Black/dark banding

[dodge586]

Using RipBot to encode my blurays to MKV I always apply a CF of 18 at 1080 and prioritise quality over file size. Sure enough, the resulting MKV looks sweet.

Though sometimes I do notice some banding of dark colours, say for example a night sky - it may have visible bands within it.

This is my only complaint - is there anything I can do to reduce this?


Thanks

[jagabo]

Yes, banding in dark areas is a weakness of x264. If you look closely at the source and the encoded video you'll see what's happened is noise in the source is largely gone, leading to banding. You can use a lower CRF, --aq-mode=2 --aq-strength=2.0 (or something between 1.0 and 2.0), or --qcomp=1.0 (or something between 0.6 and 1.0). All those things will increase the bitrate.

See the videos in this post for examples:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/345427-Handbrake-Should-i-leave-it-on?p=2156674&vie...=1#post2156674