HandBrake

Obioban wrote:Still been playing around with various settings to try to find something I like. I put it on VBR with an average bit rate of 3000 and two pass encoding turned on, and I kind of feel like it looks better than high. It looks like the sharpness is maintained but the graininess is somehow removed....?

File size of 2.7 gb, much better! High on the left, VBR based on high at 3000 on the right, both are blown up to about double the size of their normal res.

http://homepage.mac.com/ianlindvig/comp1.png

http://homepage.mac.com/ianlindvig/comp2.png

http://homepage.mac.com/ianlindvig/comp3.png

Obviously, if you lower the output quality, you're going to lose some fine detail (such as film grain). If you don't like grain much you could also experiment with denoise.

HandBrake wrote:You have a couple of options:

For the New iPad

• iPad - Up to 720p. This preset will still work great on the new iPad. It will produce up to 720p content and keep filesizes down and thus is more suited for the limited space on this device.
• High Profile - Up to 1080p. It'll take a long time to encode, but that is the trade off you need to make to keep file sizes in check for the limited space of the iPad.

For the AppleTV3

• Normal - Up to 1080p. This preset is much faster than High Profile, but can produce larger file sizes. This may cause problems for weak wireless connected devices. Quality may be slightly less than High Profile
• High Profile - Up to 1080p. Encodes will take a long time, but the quality is excellent and filesizes will be more reasonable than the Normal preset.

I've just been using the AppleTV 2 setting for 720p videos, since the iPad setting reduces the resolution to 1024x576. The AppleTV2 setting maintains the 720p resolution. I will definitely check out High Profile for any 1080p stuff I get.

Based on the top post from Handbrake, generally, what are we looking at time wise transcoding in high profile over normal?

I know this is impossible to tell since everyone has a different system, but generally what multiple has everyone seen from normal to high profile? 2x, 3x, 4x as long?

Could anyone toss out a few amounts of time it took to transcode when using the normal preset?

I am just trying to gauge if I should go the high profile route, cause if it takes say 4-5 hours for normal, and 16-20 hours for high, it is going to take me weeks just to get through the 30 mkvs I have already, which would suck. I love quality, but weeks is a little beyond my threshold.

I doubt doubling or tripling my system memory would help or be worth it right (cost:gain ratio)?

Thanks guys!

knemonic wrote:Based on the top post from Handbrake, generally, what are we looking at time wise transcoding in high profile over normal?

I've always used High Profile (but 720p output) so its length is "normal" for me. A typical encode would take about 2 hours on my Mac Pro (quad core, 8 GB) but my 1080p encodes look to be closer to the 6+ hour range (I'm still optimizing my final settings). It isn't something that I particularly worry about because once I get the workflow sorted out, you can queue up multiple encodes and walk away. Most of my encodes are done at night while I sleep and during the day while I'm at work; the computer is still usable as well. Heck, I'll probably bang out a dozen or so encodes while I'm traveling on business next week. (If it isn't clear, I pre-rip with MakeMKV to present to Handbrake.)

[Edit] Just queued up an encode of Tron that's been running for 20 minutes; Handbrake says 3h remaining. Not bad at all.

Abulia wrote:

knemonic wrote:Based on the top post from Handbrake, generally, what are we looking at time wise transcoding in high profile over normal?

I've always used High Profile (but 720p output) so its length is "normal" for me. A typical encode would take about 2 hours on my Mac Pro (quad core, 6 GB) but my 1080p encodes look to be closer to the 6+ hour range (I'm still optimizing my final settings). It isn't something that I particularly worry about because once I get the workflow sorted out, you can queue up multiple encodes and walk away. Most of my encodes are done at night while I sleep and during the day while I'm at work; the computer is still usable as well. Heck, I'll probably bang out a dozen or so encodes while I'm traveling on business next week. (If it isn't clear, I pre-rip with MakeMKV to present to Handbrake.)

Yep, I am doing the same as you, ripping with MakeMKV and queuing them up. I just didn't want to wait an entire day for a transcode, regardless of queuing it up. At that rate it would of taken me over two years to re-transcode my entire library.

So it sounds like, based on your system and mine, in high profile I can expect closer to the 10 hour maybe plus mark for my transcodes. That isn't bad, especially since hard drive space is now becoming a concern I am sure for all of us (the bulk of my movies are DVD quality so space was always easy).

Thanks!

Abulia wrote:Where are you seeing this, specifically? Get Info? Historically iTunes and the ATV would flag any content that was 1280x[x] as "HD." Some files, not at all; you had to add an HD flag via a program like Subler for iTunes/ATV to mark it as such.

I've never had iTunes flag anything automatically that wasn't purchased from the iTMS. It has always been reliant on the custom ITUNESHDVIDEO tag. The difference is that ITUNESHDVIDEO=1 now means "720p", with the new option ITUNESHDVIDEO=2 setting a "1080p" flag.

Flo wrote:

Abulia wrote:Where are you seeing this, specifically? Get Info? Historically iTunes and the ATV would flag any content that was 1280x[x] as "HD." Some files, not at all; you had to add an HD flag via a program like Subler for iTunes/ATV to mark it as such.

I've never had iTunes flag anything automatically that wasn't purchased from the iTMS. It has always been reliant on the custom ITUNESHDVIDEO tag. The difference is that ITUNESHDVIDEO=1 now means "720p", with the new option ITUNESHDVIDEO=2 setting a "1080p" flag.

Abulia, I am seeing this info on the Get Info, Summary screen from within iTunes. Once I have HB a file I then use Subler to add the HD flag. If I then load into iTunes and review the summary info I can see a line "Video Quality: High Definition (720) and Video Dimensions: 1920x1080."

How do I get to this to flag correctly that this is a 1080p file? ------ JUST downloaded Subler Beta 3 and this provides support for tagging files as a 1080p. So Im all sorted. just need a faster machine to process the 30 or so movies in a shorter space of time.

To the HB Team, many thanks for such as great product.

Pemberto

Is there a way to use Handbrake to process an full quality MKV file so that the video stream is not transcoded but the audio is processed appropriately for the ATV3 and the file ends up in a mv4 container so the ATV3 can play it. I realize it will be essentially the same size as the raw BluRay rip but can the ATV3 handle that bit rate over a wired ethernet connection?

It seems like that should be a very fast operation and it would be nice to keep at least a few of my movies at full BluRay quality. I'm just wondering how best to do this:

1) Is handbrake the right tool?
2) Can the ATV3 handle this bitrate?

Thanks in advance for any help!

kjoe wrote:Is there a way to use Handbrake to process an full quality MKV file so that the video stream is not transcoded but the audio is processed appropriately for the ATV3 and the file ends up in a mv4 container so the ATV3 can play it.

Nope.

kjoe wrote:2) Can the ATV3 handle this bitrate?

Depends on the disc. The ATV3 is specified up to High@4.0, which means a maximum video bitrate of 25,000 kbit/s. Blu-ray caps at a video bitrate of 40,000 kbit/s.

And of course not all Blu-rays are H.264.

And besides all the above, Handbrake does not do "Video Passthrough".

Rodeo wrote:And of course not all Blu-rays are H.264.

Good point. I'd almost forgotten about that. Quite a few are VC-1, and there are even some in MPEG-2.

Flo wrote:

Abulia wrote:Where are you seeing this, specifically? Get Info? Historically iTunes and the ATV would flag any content that was 1280x[x] as "HD." Some files, not at all; you had to add an HD flag via a program like Subler for iTunes/ATV to mark it as such.

I've never had iTunes flag anything automatically that wasn't purchased from the iTMS. It has always been reliant on the custom ITUNESHDVIDEO tag. The difference is that ITUNESHDVIDEO=1 now means "720p", with the new option ITUNESHDVIDEO=2 setting a "1080p" flag.

I've seen in before in the past but agree that's no longer the case. I appreciate your insight as to the tag (and new) settings.

knemonic wrote:

Abulia wrote:

knemonic wrote:Based on the top post from Handbrake, generally, what are we looking at time wise transcoding in high profile over normal?

I've always used High Profile (but 720p output) so its length is "normal" for me. A typical encode would take about 2 hours on my Mac Pro (quad core, 6 GB) but my 1080p encodes look to be closer to the 6+ hour range (I'm still optimizing my final settings). It isn't something that I particularly worry about because once I get the workflow sorted out, you can queue up multiple encodes and walk away. Most of my encodes are done at night while I sleep and during the day while I'm at work; the computer is still usable as well. Heck, I'll probably bang out a dozen or so encodes while I'm traveling on business next week. (If it isn't clear, I pre-rip with MakeMKV to present to Handbrake.)

Yep, I am doing the same as you, ripping with MakeMKV and queuing them up. I just didn't want to wait an entire day for a transcode, regardless of queuing it up. At that rate it would of taken me over two years to re-transcode my entire library.

Well, I've good news. My Tron encode (High Profile, ref=4, bframes=4, RF 21, Anamorphic Strict) took about 3.75 hours. I don't know how long my old 720p encode took but it was 2.45GB. The 1080 version is 5.41GB. I'm very impressed, Handbrake team! I'm on a 2009 Mac Pro 2.66 quad-core Xeon w/ 8 GB of RAM. YMMV, of course.

Now that I've found all this great information, I'm really in trouble. Prior to this I was using Makemkv on a loaded MacPro to extract from my Blu-Rays. I was using the Apple TV2 preset in Handbrake ( love the program ) and changing the aspect to 1920 x 1080. They took a couple of hours and looked pretty good, but I yearned for the ultimate Apple TV3 preset. I have since created High profile versions that don't run for some reason. I went back to the Apple TV2 preset version for some nice looking 5.5Gb files. Unfortunately I did something wrong and ended up with stereo audio.

If someone has the time, could they pick a popular film like one of the Star Wars prequels and leave no stone unturned with their settings? I find their contents a little confusing. I'd still love to see a preset with a couple of custom variable options, I'd like to start powering through my library.

Thanks

Flo wrote:

Rodeo wrote:And of course not all Blu-rays are H.264.

Good point. I'd almost forgotten about that. Quite a few are VC-1, and there are even some in MPEG-2.

Sounds like I stick with transcoding! Thanks for the answers everyone...

VFX wrote: If someone has the time, could they pick a popular film like one of the Star Wars prequels and leave no stone unturned with their settings? I find their contents a little confusing. I'd still love to see a preset with a couple of custom variable options, I'd like to start powering through my library.

See post #1. That tells you everything you need to know.

Everyone's presets are modified to suit their tastes; what we like/value (quality/size/encode time -- pick two) may not be what you like.

Sorry, I'm still having problems. Blu-Ray of Revenge of the Sith. I tried a High Profile without making any changes to the pre-set. It produced a 7.74Gb file that iTunes won't accept. If I run VLC it says
it can't recognize the inputs format. What do I need to supply to help solve this? I thought just using High Profile would work and then I could fine tune. The only thing I've tried that works every time is the Apple TV 2 preset with 1920 x 1080.

Thanks for your patience.

I apologize for my last question. Rather than anyone stopping their work on Handbrake to read to me what I have found to be the proper procedure, I hoped a savvy user would read it and say, "You have to turn off the Gaspini de-modulator, I had the same problem". I will continue to try and find the answer and as a last resort, pose a question and include activity log.
Thanks

Files over 4GB are only playable if you check the "large file size" box before encoding.

The High Profile preset should enable large file size by default.

VFX wrote:Sorry, I'm still having problems. Blu-Ray of Revenge of the Sith. I tried a High Profile without making any changes to the pre-set. It produced a 7.74Gb file that iTunes won't accept. If I run VLC it says
it can't recognize the inputs format. What do I need to supply to help solve this? I thought just using High Profile would work and then I could fine tune. The only thing I've tried that works every time is the Apple TV 2 preset with 1920 x 1080.

Thanks for your patience.

Activity Log please.

When i have a blu-ray and i want to encode with full resolution (for example 1920x1080 with 0 cropping), does the anamorphic settings
- None
- Strict
- Loose
have any effect (quality, encoding time)? Because all will result in an output resolution of 1920x1080 (so in my opinion, it does not make any difference).

No. 1920x1080 isn't anamorphic to begin with. The ratio of storage vs. display resolution is exactly 1:1 (square pixels).