How to set mpeg2enc values to obtain better quality??????

[incredible]

Hi!

I'm trying to reencode the DVD-movie "Witness". Well the orig. source picture-quality doesn't seem to reach a real DVD quality like "U-571" (I reencoded that movie with standard settings in mediapipe and received a good quality at a 2200 kbit rate and the result doesn't contain big artefacts!).

For "witness" I configure in Mediapipe the bitrate to 2740 but the result-movie contains strange big "blocky" artefacts in some continous fields!!!
I tried to set VBR off, but the exactly the same quality problem.
I rised the bitrate (just to see a difference) to 3500 ... same big artefacts

Is it the answer that if the quality of the DVD source contans much grain, ... that I can do what I want ... I will receive "blocky" artefacts????

Can someone explain what the settings "gop size", "reduction factor 4x4 2x2", "quantisation factor", etc. etc. etc. in mediapipe will give?????

Thanks a lot!
Markus

[bilestyle]

well you ARE choosing VERY low bitrates for something with dvd resolution. most dvds are encoding at a MUCH higher bitrate than ~3000. The 2x2 and 4x4 reduction factors when both at 1 will give the best quality but will slow down the process significantly. The GOP size can be changed as well (i've never bothered to find any good variable GOP sizes for dvd downsampling because they are only necessary at low bitrates) but for svcd i generally choose 9 as the min and 18 as the max or somethin like that... but that will make encoding SIGNIFICANTLY slower. you should just choose a more fitting bitrate for dvd.

[SIMPLE_THINGS]

> Is it the answer that if the quality of the DVD source contans much grain,
> ... that I can do what I want ... I will receive "blocky" artefacts????

Try YuvDenoiser (is a temporal denoiser for MediaPipe):

http://www.info.polymtl.ca/~anmis/YuvDenoiser.tgz