There are many MPEG encoders, does one encode better then another? I mean using the same source file, does one encoder (eg: Procoder, Mainconcept, etc) produce a better qulity video/audio then another? If so who is experienced enough to say which one gives you better result. To me speed is important but not the ultimate requirement, since I am more interested in producing qulity home made videos, I would rather have quality over quantity. How critical are the settings in these encoders. Any help and ideas and discussions would be appreciated.
In my experience, these encoders all give about the same quality; the main difference I found was the time they each took to encode. I have read that CCE is the fastest and gives very good quality but that it should be used with Avisynth which is difficult to use. Procoder gave excellent results as did TMPGEnc but I found both to be extremely slow (at least twice as slow as MainConcept which I use). The quality with MC is excellent (I'm fussy about that), encoding time is fast and I find quality is a touch better than TMPGEnc but that may be due to settings. MC is good out of the box and after trying various settings, much reading and experimentation, I am very satisfied with MC. As you can tell, most of my experience has been with TMPGEnc and now, MainConcept but either satisfied me as did Procoder. I would also imagine that settings can make much difference but I can only speak to the settings in MC. There is a difference but not a great deal unless it was cumulative, in which case, I wouldn't have noticed. MC is also much better than TMPGEnc with encoding audio but converting to Wav solved that. Try them and pick one you're happy with.
Tell me the optimum settings you have found to be good for MC, which I have. I also have TMPGEnc, which is really slow. I don't have and have not tried Canopus. I would'nt mind more info on MC if you don't mind sharing? What really upset me is the poor quality VCD that I was able to produce using MainConcept thru Vegas.
Here are my settings for DVD in MC. Main Page - enter video (I also enter a Wav just because I got in the habit with TMPGEnc but 3 times out of hundreds of encodes, there was no audio. Not using a Wav solved this), select DVD and 2 Layer then select Detailed. Detailed - Enable Line Filtering, 2 pass VBR and Crop and Scale to set aspect ratio (post back if you need this), search method and search range are good but will be set later then select Advanced. Advanced - In Video Settings: aspect ratio - 4.3 or 16.9, I Frames 15 or 18 depending on NTSC or PAL (NA is NTSC Europe is PAL), maximum bitrate - 9000, minimum bitrate - 1000 and average bitrate to set file size - Advanced Video Settings - Noise Sensitivity to 1, Noise Reduction to 30 (switch these to set by clicking NR - setting one will change the other if you switch back to check), Motion Search Mode - 11 (this will set Search Method to 11 on Detailed page), User Quant Matrices, Input videeo is RGB16-235, Motion Search Pixel Movement - both to 50 (this will set Search Range to 43 on Detailed page, 12 is also good and will set Search Range to 31),open Picture Coding Extension>intra DC precision and set to 0 (8) for average bitrate up to 5000, 1 (9) 5000 -6000 and 2 (10) 6000+ - Audio Settings - set to what you need. Now, OK all the way out and click convert unless Batch Encoding.
Wow, I must makes notes on these, I have so much to learn. I already spend hours on this stuff, and now I have opened a whole can of worms for myself. So what about VCD's. How can I convert to PAL VCD with really good Video Quality? You see Vegas (which is what I use) uses a built in MC encoder, but it does not give you all these options, which are available only on MC stand alone program. So I guess Vegas sets up all the parameters internally and lets MC do the encoding internally. I just want to create home movies with really good video quality. When I play the PAL VCD that I have made on my TV the quality seem very poor. Is it because my TV is NTSC so its not as good as a PAL TV and once my friends whose wedding video it is, watch it on their PAL TV it might be better? What do you think?
I have never made a VCD, so can't comment on it. Sorry. And as for PAL and NTSC, I don't think a PAL player will even play a NTSC disc or vice versa.
Just for the record so you know. There are DVD players that will play pretty much anything. Including VCD's for PAL or NTSC, imagine that. I have tried and it works. I burnt PAL and was able to play it without problem.
