AppleTV - ffmpeg or x264 ?

[NullMind]

What do you guys suggest to use ? ffmpeg or x264 ?I have almost 200 DVD's which I intend to convert .. i'd hate to use the wrong codec just to re-do it al later on :p

my plan is to have 4 AppleTV's in the house (one for each TV) all accessing a mac mini with a 500GB HD and my whole DVD library

And last, I want good quality, and hoping for about 1.5gb per movie, what bitrate shoudl I use ? is 2000 a good one ? or am I better off using "constant quality" (if so, what %)

rember, this is not for ipod .. but for AppleTV on big screens.

I appreciate any help

Null

[loyalty_anchored]

hey,

thats a great plan, there are a few things you need to consider with this project. which codec? H.264 without a question, quality is superior altough encoding time is higher. what kind of a machine will you be encoding with? what processor?

first of all, if you are truely looking for optimum quality you cannot think of every movie with the same settings or formula if you will.

each movie is a different source and your encoding results will vary due to that, DVDs are already compressed movies, some are smooth and soft, some are grainy and have a high amount of noise.

if you are looking to hit a specific filesize, then you need to use the target size method, enter 1500MB and do it a 2 pass for the video.

as for audio, there is no support for true 5.1 on the current appleTV, so you will probably end up encoding using 2 channel with DPL2 which should be just fine unless you have a 5.1 surround sound system connected to every TV.

something else for you to consider, i dont think 1 MacMini can handle 4 appleTVs, if all the appleTVs were to access the MacMini at the same time, i think you would end up with a hard drive that is working too hard and will not be able to keep up. having said this, i think it should have no problem streaming to 2 appleTVs at a time... so you may be totally fine and be able to pull it off.

one more thing you may want to consider is the following, once you have encoded 200 DVDs, you will definitely want to invest in another hard drive to backup all your encodes, i dont think you will want to re-encode all 200 movies in the case of a hard drive failure.

good luck !

[NullMind]

hey,

thats a great plan, there are a few things you need to consider with this project. which codec? H.264 without a question, quality is superior altough encoding time is higher. what kind of a machine will you be encoding with? what processor?

I will be using a MacbookPro dual core (2ghz) to encode

if you are looking to hit a specific filesize, then you need to use the target size method, enter 1500MB and do it a 2 pass for the video.

actually, the filesize is not important, space is cheap nowadays, quality is more important, while still beeing able to stream

something else for you to consider, i dont think 1 MacMini can handle 4 appleTVs, if all the appleTVs were to access the MacMini at the same time, i think you would end up with a hard drive that is working too hard and will not be able to keep up. having said this, i think it should have no problem streaming to 2 appleTVs at a time... so you may be totally fine and be able to pull it off.

in the end it is up to the HD .. while I dubt we will ever use all 4 at once, it is a good point, I too wonder how it will work, I might do a RAID config with 2 or 3 HD's .. might be able to handle the load better

one more thing you may want to consider is the following, once you have encoded 200 DVDs, you will definitely want to invest in another hard drive to backup all your encodes, i dont think you will want to re-encode all 200 movies in the case of a hard drive failure.

yeap, way ahead of you on that one .. was my first tought

[loyalty_anchored]

in that case, if size is no matter, you can do 1 pass in CRF mode at around 70-75%. you should start at around 75 and go down until you start noticing quality drops.

if you want to even go further with it and get better bitrate allocation, do a first pass with CRF at a good percentage you are happy with, then take the resulting video bitrate from the CRF pass and use that value to do a 2 pass encode.

now jbrjake has created a cool script to make that work a tad bit easier and he also has a method to do the three passes in 2 passes, where he sets the first pass in CRF mode as well as outputing the stat file which the second pass will use to allocate the bitrate more effectively.

i am sorry if my explanations are crummy, but there are a few threads that explain all this, one of which you can find here:

http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopi ... hlight=crf

goodluck!