Archived from groups: alt.video.divx,rec.video.desktop (
More info?)
Alex T. wrote:
> andre <andre.gunther@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:<RzWgd.15703$6q2.11581@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com>...
>
>>the dog from that film you saw wrote:
>>
>>>"Alex T." <alex_s_42@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>news:25184c1e.0410300051.3e3ced13@posting.google.com...
>>>
>>>
>>>>I want to transferm my home videos in miniDV format to a PC,
>>>>probably in DIVX format.
>>>>What codec and what parameters (bitrate) would you recommend
>>>>if I don't want to tolerate any visible quality loss ?
>>>>
>>>>I tried just running plain old DIVX with default parameters
>>>>wwhich produced reasonable results, but quality loss (although
>>>>quite low) was still present.
>>>>
>>>>Thanks
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>divx is lossy.
>>>
>>>you need to google search for 'lossless codec' to find something - but
>>>lossless codecs will of course have a far lower file compression level than
>>>something like divx -the end result will be a lot bigger.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>So what? DV is lossy too (its an MJPG derivative). Well having said that
>>the OP prob. wants to encode so he won't see the difference. For that I
>>would recommend a bitrate higher than 1500kbps since DviX is rather
>>efficient. I would always prefer XviD over DviX and I would adjust the
>>bitrate, so that I can fit my video onto the media I want to fit it to.
>>You can use VirtualDUB with all the codecs installed (search online for
>>a free DV codec) to do the conversion and play with all settings. It
>>even comes with some pretty sophisticated filters and you can download
>>plugins. All that is freeware.
>>On the other hand I would not use DviX at all but rather MPEG-2, so that
>>the video can be played on a DVD player. For that TMPG is a good choice.
>>It produces very good results at 2Mbps. Other encoders, esp. the ones in
>>the consumer DVD mastering tools (Ulead and others) might require at
>>least 4Mbps.
>>
>>Hope that answered the question.
>>
>>Andre
>
>
>
> Thanks for all the responses. You seem to be the only person, who
> actually read the word "visible"
> Let me state the question in a little bit more detail - I want to
> encode my DV video clip, which does not have any fast changing scenes,
> without any visible quality loss and with best compression rate
> possible, within the limits of the above constrain. I don't care about
> not being able to play this on DVD, I intend to watch this video on PC
> only.
>
> You recommended XviD with best bitrate possible that gives me quality
> I want. Good. Any other parameters I should tweak (and XviD does have
> a few) ?
>
> And completely different question - what about H.264 ? It's supposed
> to be much superior to mpeg4 and there seem to be a few codecs around.
> Are they stable ? Anybody actually tried to work with them ?
Well XviD is not necessarily better in compression than DviX or WMV as
others have suggested here but XviD is open source. In order to use
advanced features in DviX (like quarter pixel, advanced motion
estimation, ...) you have to get the pro version.
Either way, in order to learn how to use XviD properly check this website:
www.doom9.org
They have lots of tutorials. I haven't encoded to mpeg4 in a long time
since I got my DVD burner, so all my knowledge might be a little
outdated. I would turn on everything (liek QPel, and all the other
advanced options and run a two step VBR (Variable Bit Rate) encode.
The encoder runs first and determines the distribution of the Bitrate
across the file and runs a second time to do the actual encoding.
I have gotten extremely good results with 1Mbps (if you tweak it a lot
and do the highest quality encode you can).
Like I said I am not spending that much time on it anymore, since
storage has become so cheap.
H264 is not really implemented yet. There is a free encoder you can get
but with XviD you can still get better quality. Also the computing power
needed to encode in H264 is immense (up to 10 times as long as it takes
to encode XviD).
On www.doom9.org you can find comparisons of encoders and the download
links to encoders and tools (like VirtualDUB which I highly recommend,
its freeware and extremely powerful)
Let me know if you need more help.
Andre
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