What sort of factors are behind the great quality of a video I've
recently seen? It is 2 hours 18, a 1036mb filesize, h264, 95k aac audio, demuxer lafvpref, 1280x536 resolution. These details are what I read in
the SMPlayer software on my computer. VLC additionally says: Codec: H264
- MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) and Decoded format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV, if
any of these details help.

I've seen it on an old 1024x768 laptop and my homebuilt desktop pc with
its 27" monitor, both using SMPlayer or VLC in the Ubuntu 14.04
operating system, and am impressed with the lack of grain or blockiness.
A 1.3gb file of the same film looked noticeably worse.

I am playing around with Handbrake having just copied 120 DVDs with
MakeMKV and soon to fill an external hard drive with mp4 files hopefully
a third to a quarter of the originals' size, but understanding what went
on with this 1gb file would really help.

I prefer to use Linux software but have Windows 10 on another drive for
when it's needed. I was hoping not to need to buy Nero or DivX to get
very satisfying quality and previous advice has said they're not needed.

Thanks.

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Nathan Granville <[email protected]> wrote:

What sort of factors are behind the great quality of a video I've
recently seen? It is 2 hours 18, a 1036mb filesize, h264, 95k aac audio, demuxer lafvpref, 1280x536 resolution. These details are what I read in
the SMPlayer software on my computer. VLC additionally says: Codec: H264
- MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) and Decoded format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV, if
any of these details help.

I've seen it on an old 1024x768 laptop and my homebuilt desktop pc with
its 27" monitor, both using SMPlayer or VLC in the Ubuntu 14.04
operating system, and am impressed with the lack of grain or blockiness.
A 1.3gb file of the same film looked noticeably worse.

I think even if you find the info you are looking for on that 1.04GB file,
it doesn't mean it'll help much.

The size of the file and how good it looks depends alot on the material,
dark scenes or lack of motion can compress well, but if there is alot of motion, forest scenes, water, it just doesn't compress as well.

What I mean is, specific settings for one video may not be the ones to use
for another.

The other thing you may or may not be able to determine is where the source video came from. The 1.04GB one might be from a bluray rip and the 1.3GB one "that is noticeably worse" might of been a re-encode from some old xvid or
avi file (or even a bin/cue, heh).

Although Handbrake is a quick/easy converter, it doesn't really "tweak"
well, if you look into something like ffmpeg, it'll make your head explode
with all the options.

One thing with Handbrake, try using the "two pass" encoding, which is
usually unchecked. It'll increase the time quite a bit but instead of trying default settings "on the fly", it'll make one pass to examine the video and
the 2nd pass to actually do the encoding, adjusting things as it goes based
on the info from the 1st pass.

Personally I never seen much difference using it but in theory it should
give better results on the average.

Which actually leads me to the reason for this post, I don't know why
(exactly) you want to do all of this but I want to point out that hard
drives are cheap these days. Even if you settle on just using Handbrake with default settings to convert the 120 dvd rips, don't throw out the originals.

Stick them on a drive and stash it, desk drawer, closet.

The reason being, what you decide to do today may not hold up even a year
from now. Although the whole mkv/mp4/h264 stuff seems to be the status quo, it's just not going to in the long run. Eventually the x265/hevc will
probably migrate in eventually replacing current "standards".

If you toss all the originals, you painted yourself into a corner.

-bruce
[email protected]

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Hi Nathan,

What sort of factors are behind the great quality of a video I've
recently seen? It is 2 hours 18, a 1036mb filesize, h264, 95k aac
audio, demuxer lafvpref, 1280x536 resolution. These details are what
I read in the SMPlayer software on my computer. VLC additionally
says: Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) and Decoded format:
Planar 4:2:0 YUV, if any of these details help.
I've seen it on an old 1024x768 laptop and my homebuilt desktop pc with
its 27" monitor, both using SMPlayer or VLC in the Ubuntu 14.04
operating system, and am impressed with the lack of grain or
blockiness. A 1.3gb file of the same film looked noticeably worse.

The two biggest factors of a video's file size are the resolution and the bitrate. Decrease either and the file size gets smaller. Unfortunately, decreasing the resolution or bitrate also decreases the quality of the
final video.

For SD video (720x480 - Standard DVD Quality) I usually use h264 encoding
with a 3000kbps video bitrate and 192kbps audio bitrate. That usually
results in file sizes around 2GB-3GB for a two hour video.

For HD video (1920x1080 - Blu-Ray Quality) I use h264 encoding with an
8000kbps video and 320kbps audio bitrate. That usually results in file
sizes around 6GB-7GB for a two hour video.

For critical videos that can't be replaced (like our personal home
videos), I use 1920x1080 h264 at 30Mbps and 320kbps audio (about 5gb for
a half hour).

For comparison, most standard HD digital TV channels are encoded with
MPEG2 video at 12,000kbps and 320kbps AC3 audio. These average about 4GB
per hour.

I am playing around with Handbrake having just copied 120 DVDs with
MakeMKV and soon to fill an external hard drive with mp4 files
hopefully a third to a quarter of the originals' size, but
understanding what went on with this 1gb file would really help.

Use something like MediaInfo (or the "input bitrate" in VLC statistics)
to see what resolution and bitrate your sample video uses. Then use
similar settings to encode your video. For the highest quality, use "2
pass" encoding.

You can also try different programs for encoding your video. Handbrake
usually encodes well, but I tend to use FreeMake as it's easier to use.

If you plan to keep the original DVD's, you can decrease the bitrate as
low as you can tolerate to get the file sizes down.

If you plan to discard the DVD's after ripping them, I highly recommend
just keeping the original MPEG2 video as it was encoded on the DVD (maybe
3-4GB per disc). Every time you reencode video, you're throwing away
video information you can't get back.

Hard drives are cheap these days. I wouldn't worry too much about file
sizes.

Anthony Watson
www.watsondiy.com
www.mountainsoftware.com

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"HerHusband" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

The two biggest factors of a video's file size are the resolution and the bitrate. Decrease either and the file size gets smaller.

By definition, file size = bitrate x duration.
Changing the resolution doesn't change the file size at all if the bitrate is unchanged.

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