How to make my video look little sharper using x264?

[kkiller23]

I'm wondering how to sharpen the image a little using x264?

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/135685


as you can see it doesn't look that much better then XviD, i might even say the XviD looks little better even though everyone is always telling me that x264 is a much better codec.

So can someone recommend me some good settings to encode with megui to downscale a bluray to SD?

I tried setting deblocking to -1, -1 as in a tut it said it made it look a little sharper, but it didn't really do anything.

[hello_hello]

Generally x264 is better at retaining detail than Xvid but I guess the main advantage of x264 is it should offer smaller file sizes for a given quality. It's hard to tell from a single screen shot comparison, especially when they're not the same frame, but to me the x264 screenshot looks marginally better. Although I do wonder if the original video has already been sharpened or if it was upscaled. Personally if that's just the result of resizing I don't think I'd be adding sharpening because it already seems to have an artificially sharpened look about it to me, but maybe that's just the screenshot.

I assume you used the same type of resizing for both? Some resizers are sharper than others. I generally use Spline36.

Usually I don't like the effect of sharpening, but if used very subtly it can be effective. There's a bunch of sharpening filters for AVISynth here: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Sharpeners

You'll need to download one and add the sharpening to MeGUI's script manually. When you manually add things to the script, if you then make other changes using the GUI the manually added stuff will probably be removed (which can be $#@%ing annoying). However if you add something to the script, using the "Preview AVS Script" button will let you view the changes using the video preview.

Anyway, for subtle sharpening I quite like asharp so I'll use it as an example.
You need to tell MeGUI to load the asharp dll (after you've downloaded it) by using the "Load DLL" section at the bottom of the AVISynth Script Creator's Script tab, or by manually adding something to the script like:

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\asharp\asharp.dll")

Then you need to add the sharpening parameters. For subtle adaptive sharpening try adding a line to the script like:

asharp(0.9,3)

There's a html file included in the asharp zip file which explains how it works and you can play around with different parameters to see what you like. Or try a different sharpening filter.

On the odd occasion I've used a sharpening filter I think I've used the asharp settings above, and I've put the sharpening before the resizing in the script. I also tried putting it after the resizing but preferred it the other way. Obvious sharpening (where the edges of objects in the video are enhanced too artificially) looks bad to me. I'd prefer blurry. I think I decided sharpening before resizing still enhanced the detail, but looked more natural. Whether it's technically the correct way to do it I'm not sure.

Someone who uses filtering more than I do (which is fairly rarely) may have better sharpening advice, but the above should at least give you an idea how to go about adding it to MeGUI's script. I suspect if you do add sharpening you might also start to see a llittle difference between x264 and Xvid, when it comes to fine detail.

[kkiller23]

Thank you for the reply. I've never tried Spline36. I might have to give it a go. I've heard about it in a few tut's, but when i tried to use it megui gave me an error. So i guess i have to download it and install it manually like the others?

[hello_hello]

I'm sure Spline36 is a method of resizing AVIsynth uses natively, so it requires no plugin. If it did, MeGUI would include it. I'm not sure why using it would give you errors. Spline36 and Lanczos4 are commonly used and very similar resizers.

[kkiller23]

Ah, i was using an older version of AVIsynth that didn't include spline yet. I just updated and it works now. I'm doing a test with spline36 now.