[Rejected] Quicktime component..please!

[richardb]

Hello there, I am new to this so please due excuse.
I have an Apple TV Gen1 (160GB HDD)

I have rented and purchased some Apple HD movies, and I must really say, they look pretty great.
I have converted some of my HD Movies using Quicktime and they look just as good. They take away, but I don't mind that as I get such a great quality.
I have tried Handbrake, and have messed around with the settings, however I never seem to get the final movie to look as good as it is compared to my quicktime encodes.
The fantastic thing about handbrake is that it supports all the HD formats and containers, like VC-1 without any problems. Quicktime does not, even with wmv player installed quicktime always crash's.
Would it at be be easy or possible to include the Quicktime component, and settings within Handbrake?
I don't know how easy this would be, and if at all it could be, I just think a lot of people would find this us full. I know I certainly would.
Thanks for taking the time anyway.....Handbrake really is a great project, I am just thinking on ways it could expand.
Many kind regards.

[Deleted User 11865]

Hello there, I am new to this so please due excuse.
I have an Apple TV Gen1 (160GB HDD)

I have rented and purchased some Apple HD movies, and I must really say, they look pretty great.
I have converted some of my HD Movies using Quicktime and they look just as good. They take away, but I don't mind that as I get such a great quality.

Which QuickTime (7, 7 Pro, X)? What settings?

I have tried Handbrake, and have messed around with the settings, however I never seem to get the final movie to look as good as it is compared to my quicktime encodes.

If you're using QuickTime's H.264 encoder, then you're doing something wrong in HB. QuickTime's encoder is one of the world's worst CPU-based H.264 encoders, and is quite easy to beat. Encode log(s) please.

Would it at be be easy or possible to include the Quicktime component, and settings within Handbrake?

HandBrake is cross-platform. QuickTime is not. This isn't going to happen.

[s55]

x264 has a proven track record to be one of the best H.264 encoders out there. QT is probably one of the worst.

Feel free to do some research, there are plenty of examples out there comparing various h.264 encoders.

Might also want to work on your settings, sounds like you've not got an optimal setup. Bare in mind though, unless you have really high quality sources or access to masters, you'll have a hard time matching the apple HD content (with any encoder)

[richardb]

Hello, thanks so much for all your help. Its good advice I will try different settings and see how I get on!
However I did hear that the Quicktime Multi pass is not just 2 passes, but actually 5 passes. Maybe this is why details in peoples faces seem to be a little clearer! - Mind you thats not always a good thing!

I will try the settings........maybe though that is something Handbrake could incorporate, multi passes!

Thanks for your help again guys...its been invaluable!

[mduell]

HB does support 2-pass, when it makes sense for your ratecontrol method.

Post your encoding logs. You're probably doing something silly like using ffmpeg.

[LonestarOrison]

I believe what he's talking about is the very desirable dithering effect QuickTime uses, which seems to smooth away all color banding. It's a shame x264 doesn't use anything similar. If it did, I can imagine people would prefer to use a much higher CRF in their encodes, because this effect seems to trick the eye into believing the video is much higher quality than it actually is. My current solution to color banding is to use a lower CRF value, adding an unnecessarily high bitrate just to make the picture look normal. Of course, increasing AQ strength helps, but then noticeably bad edges appear.

This is why a dithering filter would be useful in HandBrake, especially for animation encodes. However, such a filter would only be a workaround for an issue that really comes down to human-perceived quality enhancement in x264, because using settings that would retain the dither is very much the same as using settings that would stop color banding.

[LonestarOrison]

Actually I take that back. There's nothing wrong with x264 in that regard, it's just a problem with the decoder bundled with HandBrake. It doesn't decode with the fact in mind that during encoding there will usually be a low bitrate used. The QuickTime decoder overcomes that by adding a small amount of dither to parts that would usually suffer from banding, blocking, and colour inconsistencies. Needless to say, as shown by iTunes HD and SD content alike, it works extremely well. While that does have to do with the quality of the source, one simply can't pin that to every poor guy turning up here looking for a higher quality solution. I have done my own encoding in the past, working with DVD sources and the QuickTime encoder, and the output quality rivals that of the content available on iTunes.

So, while it won't happen because historically it has been rejected many times before, adding a QuickTime decoder to HandBrake would prove to be an incredible matchup. Quality would be unsurpassed by anything else at even at very low data rates.

And in response to the second post, one can safely assume he was exporting to Apple TV using the latest version of QuickTime. Even though that export option is only single pass, it produces amazing looking video. Like I said above, HandBrake could easily do better, if only the QuickTime decoder would be harnessed.

It really is beating a dead horse though.

EDIT: Also people would need the QuickTime MPEG-2 Decoder, which people wouldn't be prepared to pay for... Of course you could always advise the install of QuickTime Alternative 1.81.

[Deleted User 11865]

Actually I take that back. There's nothing wrong with x264 in that regard, it's just a problem with the decoder bundled with HandBrake. It doesn't decode with the fact in mind that during encoding there will usually be a low bitrate used.

Congratulations, you just invented lossy decoding (as if lossy encoding weren't enough, now the video decoder is doing the filtering, too).

The QuickTime decoder overcomes that by adding a small amount of dither to parts that would usually suffer from banding, blocking, and colour inconsistencies.

You do realize that all the visual comparisons we've been doing in your thread were done in QuickTime? If it's the decoder doing the dithering, then why isn't HandBrake's x264-encoded output dithered on playback too, it's only the MPEG-2 component?
Have you checked your guess by e.g. encoding to H.264 with x264 via QuickTime, using x264Encoder?

[LonestarOrison]

I should really just leave this forum lol. I realized earlier that I had, yet again, mistaken myself in my previous post (and that I was right in the one before that).

You're right.

*shrug*

I'll get a mac and use compressor. I'm hoping, albeit unrealistically, that they'll include Sandy Bridge encoding acceleration and with that improve its H.264 encoder, assuming of course that Intel has given Apple access to low-level code for the Sandy Bridge encoder (I'm satisfied with iTunes quality at present anyway, so it's not a big deal if it doesn't happen).