AAC probably reduces the audio stream size by about 700MB for a movie, on average (depending on the quality setting/bitrate used). Of course if you're into sound wizzing around the room and need to send a receiver AC3, then it makes sense to convert to AC3 instead.
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    Sorry for the gravedig, but it seems pertinent. Assuming a bluray source, would an audio encode of 5.1 to AC3 at 384k have better quality than AAC 5.1 192k?
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