Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Discuss encoding for devices and presets.
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Durendal
Posts: 31
Joined: Mon Feb 12, 2007 5:41 pm

Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Post by Durendal »

I recently got an iPhone 4S and I'm loving that I can output 1080p high profile H.264s. I've monkeyed with the presets and have a few BluRay rips crammed down to about 4GB with excellent quality. I'm using every setting I can on the Advanced tab. To give you an idea of how much, it takes about 16 hours for a 2 pass 1080p video at ~4000kbps on an i7 2600k @ 4.2ghz. This is a Hackintosh running 10.7. I don't really care how long the encodes take. I'm just looking for maximum compatible compression to maintain the best quality/filesize ratio I can. I also have an HTPC, so I'd certainly like to store these rips on both my phone and the HTPC. Needless to say, I want the best quality I can on a 1080p TV without having to encode each movie twice.

With that, I'm pretty happy with BluRay rips, but I'm trying to keep DVDs down as far as I can, and it seems that I just can't quite keep the filesizes as small as I'd like. I only have so much space on the phone. I'm using the same presets as BluRay rips, except that the decombing filter is on, the bitrate is lower, and, of course, the resolution is smaller. The command line presets I have are here:

b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50:bframes=5:b-pyramid=strict:direct=auto:me=tesa:merange=32:subq=10:trellis=2:analyse=all:psy-rd=1.0,0.20

Starting with the "High Profile" setting in Handbrake and cranking up as much as I can. I'm wondering if anyone has any advice, ie, tweak the settings or manually add additional command line arguments. As I'm targeting minimal filesizes, I would think that constant quality may not be the best way to go. Encode time is irrelevant. The DVDs only take 2-3 hours to rip at these settings, depending on the movie.
rollin_eng
Veteran User
Posts: 4840
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 11:06 pm

Re: Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Post by rollin_eng »

While I understand what you are trying to do I think you are going about this the wrong way. While the iphone 4s will play 1080 it cant display 1080. By doing 2 encodes you can focus on each device, nice big 1080 for the HTPC and a nice small encode for the phone. This way you could use cq encoding to make the encodes more efficient and probably faster to do both than you currently do one.
Durendal
Posts: 31
Joined: Mon Feb 12, 2007 5:41 pm

Re: Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Post by Durendal »

I realize that the iPhone can't display 1080p on its own screen, but I have the HDMI adapter and have plans for its use, so I want them at full resolution for display on TVs. Otherwise I'd just halve the dimensions and scale it to the resolution of the iPhone screen.

1080p video isn't really my problem, though. I'm okay with where I have it. DVD resolutions are well within the iPhone 4S screen resolution and they're the ones I'm really trying to squeeze. I'm looking for any tips folks might have to get maximum compression of DVD content with minimal quality loss.
rollin_eng
Veteran User
Posts: 4840
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 11:06 pm

Re: Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Post by rollin_eng »

If thats the case I would suggest using cq encoding starting with the high profile preset. CQ should save you space over a fixed bitrate.
Durendal
Posts: 31
Joined: Mon Feb 12, 2007 5:41 pm

Re: Maximum iPhone 4S quality

Post by Durendal »

Yeah, I suppose that's the next step. I'll play around with the values on the RF slider and see what I can get.

In the meantime, any suggestions on further refinements under the advanced tab or additional arguments for the command line that can boost quality at the expense of encoding time? I don't know how the 4S will handle reference frames, so I've left that at the default. I presume it would be fine, but I don't want to push it above 3 unless I know. The same goes for the deblocking filter. I know the general guidelines for iPhone encodes, but not the fine details like these when it comes to what it can handle.
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