Change in attitude

[Mephesto]

In the beginning of my encoding career I would starve the hell out of my videos with low bitrates, emphasizing the awesome compression over quality but since I started using MSU video comparison tool where I could view the difference directly and closely, I've gotten way more picky about the quality. I've encoded the same videos now that I did 5 years ago and despite the increase in x264 efficiency plus the gains from other things I've started doing since such as denoising and deshimmering, the bitrates are twice as higher.

But my question is about semantics. Is it more correct to say that I've become more conservative in my methods since or liberal.

I don't wanna see any political references or discussions about the words, I'm asking about the technical use of them.

[poisondeathray]

But my question is about semantics. Is it more correct to say that I've become more conservative in my methods since or liberal.

Neither term really applies in this context

If you were to boil it down to those 2 terms only, you've become "more liberal" in terms of your methods, because you are doing more things, filtering etc... "More conservative" would imply you are doing fewer manipulations and leaving things as they are

[Mephesto]

Yeah that's where I was at, because more manipulation would be a liberal workflow but they are for the purpose of better preserving or 'conserving' the video quality the way it should be.

What would it be in terms of using a more liberal amount of bitrate to better conserve the quality... ehh, I hate semantics.

[smrpix]

What would it be in terms of using a more liberal amount of bitrate to better conserve the quality... ehh, I hate semantics.

Liberal or conservative, you don't want to be accused of being anti-semantic.

(Sorry, I've literally waited decades for an opportunity to use that joke.)

[Mephesto]

What would it be in terms of using a more liberal amount of bitrate to better conserve the quality... ehh, I hate semantics.

Liberal or conservative, you don't want to be accused of being anti-semantic.

(Sorry, I've literally waited decades for an opportunity to use that joke.)

I AM anti-semantic. Semantic pedants should be sent to concentration camps where they can learn to concentrate on getting lives than being the nitpicky, grammar nazis they are.

[sambat]

..they can learn to concentrate on getting lives than being the nitpicky..

Watch them grammar.

[gonca]

You're not getting more liberal or conservative, just older and fussier. In a nice polite way, you're becoming more discerning about quality.

[Mephesto]

You're not getting more liberal or conservative, just older and fussier. In a nice polite way, you're becoming more discerning about quality.

I know that but it's much funner to use pseudointellectually-wrought big words that make me sound smart rather than another prissy fag who complains about a single speck missing from his gay porn videos. It makes me feel all tingly inside.

Watch them grammar.

NO!

[ranchhand]

Stop it guys, I'm having flashbacks to my high school days... I hated every English teacher I ever had. Now where'd I put that whiskey & soda?? On second thought, forget the soda.

[gonca]

Well Mephesto, I guess you're becoming a neo-con with a liberal latitude towards your encodes. Your grants (bitrate) toward your constituents (encodes) are far more left wing with a conservative eye on usage of resources (quality)

[yoda313]

I think these days its more a matter of storage space and playback medium than the actual encoding procedure.

Back when all you had were cdrs and harddrives where a few gbs were monstrous space was at a premium and video was new.

Progress to single layer dvds and you still have to sacrifice. Dual layer dvds give more flexibility of course.

Enter blulray and terabyte harddrives. Space galore!

It all depends on your storage medium and ultimate playback platform. If its a harddrive and a settop media player just leave it as the original source be it ripped from a dvd or bluray and forget compressing it further.

Just save up for a few harddrives that start with TB and forget about it.

This is truly the glory days of digital media. Storage space is almost a commodity and doesn't need to be rationed. Gorge yourself on it and stop worrying about it

[hello_hello]

I think a lot of it comes down to how much encoding you do. The more you encode, the more bad stuff you notice and the fussier you tend to get as a result. Well that seems to be how it went for me..... I sometimes view old Xvid, or even the occasional early x264 encode, and find myself wondering "what I was thinking".

Mind you I've only owned a HD TV for a couple of years. Before that I was still using the old CRT TV with it's ability to hide the nastiness.

[Mephesto]

Well Mephesto, I guess you're becoming a neo-con with a liberal latitude towards your encodes. Your grants (bitrate) toward your constituents (encodes) are far more left wing with a conservative eye on usage of resources (quality)

I lol'd.

I think these days its more a matter of storage space and playback medium than the actual encoding procedure.

Back when all you had were cdrs and harddrives where a few gbs were monstrous space was at a premium and video was new.

Progress to single layer dvds and you still have to sacrifice. Dual layer dvds give more flexibility of course.

Enter blulray and terabyte harddrives. Space galore!

It all depends on your storage medium and ultimate playback platform. If its a harddrive and a settop media player just leave it as the original source be it ripped from a dvd or bluray and forget compressing it further.

Just save up for a few harddrives that start with TB and forget about it.

This is truly the glory days of digital media. Storage space is almost a commodity and doesn't need to be rationed. Gorge yourself on it and stop worrying about it

You're forgetting transfer speed, both HDD and network. HDD speed has scaled in the wrong direction. They are so pathetically slow and easily fragmented that I created a 300GB partition on my 2TB drive because there's really no point in the rest of the space when it's gonna take 6 hours to access, plus the less you have the way easier it is to do backups and other essential operations.

The most annoying is the persistently slow internet speed. It doesn't help that the average cable provider makes upload 20x slower than download so a large portion of the world is stuck with 400 kbps upload speed. That's the bitrate of the videos they'll be sharing in real time with everybody. Pitiful.

I think a lot of it comes down to how much encoding you do. The more you encode, the more bad stuff you notice and the fussier you tend to get as a result. Well that seems to be how it went for me..... I sometimes view old Xvid, or even the occasional early x264 encode, and find myself wondering "what I was thinking".

Hey hey hey m'nigga, I used to use CRF26 in the very beginning. Cool huh?

Mind you I've only owned a HD TV for a couple of years. Before that I was still using the old CRT TV with it's ability to hide the nastiness.

I know right? I miss my old CRT. Ever since I got my LCD (I always hated them and still do) I noticed the artifacts, especially banding and blocking a lot more clearly, like the crappy contrast ratio amplified them.

I used to snap at people claiming some h264 encodes were bad quality by blaming their use of an LCD monitor (as if CRTs were available anymore).

[hello_hello]

I think CRTs tend to hide the nastiness because they don't have the resolution to show all the noise..... although I don't really know "why" for sure.
I recall dragging out some very old AVIs not long after buying my Plasma. They looked perfectly fine on the CRT TV (from memory).... I could have been playing the original DVDs. Using my Trinitron CRT PC monitor (I'm not an LCD fan either) there was definitely a difference. I could more nasty using it. Maybe it's the higher resolution and/or refresh rate, maybe it's just that I'd generally sit further away from the CRT TV screen..... and of course these days generally I preview encodes on a 51" screen sitting five feet from my desk, which is all very handy until you realise the video encoding quality OCD is now becoming a little worse with each encode.....

Thinking about it, maybe it's as much about monitors/TVs showing more of the nasty stuff as the years have progressed as it is about the brain getting better at seeing it.

[Mephesto]

It's nothing to do with lower resolutions because even today I rarely if ever encoded a 1440x900 video and even if I did it wouldn't play properly on my old PC attached to the CRT.
The lower contrast ratio and other problems LCDs have like viewing angles can amplify banding artifacts and such.
Nothing to do with viewing distance either as my LCD monitor gets hot and I feel it on my face if I'm too close especially during the summer.

[fritzi93]

This is truly the glory days of digital media. Storage space is almost a commodity and doesn't need to be rationed. Gorge yourself on it and stop worrying about it

You'll use that space alright. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Just the last 2 years, I've burned at least 200 BDRs and bought 12 TB in hard drives (an order of magnitude over all the hard drive space I had up to then).

With more storage space available, I guess I've been more willing to notice quality loss from over-compression. Then again, it shows more on a 70" flat panel.

[yoda313]

Then again, it shows more on a 70" flat panel.

Tech envy

[soneca]

Hey hey hey m'nigga, I used to use CRF26 in the very beginning. Cool huh?

I used to encode everything using crf18/17 and now I'm reaching 20 and, depending on the quality, also resize movies that have no resolution to justify keeping the 1080, I'm in 12TB and needing to buy more disks. I have you had over 1000 dvd's inherited from my video store and I did not get to burn the bd's for lack of space ... I have some.

Speaking of crt I remember my first Sony Wega Trinitron... resolution higher than any other crt!! I began to notice too many defects in images of dvd's that I did not notice before!!