Hi All, There is typically a small loss in sharpness when transcoding video. I have been trying to find a way to compensate for this without introducing artifacts. I believe that I have a solution:
-J msharpen=threshold=5:strength=8 This appears to me to correct the problem without introducing any artifacts. Stronger values produce increasingly offensive "jaggies" and "beating", but these values do not. I have tested this on a wide variety of source, and it works well with very high quality and moderately high quality source. The effect is subtle and very satisfying. I recommend using this option whenever making dvd's from live-action source. I also of course continue to recommend overscan compensation in all cases when targeting NTSC dvd format. These settings will never fail to improve quality (unless no scaling is being done otherwise): -j -16,-32,-16,-32 # for 4:3 -j -8,-32,-12,-32 # for 16:9 These are "safe" values for all source at least 640 pixels wide. For source more than 720 pixels wide the numbers can be increased proportionately. doing this will increase the bit-density of the visible image by ~15%. And lastly, many people will find this option improves their viewing experience, though it does change the appearance of the image: -x mplayer="-vf eq2=0.9:1:0:1.02" This will kick up the contrast and saturation slightly. Some people may find this offensive so I don't recommend it in all cases. Oh, while I'm at this, here's how to hard encode fancy styled subs using Transcode: -x mplayer="-ass -embeddedfonts -sub my_sub_file.ass" Amusingly, there is no way to do the same thing using mencoder.
