Vidcoder 'medium to medium-high' quality x264 MVK help

[Fejinwales]

I was wondering if someone could help me with a profile.

A bit of history, I used to use MeGUI to do my encoding until I got fed up of its inconsistency as far as lip sync issued were concerned, so I looked around for a more reliable encoder and found Vidcoder which has never failed me. I have already made a HQ profile for movies and DVD’s I have on my HDD based on the settings contained in a previous thread here but my problem is that I have still some older TV stuff on that I want to convert for storage and viewing on my TV from a HDD through my Blu-ray player. The normal setting doesn’t really do it very well – it is blocky where a similar colour or shade covers a large area and also a little fizzy, as most of my stuff fis sci-fi there is a mlot of this….

What I really need is a profile that is better than the normal (maybe on par with MeGUI Spline setting or better) but obviously not as high as the HQ setting here. I want to make them as MVK with AC3 Passthru and chapter markers, constant bitrate and 400MB is size but they are all the parameters I know about. I would obviously not mind waiting longer for the conversions than the really quick time taken on ‘Normal’. I could do them in the HQ profile but they take ages for little gain considering the source. Can anyone please advise settings for a ‘medium or medium-high’ profile for this sort of content?

 

[InsaneNutter]

I have created a profile for 480p and 720p encoding based on the Vidcoder settings tutorial we have here.

I could post them up for when im home if you like, both profiles do take ages to encode stuff. However the 480p one has worked fine for some TV shows i've encoded.

In my opinion the end results have been great, i play all my media back using XBMC running on an Intel Atom / Nvidia Ion based Nettop PC.

 

[Fejinwales]

I could post them up for when im home if you like, both profiles do take ages to encode stuff. However the 480p one has worked fine for some TV shows i've encoded.

That 480p one you made for DVD's would be great if it's not too much trouble,
What I really need is a better quality than 'normal' would give be as it leaves blocking on the particular famous sci-fi series I need to do (4:3 aspect ratio 720 x 550 encoded size). But also one that although will take longer than the standard 'Normal' preset would take bun nowhere as long as it would take to do an HQ one (for DVD movies and Blu-ray rips), which I got from this site. They also need de-interlacing but as I understand it the Decomb function will do this selectively although I can find no explanations for the setting choices 'Fast' and 'Bob'. I am currently doing a test episode to see if de-interlacing using Decomb actually works

Any advice you can give would be great.

My media is all converted from my own DVD's, I need to get shelf-space desperately. I don't bother with my movie collections but the series take up an awful lot of space. I also do it because I am disabled and find it difficult sometimes to keep getting up and down to change disks.
I playback from an external HDD connected to my Sony Blu-ray Player.

 

[InsaneNutter]

I'm in a bit of a rush however have attached them to this post.

Ive been encoding TV series to set file sizes, 550MB for a 45min ish 480p TV episode has produced great results for me.

Likewise the 720p 2.2gb for HD stuff looks great, i probably could get away with doing them smaller however the quality / bitrate is great and seems to be better than encodes you see uploaded on the net, with very similar file sizes.

Have a play about, i have mainly used the 720p settings. Only encoded one or two random episodes with the 480p settings, however i was happy with the results.

 

[Fejinwales]

Thyankks InsaneNutter. I'll give tthe 480p one a go straight away and will let you know the results I get. I was expecting it to take a long time, but at the moment it says a total of half an hour for a 45 minute episode of TNG...that is great!
I tried with some settings yesterday and the resulting MVK was very jittery, even when someone was walking diagonally across the screen, I am really hoping your profile will sort this out.

 

[InsaneNutter]

I cant honestly say i've seen anything jittery in my encodes like what you describe, i'm no expert by any means. I just read up on and and played about to see what worked best for me.

What processor do you have? I have a Core i5 2500 and it takes longer half an hour for me!

 

[Fejinwales]

In the end it actually took just 32 minutes. It was a superb picture but still jittered. I think it almost sertainly has to do with the de interlacing because if I make the same episode with MeGUI it is perfect as there is a de-interlacing analyses on there, in the case of TNG it is Partially Interlaced, Varying Field Order and Yadif used to correct...but, and it is a very big but...for some reason, despite successfully doing Enterprise, TOS, DS9 and Voyager and a myriad of other series with MeGUI, all U'S series from R2 DVD's, TNG has decided to lock up my BD player when I skip forward or back to a chapter, or even FF or REW. It makes no sense. I know how to do these given the amount of conversions I've done but for some reason the chapters and skips will not work on this particular series. I never checked if they worked with Vidcoder because of the jittering problem. As a test I made a conversion of episode 1 of 'Space Above and Beyond' with the 420p settings, this did not require de interlacing and was superb so I will be keeping the 420p profile for use with series I have yet to do. But if de interlacing is needed it seems that I will have to use MeGUI.

In the meantime - and as I am the kind of person with little patience for technology as a whole, and also as a result of now not having a full converted set of the Star Trek franchise because of the indexing problems with TNG I have now, regretfully, deleted all the other seasons and will keep my DVD's on shelf. I do not like missing series from an otherwise full set.

As for my system and processor, My processor is older than is yours, I suspect you have the i5 with the graphics capability, the new type. Mine is an i7 but an older version than is yours, I built this computer about 2-and-a-half-years ago. My system is as follows:

Motherboard - ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6T DELUXE V2 (LGA1366) - Liquid Cooled
CPU - Intel Core i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz - 4 Cores, 8 Threads
RAM - 16.0 GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 534MHz
Graphics - 1024MB GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Gigabyte)
Monitor - HP 2310 (1920x1080@60Hz)
HDD 1 - 60GB M4-CT064M4SSD2 ATA Device (SSD)
HDD 2 -1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 ATA Device (SATA)
Optical Drives - 2x Optiarc DVD RW AD-5260S ATA Device
Audio - Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio
OS - Vista Ultimate 64bit

I want to thank you for the profiles you sent. If I ever get around to buying a BD drive I will be able to use the other one you gave me as well.

 

[carlmart]

Sorry to get into this discussion, but I asked some processing questions on another thread, that with the Vidcoder tutorial, and I wonder if anyone will read it.

I used the high profile setup to process a 1080p mkv file so that it could fit onto a 1080p 8Gb size. Processing took about 9 hours, which I thought was a bit high, or that should be about right?

My hardware is based on an i7 3770 cpu, non boosted, with 8Gb memory, running Windows 7/64. Vidcoder is the 64 version, of course.

During processing I checked with Task Manager to see if cores and memory was being wholly used, and they were not. Memory used was about 3Gb and cores were never topped. Is that the way it should be?

There's no Vidcoder setup for hardware, anyway.

In any case the processing results were very good.