I've been playing around with Handbrake for the past couple or so weeks, doing test after test to see optimal encodes with minimal loss of quality. I came across this link:
I've followed it closely, read it over multiple times and played around with various things to try and get things 'right'. Below is a screenshot of the settings I've basically decided on where I'm comfortable with both the quality, file size and time to encode;
My question is;
Are these settings recommended? What I'm trying to accomplish is to get my MP4s encoded that are playable on as many devices as possible at the smallest file size possible without much loss of quality. My dad has a WDTV Live, I've currently got a Boxee Box and may be upgrading to a Roku 3. My mom and sister use chromecast and VLC. I've read reports that each device has a maximum Level it can handle but it looks like Level 4.1 seems to be a safe profile for most devices. I've got a ton of home media I need to convert and just want to make sure my family won't get screwed with incompatibilities. At 4,200kbps the video quality looks amazing (1080p).
Hard to say - any "tutorial" from that long ago is bound to be flawed, because it is going to recommend things that the author thought were "right", but might have been horribly bad. That's why the advanced tab in handbrake is OFF by default, to reduce people doing tweaks that do not make sense.
Have you TRIED the default presets yet, or did you jump right into tweaking settings?
Anything that involves twiddling a bunch of [Censored] on the advanced tab is definitely not recommended.
Bitrate target rate control is also certainly not recommended.
For your devices, I'd recommend the High Profile preset as a starting point. From there, try a few different quality (CRF) settings in the low 20s (20, 23, 26 perhaps) on a couple different style movies to see what's "without much loss of quality" to you. Then turn off the advanced panel and try a few different x264 presets on the video tab to see which is the slowest you can tolerate; you'll find you don't gain much from slower encoding. Use the 4.1 level option on the video tab to limit your output to level 4.1 for device compatibility and you can leave the profile option on auto or high.
If you want to optimize a bit more, select an appropriate x264 tune for each movie you encode, but it's not necessary.
kamil wrote:I've been playing around with Handbrake for the past couple or so weeks, doing test after test to see optimal encodes with minimal loss of quality.
If you still want to use the Advanced tab:
It probably depends on what exactly you are encoding (action, drama, sports, cartoons?) but you will probably not see a lot of difference in quality by changing - on the Advanced tab Subpixel Motion Est: to 9: RD Refine in All Frames instead of keeping it at 10: QPRD in all frames.
I always personally found the quality difference between these to be so minimal that it was worth it to switch to 9 to gain slightly more speed vs. the insanely slow encode speed of using 10 (which is probably quite close to what used to be the "Placebo" preset).
kamil wrote:I've been playing around with Handbrake for the past couple or so weeks, doing test after test to see optimal encodes with minimal loss of quality.
If you still want to use the Advanced tab:
It probably depends on what exactly you are encoding (action, drama, sports, cartoons?) but you will probably not see a lot of difference in quality by changing - on the Advanced tab Subpixel Motion Est: to 9: RD Refine in All Frames instead of keeping it at 10: QPRD in all frames.
I always personally found the quality difference between these to be so minimal that it was worth it to switch to 9 to gain slightly more speed vs. the insanely slow encode speed of using 10 (which is probably quite close to what used to be the "Placebo" preset).
Awesome! This definitely speeds things up, just tested it out right now. I'm forced to use a 6 minute clip that has a variety of scenes and it's looking almost identical to the encode I had before. File size is the same. Oddly enough, some parts look a tad better while others just look different (not worse).
Thanks!
Woodstock wrote:Hard to say - any "tutorial" from that long ago is bound to be flawed, because it is going to recommend things that the author thought were "right", but might have been horribly bad. That's why the advanced tab in handbrake is OFF by default, to reduce people doing tweaks that do not make sense.
Have you TRIED the default presets yet, or did you jump right into tweaking settings?
I tried the default presets (a variety of combinations), I wasn't happy with the results; clothes and skin get washed out at the same bitrate compared to the current settings I've got.
kamil wrote:
Awesome! This definitely speeds things up, just tested it out right now. I'm forced to use a 6 minute clip that has a variety of scenes and it's looking almost identical to the encode I had before. File size is the same. Oddly enough, some parts look a tad better while others just look different (not worse).
From many tests (using much larger files than that) I also personally found the filesize to either be the same or of little difference between the two.
Using 10: QPRD in all frames would sometimes save a few mb, but that's all it was - most times barely even 5-10mb. Nothing really worth talking about.
The difference though and something I missed before - you never mentioned above if you were planning to get rid of your original source. I have read posts before where other users have been trying to do that to save some space and if that is the case (if it was me) I would revert back to your original setting as even though it takes longer, you want the best possible result, even if it is slower.
kamil wrote:
Awesome! This definitely speeds things up, just tested it out right now. I'm forced to use a 6 minute clip that has a variety of scenes and it's looking almost identical to the encode I had before. File size is the same. Oddly enough, some parts look a tad better while others just look different (not worse).
From many tests (using much larger files than that) I also personally found the filesize to either be the same or of little difference between the two.
Using 10: QPRD in all frames would sometimes save a few mb, but that's all it was - most times barely even 5-10mb. Nothing really worth talking about.
The difference though and something I missed before - you never mentioned above if you were planning to get rid of your original source. I have read posts before where other users have been trying to do that to save some space and if that is the case (if it was me) I would revert back to your original setting as even though it takes longer, you want the best possible result, even if it is slower.
Yes, I'll be dumping the original source. But, luckily, with the settings I've got now, the difference between the original and compress with the current settings is very, very difficult to see. Thing is, I'm recording a lot of stuff from 8mm camera and recording to DV. The amount of space used is huge, so I need to compress down and toss out the DV files and then get rid of the tapes as well. If anything, I can always bump up the bitrate and essentially make a near exact duplicate of my source.
mduell wrote:No one has commented on the comical merange=64 yet?
Some people like this to be as high as possible. I'm in the camp to keep this as low as possible (16 or 24).
My reasoning is this: you can get an optimal match in one frame with a high merange, but there will be a big miss the next frame, because the predicted blocks are all so far away. (I read this somewhere and I agree with it.) In my testing, a low merange is usually less efficient (<1%), but is faster.
Most of the settings are fine, in the sense they don't cause quality issues. I will prefer to start with a preset and tweak from that -- there is much less to specify.
The one I most disagree with is using a fixed bitrate.
mduell wrote:No one has commented on the comical merange=64 yet?
Some people like this to be as high as possible. I'm in the camp to keep this as low as possible (16 or 24).
I recall one of the x264 developers saying that a high merange can actually hurt quality because it searches too far from the initial motion vector prediction and can find a false match. A small merange does not limit the size of your motion vectors. It only limits how far from an initial prediction it searches. This is why even the "placebo" x264 preset does not use such large values. The largest value used by any x264 preset is 24.
mduell wrote:No one has commented on the comical merange=64 yet?
Some people like this to be as high as possible. I'm in the camp to keep this as low as possible (16 or 24).
I recall one of the x264 developers saying that a high merange can actually hurt quality because it searches too far from the initial motion vector prediction and can find a false match. A small merange does not limit the size of your motion vectors. It only limits how far from an initial prediction it searches. This is why even the "placebo" x264 preset does not use such large values. The largest value used by any x264 preset is 24.
Thanks for tip! Would a value of 24 suffice for 1080p content?
Although not always called out, I feel merange is resolution dependent. The value of 16-24 is deemed to be good-enough for HD (720p or 1080p), so it should be adjusted for 480p (max 16) and 4K (scale accordingly).
x265 is tuned for 4K, so it uses merange of 57, which I think is too high for 1080p. ctu is another one that may need to be set. (64 may be too high.)
nhyone wrote:Although not always called out, I feel merange is resolution dependent. The value of 16-24 is deemed to be good-enough for HD (720p or 1080p), so it should be adjusted for 480p (max 16) and 4K (scale accordingly).
x265 is tuned for 4K, so it uses merange of 57, which I think is too high for 1080p. ctu is another one that may need to be set. (64 may be too high.)
