Encoding for big screen TV.

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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PuzZLeR
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Encoding for big screen TV.

Post by PuzZLeR »

I will be moving in the coming months/year and then will be in the market to buy a big screen HDTV, minimum 50". I would like to buy it now, but due to logistics, other people, (blah, blah, blah, boring, who cares) I have to wait till I move. <Sigh.>

What really sucks is that I want to encode today for it and will not know if it will look good or not when the time comes. Yes, there WILL be stand-alone DvD players for H.264 and I will buy one of those too when they come out.

If anybody has one of these TVs, and has managed to play H.264 content on it, can you tell me what are the minimum settings you need to make it look good. I know there will be varying answers to this, but an idea would be nice.

Since much of my source is DvD NTSC, I currently wish to keep the rez of 720x480 anamorphic or even 640x480 at lowest. I'm encoding at around 1500kbps, or at minimum 60% CRF.

Are these settings good enough for the big screen?

Thanks so much in advance!
hawkman
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Post by hawkman »

For a big screen, resolution is the key. More pixels, more clarity. Anamorphic is definitely the way to go, if you ask me.

As for bitrate - if the encodes look good on your Mac, they're likely to look good on your TV. I'd generally go with 2000 - 2500kbps, but then I'm ripping PAL discs, so they have both a higher framerate and a higher pixel count than NTSC; you'll be able to get away with less, but exactly how much less I don't know. Personal preference with this really, depends how much you value video quality vs hard drive space!
cvk_b
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Post by cvk_b »

50"+?

Do you care how big your files are? Definitely anamorphic.
Cavalicious
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Post by Cavalicious »

The settings I gave you before will work. I doubt you will be going bigger than me...110"
realityking
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Post by realityking »

Cavalicious wrote:110"
What kind of living room do you have? :shock:
zen649
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Post by zen649 »

I have a 56" set and have been playing my mp4(264) rips with a Mac Mini hooked up to it over a VGA. I have tried many, many, many different combinations of bit/sec. I have to disagree with a setting of 2000. On the big screen you can see to many artifacts at this setting(IMO). I use a different method. I use target size set to 4GB so that no matter what the length of the movie I will be encoding at the highest possible bit rate. I am not concerned about file size. I know a lot of people will think this is overkill but with HD being so cheap and my tv having such large screen I thought this would be the best solution for me.

I have to say that my system works incredibly well. The rips look the best that they can(without messing with the advanced option of h.264 which I have not tried yet) and the whole system works incredibly well(I can watch anything I have rip very easily using FrontRow and a Harmony remote.

There are a few draw backs. You can't using the rip for viewing on an iPod, and the rips take a long time.

There are some times when I do not use the target size method. This is when I am ripping movies/tv shows that are less than an hour and a half long. For these situations I will rip them at 4000kps. I will also do this with my kids cartoon movies.
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delacroixp
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Post by delacroixp »

I would certainly recommend upscalling to 1440 (see post)...
I have done some tests on the Band of Brothers and concluded that that you would get better quality by upscalling to the full resolution of your TV... probably 1440x800 for 16:9 movies...

I've used LanczosMTPlus and Q22-CQ-CRF with excellent results (+/- 2Q and no filter - depending on the movie) ...
This system is really only geared for high-bitrates with the aim of transcoding a 9 GB DVD Mpeg-2 anamorphic movie (super elastic) onto a single 4.5 GB DVD... high-quality (superbit) lower-res movies should also work fine...
Your encodes will take a lot longer but therein lies the beauty of the final product...

I would even go so far as to say that the quality is eminently superior to DVDShrink.


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
Cavalicious
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Post by Cavalicious »

delacroixp wrote:I would certainly recommend upscalling to 1440 (see post)...
I have done some tests on the Band of Brothers and concluded that that you would get better quality by upscalling to the full resolution of your TV... probably 1440x800 for 16:9 movies...

I've used LanczosMTPlus and Q22-CQ-CRF with excellent results (+/- 2Q and no filter - depending on the movie) ...
This system is really only geared for high-bitrates with the aim of transcoding a 9 GB DVD Mpeg-2 anamorphic movie (super elastic) onto a single 4.5 GB DVD... high-quality (superbit) lower-res movies should also work fine...
Your encodes will take a lot longer but therein lies the beauty of the final product...

I would even go so far as to say that the quality is eminently superior to DVDShrink.


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
(re-Group):

After re-reading (and an explanation), I understand the basis of the Prep-Work.

It is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), but after the Up-scaling prep-work, it will/could still be in a format to further encode to h.264

If true, I guess, my question to you would be: What would the ideal h.264 settings be, to minimize the lost of quality that your pre-scaling workflow implemented?
hawkman
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Post by hawkman »

Why upscale in HB? I don't know how good HB's scaling algorithm is, but not only are you wasting time and hard drive space, you're limiting yourself to the upscaling HB can do right now; if you leave it to your TV / playback device, then you can take advantage of any improvements to upscaling in the future. Not to mention, your TV's upscaling really should beat the crap outta HB :/
Cavalicious
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Post by Cavalicious »

hawkman wrote:Why upscale in HB? I don't know how good HB's scaling algorithm is, but not only are you wasting time and hard drive space, you're limiting yourself to the upscaling HB can do right now; if you leave it to your TV / playback device, then you can take advantage of any improvements to upscaling in the future. Not to mention, your TV's upscaling really should beat the crap outta HB :/
He's not referring to HBs Upscaling (I thought the same, hence the edited post). He is referring to Prep work (I think) to the DVD content with a high-end scaler. Which, how it was explained to me, gives far better results than Hardware "real time" upscaling Chipsets.

...that was a mouth full...

either way, I believe, you're going to get a far larger size file than most want here.

EDIT: It is also my understanding the the prep-work at its fastest only runs at about 0.4 fps. Which will really be a turn off for most here.
hawkman
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Post by hawkman »

Aha, I see. Apologies. That sounds like an awful lot of work, but if you're happy with the results that's what matters!
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delacroixp
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Post by delacroixp »

Posted by Cavalicious, Fri Jun 22 (10:25 pm):

either way, I believe, you're going to get a far larger size file than most want here.
You're quite right...

I've got an overclocked Conroe (dual-core) and I still get only 4 or maybe 6 FPS on 1440 upscaled anamorphic PAL Mpeg-2 movies...
However, if you have an HD big screen TV... you can probably afford a dual or even a quad, core system and the cost of encoding-time is drastically reduced...
Of course, most of the stuff in your video library will probably also be off-the-shelf DVD's with no need to encode anyway...
But if there are a few DVD's that you do want to encode... you would certainly want to take advantage of the sheer number of pixels on your screen (see post)... and while each pixel my reach a quality threshhold... double the pixels can return double the quality...

Personally, I feel that anamorphic encoding with H264 is counter-productive since the encoder doesn't know it's encoding anamorphically (signalling is a very poor substitute)... so it kills the elasticity... which is the same as encoding a 640x480 movie but signalling 16:9...
You're better off encoding directly into DAResolution... be it 864x480 (same No of Pixels as 720x576 PAL 16:9), 720x400 or 640x360...
Q24-CQ-CRF (+/-) is probably the most efficient quantizer... so if you prefer more quality and don't mind 1Movie=1DVD... then increasing the resolution is a natural progression...

Upscaling will not only produce larger files than most people would want here... but anywhere... smaller files are always preferable !!!
However, there may be certain cases in which everyone may want to upscale to some extent some of the time... while others may upscale all of the time...


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
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delacroixp
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@Cavalicious

Post by delacroixp »

Cavalicious wrote:The settings I gave you before will work. I doubt you will be going bigger than me...110"
That's positively huge... what kind of resolution do you get ???
It sounds like a projector system but there are few projector systems I know that even support 1080p HD (ie, 1920x1080)... though it would certainly look good at full res...


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
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delacroixp
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@zen649

Post by delacroixp »

zen649 wrote:I use target size set to 4GB so that no matter what the length of the movie I will be encoding at the highest possible bit rate. I am not concerned about file size.
I'm sure that you are concerned about filesize... else you could have simply used the original ISO copied directly onto a HDD without all the fuss of encoding and without losing the menu system and extras...
However, I'm just curious why you choose to encode at 4GB... DivX has always struggled to overcome the costraints of a maximum filesize limit... presently @ 4GB (4GB limit workaround / HD Encodes for PC - DivX Forum post)... but H264 has no such handicap... 4.4GB would be equally effective, given the capacity of a 4.5GB DVD...
Do you keep the surplus DVD space for extras or bonus material... ???

Perhaps you could try a 2-pass test encode set to 4.4 GB, upscaled to HD resolution (ie, 1280 x ΧΧΧ) and mention if there is any significant difference when viewed on your 56" HD home entertainment system...


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
hawkman
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Post by hawkman »

Well, in the current release HB can't output >4GB files, if I recall correctly.
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delacroixp
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Post by delacroixp »

@hawkman
hawkman wrote:Well, in the current release HB can't output >4GB files, if I recall correctly.
Awesome... gtk

Thanks much...


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
zen649
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Post by zen649 »

The only reason I use handbrake is to convert the movies I want to watch into an FrontRow(quicktime) compatible format. I have used Media Central and other work arounds for playing movies easily from my couch(I use a MacMini hooked to a 56" flat screen). Converting the file also allows for easy transfer and convertion to an iPod format. I understand there might be other ways of doing this same task but this one works great. Even my kids can run the FrontRow interface.

As stated ealier I use the target set to 4GB so Handbrake will output a useable file.

I am currently trying out a 3.8 GB target size when I choose to use the surround option(6-channel).
Cavalicious
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Re: @Cavalicious

Post by Cavalicious »

delacroixp wrote:
Cavalicious wrote:The settings I gave you before will work. I doubt you will be going bigger than me...110"
That's positively huge... what kind of resolution do you get ???
It sounds like a projector system but there are few projector systems I know that even support 1080p HD (ie, 1920x1080)... though it would certainly look good at full res...


:D :twisted: :shock:
Pascal
I'm currently have a Native 720p projector (Sanyo Z2,Z3,Z4), with my AppleTV set to upscale to 720p.

I'm waiting for Sanyo to come out with their 1080p Projector and then I'll upgrade.

There are now about 15 projectors (5 affordable) that support 1080p. I just like Sanyo (Price/Performance)
nhelder
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Post by nhelder »

As an alternative to pre-upconverting DVD content prior to encoding in order to fill the resolution of large 1080p displays, has anyone played around with ripping blu-ray content (via SlySoft, others?), and then running the resulting files through HandBrake? - can that be done or is it not feasible at this point?
realityking
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Post by realityking »

Well, at the very most I could work with MPEG2 and plain AC3 or DTS no fancy stuff like AC3+, DTS HD, h.264, VC-1 and so on. I believe the LPCM support in HandBrake is still broken and is only able to handle 2 Channel sound. The Container itself shouldn't be a problem since its either a transport stream or a program stram (I think one is used by HD DVD and ne by Blu Ray).

I'd try to get a Blue ray/HD DVD Title into a .ts however so far I haven't found anything in MPEG2....
Maury Markowitz
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Post by Maury Markowitz »

zen649 wrote:Even my kids can run the FrontRow interface.
This is precisely why I'm looking at getting an AppleTV, for the kid's DVD collection. Having that instant-on would make it easier for them to use -- it's only a matter of time before the brake the DVD player.

Maury
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delacroixp
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Post by delacroixp »

nhelder wrote:As an alternative to pre-upconverting DVD content prior to encoding in order to fill the resolution of large 1080p displays, has anyone played around with ripping blu-ray content...
I doubt that upscaling to 1080p for 'Mpeg2 720x576' material has any merit but over-sampling to 720p may well be in the ballpark (which could still look good @ 1080p)... especially for high-bitrate movies like Sony Superbit releases... but even then probably only for filesizes greater than 50% of the original ...

I'm based in George, South Africa and I haven't even seen a Blu-Ray disc around here...
I get the impression that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be slow to mass market since the film studios are divided into 2 camps and polarized around each format...
In other words... you'll probably need to acquire both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players to cover all your favourite movies (a bit rough for most people)...

I'ld be thrilled, just to get 1 or 2 Superbit DVD's, to test a few encodes.


:D :twisted: :mrgreen:
Pascal
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