Guest blcollier Posted March 26, 2011 Report Posted March 26, 2011 (edited) Afternoon all As mentioned in a few threads, I've been tinkering with encoding settings in Handbrake in order to get the optimal settings for converting video. After spending a few hours with this last night and this morning - what a fun Friday night, huh? :D - I think I have nailed it. This profile will allow you to watch files using the native video player - you don't need anything like RockPlayer, or VPlayer. This means that they should be hardware accelerated. You can use something like RockPlayer, but framerates will suffer if you're using HD videos. I tested this using the 1080p MP4 version of Big Buck Bunny as the input file and it works very well - I'm going to give this a shot on some of my other videos today. I have attached the profile in question. EDIT: Rename the file to "Vega.plist" before importing (take off the .txt extension) - I've only just realised that modaco will not let me upload PLIST files... Don't try to double click this, as it might try to open in Quicktime - no idea what it will do on a Mac! To import it open Handbrake, go to "Presets" and click "Import". The profile export feature is experimental, so I'll list the detailed settings that I used in case it does not work. Firstly though, if you're not sure what you're doing in the "Picture" tab, have a read of this quick primer on Anamorphic video. If you want to scale down a 720p or 1080p video to match the Vega's resolution, set Anamorphic to loose, modulus to 16, and set the video width to 1024. For any videos that are not HD, or if you're not sure, just set this to "Strict": this will make sure that the video always displays in the correct aspect ratio, but you won't be able to scale the video down. Don't mess with the "Cropping" settings unless you know what you're doing. I'd highly recommend scaling 720p or 1080p HD videos down to match the Vega's resolution - it drastically reduces the output size: The original version of Big Buck Bunny (1920*1080): 885MB Strict anamorphic - no scaling (1920*1080): 388MB Scaled down to 1024*576 with loose anamorphic: 128MB The Vega will play 720 or 1080 files, but you won't see that extra detail so there's no point in wasting the extra space on your SD card, IMO. Detailed settings - in case the attachment fails. If anyone finds any optimisations for this, please let me know! Output Settings: Container: MP4 File Large file size: Unchecked Web optimised: Unchecked iPod 5G support: Checked Video Filters Tab: Detelecine: Default Decomb: Default Deinterlace: Off Denoise: Off Deblock: Off Grayscale Encoding: Off (Unchecked) Video Tab: Video Codec: H.264 (x264) Framerate: Same as source Quality: Constant Quality, set slider to RF:20 Audio Tab: This is going to vary, depending on the audio tracks in the source video (for example, a DVD may have multiple languages and each of these will be a different audio track) - I have not yet tested multiple audio channels on the Vega, so I highly recommend only adding one audio track to your output file. The following drop-downs must be set: Audio Codec: AAC (faac) Mixdown: Stereo (no point having multi-channel audio if you can't play it on the Vega) Samplerate: Auto Bitrate: 160 Subtitles: This will depend entirely on whether you want to include the subtitles from the source video. This can get a bit more complicated, so I'm not going to cover it here; if your source has subtitles as a separate track (i.e., soft subs not hard subs), you may need to take some extra steps - do some research on this over at afterdawn.com or doom9.org. Chapters: If your source video has chapters - like a DVD - you can replicate those chapters in the output video; if there are no chapter markers in the source, the checkbox is greyed out. Advanced: There's quite a lot in here, so bear with me... Reference Frames: Default (3) Maximum B-Frames: Default (3) CABAC Entropy Encoding: Checked 8x8 Transform: Checked Weighted P-Frames: Unchecked Pyramidal B-Frames: Default (Normal) No DCT-Decimate: Unchecked Adaptive B-Frames: Optimal Adaptive Direct Mode: Default (Spatial) Motion Estimation Method: Default (Hexagon) Subpixel ME & Mode Decision: Default (7) Adaptive Quantisation Strength: slider set to middle Psychovisual Rate Distortion: slider set to middle Psychovisual Trellis: slider set fully to the left Partition Type: Default Trellis: Default Deblocking: Both drop-downs set to Default (0) For those that are interested in the more nerdy side, I started off by copying Handbrake's built in "High Profile" x264 settings. I found this page, which mentions that the Xoom only supports the baseline x264 profile, so I turned off the advanced x264 stuff. However I realised that even though the hardware is the same, the Xoom is not the Vega. So started re-enabling the advanced options one by one to see if any caused a problem. The only one I found that caused any issue was weighted P-Frames, which seemed to make videos judder slightly.Vega.plist.txt Edited March 26, 2011 by blcollier
Guest Hasanpb Posted March 26, 2011 Report Posted March 26, 2011 (edited) Thanks. Edited March 26, 2011 by Hasanpb
Guest blcollier Posted March 27, 2011 Report Posted March 27, 2011 Thanks. excellent - thanks for this No worries. I've tried this on a few non-HD videos, and it seems to work quite well.
Guest MaxiP Posted March 28, 2011 Report Posted March 28, 2011 Thanks - I had created a Vega profile but only using the basic settings.
Guest Touch Graphite Posted March 28, 2011 Report Posted March 28, 2011 Top Man! Downloaded Handbrake and imported this baby in within minutes.
Guest blcollier Posted March 28, 2011 Report Posted March 28, 2011 I have found other transcoding applications, but short of avisynth with hand-written scripts you aren't going to find much better quality than the results that Handbrake produces. I have also recently discovered that Handbrake does not in fact use CUDA-assisted (i.e. graphics card accelerated) encoding, and that actually using CUDA-enabled video encoders can result in a detriment to the quality... Encoding any given frame of video is dependant on the previous frame, so handing off each frame to hundreds of parallel processors to encode separately results in the encoder having to make guesses or assumptions about the preceding frame - hence lower quality. At least as far as x264 goes - don't know about other codecs, but I'm only really interested in x264 these days. Top Man! Downloaded Handbrake and imported this baby in within minutes. Good lord, another Welshman! :D
Guest Touch Graphite Posted March 28, 2011 Report Posted March 28, 2011 It's concerning when your genuinely impressed to see someone else from the same country. It might be a United Kingdom but come to the several bridge and people are so boring over here. This also goes for owning fast, rare cars.
Guest mrg9999 Posted March 28, 2011 Report Posted March 28, 2011 It's concerning when your genuinely impressed to see someone else from the same country. It might be a United Kingdom but come to the several bridge and people are so boring over here. This also goes for owning fast, rare cars. Is there a batch script to convert say all avi files in a directory or tree?
Guest blcollier Posted March 29, 2011 Report Posted March 29, 2011 It's concerning when your genuinely impressed to see someone else from the same country. It might be a United Kingdom but come to the several bridge and people are so boring over here. This also goes for owning fast, rare cars. Well, it's a big old world out there on the internets... And I'm easily amused... :D Is there a batch script to convert say all avi files in a directory or tree? Handbrake will allow you to do batch encoding - I've got around 10 movies left in the queue and it's been encoding pretty much non-stop for the last few days. You just have to add each file to the queue individually, you can't just point it to a directory. It probably is possible to set up a script that says "look at all the files in this directory, convert them to this format and spit them out to this directory"; the best way to do this is probably AviSynth scripting, which is still a rather murky world to me. It would probably only take me a few hours of tinkering to learn it, but I have no inclination to learn a scripting language when there are perfectly good GUIs that do the same job. Feel free to experiment and post your results, however.
Guest yetirider Posted May 1, 2011 Report Posted May 1, 2011 What size files are you getting with this profile? I ripped a "Dune" DVD Standard Apple TV profile = 1.25Gb Vega profile = 990.4MB Am I missing a setting? I imported the .plist and made no further changes. Cheers Phl
Guest Theopulus Posted May 4, 2011 Report Posted May 4, 2011 Thanks a lot; I was struggling with it some time ago
Guest Briggykins Posted May 4, 2011 Report Posted May 4, 2011 Quick question on this - if you're outputting to HDMI, does downscaling note still apply? I.e., is it worth me leaving it at HD res or will the Vega only output at it's native resolution anyway?
Guest Tippon Posted May 5, 2011 Report Posted May 5, 2011 Thanks for this blcollier, makes my life a lot easier :mellow: P.S. yet another Welsh geek here :o
Guest IanTurner Posted June 17, 2011 Report Posted June 17, 2011 (edited) Doesn't seem to work for 2.35:1 films. If i convert the film with those settings then the mp4 file plays fine in quicktime. If I play it with the stock player or rock player then rather than letterboxing it stretches to the screen height rather than width which it compresses. The source is listed as 720 x 576. The width height as 720 x 428 The display size as 1033 x 432. Which seems to exceed the 1024 of the screen. should I reduce the width setting so the display size goes below 1024 or reduce cropping or a mixture of both ? Edited June 17, 2011 by IanTurner
Guest tomolewis Posted June 21, 2011 Report Posted June 21, 2011 Tried this but it still seems to give jerky video or the audio/video goes out of sync?
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