Phil Ehrens wrote:
Phil Ehrens wrote:
Carl Karsten wrote:
Phil Ehrens wrote:
I'm not suggesting that the crap programs available for Windows and Mac
are worth 2 cents, but Linux video software is in a pretty messy state
overall. Still no decent editor, and no decent subtitling program.
Transcode can make dvd's that totally blow away even the best commercial
dvd's, by the way... But I don't know why. Unless all the "pros" are
total idiots.
In what way is the tc produced dvd better?
Use of available bits. I just made a dvd with an *average* bitrate
of 2.8, and a peak of 13. The source was a beautiful h.264 hdtv
capture. By balancing the use of the nr filter in ffmpeg with the
msharpen filter of transcode, I achieved a dvd that preserves
fine detail amazingly well, loses a little low contrast edge detail
in dark scenes, and has nearly zero mosquito noise. It's a two
pass encode, and it has hard-coded fancy styled subtitles rendered
by mplayer.
The peak bitrate is outside the standard, but it is only transient,
so any player not made more than five years ago handles it without
a buffer problem, since the average bitrate is so low. I've found
that buffering problems start to occur at about 18 mbit transients
with modern players. If the peak bitrate were hard limited to
conform to the standard, it would yield some macroblocking in high
motion scenes (there are panning shots with sword fights). I am
particularly interested in the fabrics used in the costumes, and
it is easy to differentiate between silk, cotton, and bast fibers
on this dvd ;^)
I have some dvd's that have an average bitrate of 1.8 with very
static content that look about the same as a typical commercial
dvd (with a bitrate of 4-6). Those have peaks below 8.
Gah! Foolish me... I left out the most important difference... I
forget about this because to me it just seems natural to do it...
Since I compensate for overscan, my dvd's show 15% more of the
picture than commercial dvd's, AND the bitrate is effectively
15% higher because I don't waste bits on that part of the picture
that would otherwise be lost to overscan. By the way, my peak
bitrate overstep is only a deviation from the dvd standard, the
mpeg2 standard allows it... Mpeg2 decoding chips are designed to
the mpeg2 standard, afaik.
you mean that isn't my TV's fault? :)
wow, I wonder why the DVD industry isn't on top of this stuff. Seems like it
would be good biz... wait. Dilbert's boss is everywhere.
Carl K
