Incorporate Avisynth Scripts into FFMPEG issues

[manono]

I also notice their video bitrates are super high: 9500/9800 kbs.

That means nothing. it's just a number in a header. If you want to find out the real bitrates, open the VOBs in something like DVD Bitrate Viewer (includes audio plus video plus subs plus overhead). And DVDs don't contain AC-3 PCM. AC3 (probably what you want) or WAV or (if PAL) MP2.

Most retail DVDs use variable bitrate with the max bitrate around 8000. Some lower, some a little bit higher. I daresay you will never find a retail DVD with a max video bitrate of 9800.

[poisondeathray]

My tapes are retail tapes. They are movies/Television series. I don't have homemade videos.
The reason I'm asking for this is that i purchased professionally produced DVDs (retail DVDs) and I compared their picture quality with my raw uncompressed MOV files. I notice my uncompressed MOv files quality = their retail DVDs. Then I assume they muat have w way to convert these files to dvds. I also notice their video bitrates are super high: 9500/9800 kbs. Even the best DVD RECORDER LIKE JVC and TOSHIBA XS34...can't obtain this high bitrate. I can upload a portion of their retail DVD so you can see their quality vs my uncompressed Mov files. Other tha Ffmpeg, would you recommend any other programs that could create high quality DVDs? Please advise me. Thank you.

What kind of "retail tapes?"

How do you know "these files" were the same source for the retail DVD's ? How do you know they didn't use something else or undergo some other path ?



Movies / TV series such as dramas are progressive content. In North America this means you should be performing inverse telecine to recover the original progressive frames. Then you should encode progressive and make a progressive scan DVD. Progressive content, but encoded interlaced or with telecine is significantly worse - You encode 25% extra fields. So at a given bitrate, the quality will be worse.

Soap operas, or documentaries, sports shows - those are usually interlaced content. Those you would encode interlaced

The problem with 9500-9800kbps is potential playback problems in some DVD players, such as older models, and cheap imports

A good free MPEG2 encoder is HCEnc . A GUI for it is AVStoDVD . There are commercial encoders such CCE, Mainconcept, Procoder . Each has pros/cons, but FFmpeg is clearly the worst - By far.


And if you're worried about bitrates, quality, why use DVD-video at all ? Many TV's these days can play files natively, such as h264 / MP4/MKV. Or a cheap android box can be used as a media player

[rgia]

I also notice their video bitrates are super high: 9500/9800 kbs.

That means nothing. it's just a number in a header. If you want to find out the real bitrates, open the VOBs in something like DVD Bitrate Viewer (includes audio plus video plus subs plus overhead). And DVDs don't contain AC-3 PCM. AC3 (probably what you want) or WAV or (if PAL) MP2.

Most retail DVDs use variable bitrate with the max bitrate around 8000. Some lower, some a little bit higher. I daresay you will never find a retail DVD with a max video bitrate of 9800.

I downloaded the Bitrate viewer and loaded a few DVDs. Here is one of the statistical results that came back.
[Attachment 53621 - Click to enlarge] I've learned something new today thanks to you. I appreciate the guide from you. So It turns to be the max bitrate is 9879 kb/s and the average bitrate is 4491. But the quality is awesome!!!! I just don't know of any methods or Softwares that are capable of converting uncompressed MOV files into DVDs with the correct bitrate, resolution pre-determined. Could you please throw at me some good tips? I'd appreciate your help.

[rgia]

My tapes are retail tapes. They are movies/Television series. I don't have homemade videos.
The reason I'm asking for this is that i purchased professionally produced DVDs (retail DVDs) and I compared their picture quality with my raw uncompressed MOV files. I notice my uncompressed MOv files quality = their retail DVDs. Then I assume they muat have w way to convert these files to dvds. I also notice their video bitrates are super high: 9500/9800 kbs. Even the best DVD RECORDER LIKE JVC and TOSHIBA XS34...can't obtain this high bitrate. I can upload a portion of their retail DVD so you can see their quality vs my uncompressed Mov files. Other tha Ffmpeg, would you recommend any other programs that could create high quality DVDs? Please advise me. Thank you.

What kind of "retail tapes?"

How do you know "these files" were the same source for the retail DVD's ? How do you know they didn't use something else or undergo some other path ?



Movies / TV series such as dramas are progressive content. In North America, this means you should be performing inverse telecine to recover the original progressive frames. Then you should encode progressive and make a progressive scan DVD. Progressive content, but encoded interlaced or with telecine is significantly worse - You encode 25% extra fields. So at a given bitrate, the quality will be worse.

Soap operas, or documentaries, sports shows - those are usually interlaced content. Those you would encode interlaced

The problem with 9500-9800kbps is potential playback problems in some DVD players, such as older models, and cheap imports

A good free MPEG2 encoder is HCEnc. A GUI for it is AVStoDVD. There are commercial encoders such as CCE, Mainconcept, Procoder . Each has pros/cons, but FFmpeg is clearly the worst - By far.


And if you're worried about bitrates, quality, why use DVD-video at all ? Many TV's these days can play files natively, such as h264 / MP4/MKV. Or a cheap android box can be used as a media player

I'm familiarizing myself with HCEnc and AVStoDVD right now. In the meantime, I'm trying to convert MOV files (2-audio channels) to MP4 (with 2 audio channels) using FFMPEG. Could you please take a look at this command line below?

This is my command line to convert the uncompressed 10-bit 422yuv files to MP4 without cropping.

for %%a in ("*.mov") do FFmpeg -i "%%a" -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 0 -c:a aac -b:a 192k "\%%~na.mp4"

This is my command line to convert the uncompressed 10-bit 422yuv files to MP4 with cropping since the resolution of the original files are 720x486

for %%a in ("*.mov") do ffmpeg -i "%%a" -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -vf crop=720:480:0:3 -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 0 -c:a aac -b:a 192k "\%%~na.mp4

Could you please glance at them and correct me if I wrote them wrong? Thank you for your patience.

[poisondeathray]

-vf crop=720:480:0:3 means you're cropping 3 from the top , 3 from the bottom - is that what you wanted ?

[rgia]

-vf crop=720:480:0:3 means you're cropping 3 from the top , 3 from the bottom - is that what you wanted ?

I honestly did not know that. I just copied the way another member created his syntax to crop 720x486 videos to 720x480. I thought this was what I needed. Could you please help me understand why 720:480:0:3 will crop both the bottom and the top? The resolution of the MOV files are 720x480, If I want to crop them to 720x480, what do you think how I should correct the mistake? I also have a dumb question about cropping. Do you think cropping affects the quality of the video being cropped?

[poisondeathray]

-vf crop=720:480:0:3 means you're cropping 3 from the top , 3 from the bottom - is that what you wanted ?

I honestly did not know that. I just copied the way another member created his syntax to crop 720x486 videos to 720x480. I thought this was what I needed. Could you please help me understand why 720:480:0:3 will crop both the bottom and the top? The resolution of the MOV files are 720x480, If I want to crop them to 720x480, what do you think how I should correct the mistake? I also have a dumb question about cropping. Do you think cropping affects the quality of the video being cropped?

You need to look at the actual image and correlate. ie. What area are you cropping ? When you cap at 720x486 usually there are some garbage pixels on the borders. Make sure the crop corresponds to the correct area

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#crop

that "3" means the y position of the crop box. x=0, y=3

Also, most retail DVD's from an analog source will mask out or crop and add borders to the garbage areas if there are any . They look bad and impair compression

I can upload a portion of their retail DVD so you can see their quality vs my uncompressed Mov files.

It might be a good idea to post those samples or start a new thread about it

[rgia]

-vf crop=720:480:0:3 means you're cropping 3 from the top , 3 from the bottom - is that what you wanted ?

I honestly did not know that. I just copied the way another member created his syntax to crop 720x486 videos to 720x480. I thought this was what I needed. Could you please help me understand why 720:480:0:3 will crop both the bottom and the top? The resolution of the MOV files are 720x480, If I want to crop them to 720x480, what do you think how I should correct the mistake? I also have a dumb question about cropping. Do you think cropping affects the quality of the video being cropped?

You need to look at the actual image and correlate. ie. What area are you cropping ? When you cap at 720x486 usually there are some garbage pixels on the borders. Make sure the crop corresponds to the correct area

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#crop

that "3" means the y position of the crop box. x=0, y=3

Also, most retail DVD's from an analog source will mask out or crop and add borders to the garbage areas if there are any . They look bad and impair compression

I can upload a portion of their retail DVD so you can see their quality vs my uncompressed Mov files.

It might be a good idea to post those samples or start a new thread about it

Here is a portion of the DVDs created by David. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CJ9g7ZQc6TLoXb3CQugTJpjo4V6Mzr03/view?usp=sharing

[poisondeathray]

That DVD sample is actually interlaced content, shot on video

[manono]

Here is one of the statistical results that came back..

You have to remember those numbers include not just the video but the audio stream(s) as well, plus the subs and the muxing overhead. If more than one audio stream, then it can affect the video bitrate significantly. Add up the audio bitrate(s) and subtract them from the total and average bitrates for an estimate of the video bitrates alone. The subtitles and overhead don't take much.

Could you please throw at me some good tips?

Just use AvsToDVD.

[rgia]

Here is one of the statistical results that came back..

You have to remember those numbers include not just the video but the audio stream(s) as well, plus the subs and the muxing overhead. If more than one audio stream, then it can affect the video bitrate significantly. Add up the audio bitrate(s) and subtract them from the total and average bitrates for an estimate of the video bitrates alone. The subtitles and overhead don't take much.

Could you please throw at me some good tips?

Just use AvsToDVD.

Thank you for sharing helpful information about the bitrate composition with me. I tried the AVS2DVD. Sadly, it fails to convert uncompressed 10-bit MOV files to DVD. It froze for like forever, and then crashed. I guess my uncompressed files are way too big for it? 100Gbs and up.

[poisondeathray]

If it's "freezing", it might be indexing the source. The speed depends on your hardware, drive speed etc..

You can actually use LSmashVideoSource("video.mov") and it won't index the source

[rgia]

If it's "freezing", it might be indexing the source. The speed depends on your hardware, drive speed etc..

You can actually use LSmashVideoSource("video.mov") and it won't index the source

Can you show me how to proceed with LSmashVideoSource? I googled and I found out that it seems to be a plugin for AVIsynth? How would I combine LSmashVideoSource into AVS2DVD? Thank you.

[poisondeathray]

I'm just guessing that's the reason why it's freezing. If you wait a few minutes and it unfreezes, that could be the reason why

If that's the reason, you can create an avs script, and feed that into avs2dvd (it accepts avs scripts).

But it seems to freeze for me too with 10bit input, not sure why. I actually don't use it. It freezes with a script converting to 8bit script too, that works in other programs - not sure why. But it works ok with 8bit directly


But I sometimes use hcenc directly, and other tools to author. This works ok with a valid script. Hcenc is only the encoder, you still have to author the DVD, make menus, etc...avs2dvd does simple menus, authoring if you can get it to work

This converts to 8bit 4:2:0, downsamples interlaced

LSmashVideoSource(v210.mov")

ConvertToYUV420(interlaced=true)
ConvertBits(8)