mduell wrote: ↑Fri Jan 19, 2018 12:33 am
As usual, choose a reasonable RF for your content, resolution, and personal preferences.
I don't know why you want to target a particular average bitrate, but it's probably a bad idea. Try RF values until you get the quality you want across a range of videos. Some videos will be higher bitrate, some will be lower.
The ratio of vbv-bufsize to vbv-maxrate is however many seconds of video your device needs to buffer. For some hardware applications it's a well defined number by the playback chip. For network constraints it just depends on how much buffering your playback software is doing. 2 seconds is a reasonable number, but in no way definitive. It could be 1x for a 1 second buffer, or 10x for a 10 second buffer.
Hello again mduell
This whole situation came about when I wanted to see how much quality I could retain/make the video look its best for me, when limiting the bitrate/filesize (I was curious).
So I tried two things starting out; I created an 1GB Preset where the total bitrate (video & audio) would equal 1GB in filesize per 1.5 hours of video. Then I created a 2GB Preset which did the same.
I was pretty happy with both results and they looked good viewing close up on a computer monitor and of course even "better" when viewing in a living room on an 50" HDTV because of the distance and/or the whole "Retina" concept.
I then asked myself if there was a way I could improve on this by creating a "hybrid preset" between the two.
I did a test on a Blu-ray source that had more-than-your-average-grain and found the 1GB Preset yielded more blocky artifacts in certain scenes (of course) throughout the movie, but the 2GB Preset version was great/much better in those scenes.
I didn't know if I was understanding/doing things correctly on my own; I've found many guides of course and read and tested a lot too, but I still wasn't sure if I was interpreting what I was reading correctly or if I was misunderstanding how it worked. So this led me to posting in the HandBrake forums
I was doing 2-Pass encodes with an Average Bitrate for both presets and thought that if I can create more of a VBR encode instead of an ABR encode, I can get better quality in the 'grainer' scenes and still have smaller files than the 2GB preset was churning out (possibly).
So if I instructed HandBrake to not use an ABR, but a VBR instead and limit the maximum bitrate so the files don't go over the 2GB preset, those scenes which were more blocky because of the lower bitrate of the 1GB preset ABR, would have a higher bitrate in those scenes if I used a VBR method with a maximum bitrate to limit the filesize and match the 2GB preset quality.
Having said all this though, I could use the 2GB preset and be done with it, but again, the reason why I'm doing this is because I'm curious and to see if I can create a hybrid preset between the two presets that will yield roughly the same quality as the 2GB preset does, but with filesizes in-between the 1GB & 2GB presets.
I'm not sure how clear this post is or if I'm explaining myself well enough for people to understand, but yeah, this is what my thought process was through this little adventure
Again. Thank you for your time, input and helping me understand things mduell