What is the best quality rescue mode?

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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jeffcobb
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2009 3:33 am

What is the best quality rescue mode?

Post by jeffcobb »

While you find this rarely on movies cheaply-encoded TV shows are almost impossible for me to get looking right. Specific examples include Brisco Country Jr, Space: Above and Beyond, Tour of Duty and MacGuyver. Many music ( concert ) DVDs. I honestly don't know it the source bitrate is too low or what but standard ripping that works really well for almost every other situation leaves really bad darks, artifacting, sometimes audio artifacts as well. The only fix I have for this (which is more like a patch because I understand so little about the problem to make a "smart" fix) is to turn the bit rate up to 1500 or better. It wastes a lot of space but there are times when I will sacrifice some space to save an old favorite.

Is there a best mode for this? I was (just converted over to mp4 tonight tks to Joel) doing a two-pass AVI but I really don't know what would work best here for weak source material...
TedJ
Veteran User
Posts: 5388
Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 11:25 pm

Re: What is the best quality rescue mode?

Post by TedJ »

Your best bet is to use one of the constant quality modes, but be prepared for some scary average bitrates in the final encode.

BTW, I feel your pain... I've got the PAL releases for the first couple of seasons of Family Guy that are truly awful. :roll:
iJoel
Enlightened
Posts: 124
Joined: Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:25 am

Re: What is the best quality rescue mode?

Post by iJoel »

Glad I could help ^__^.

It really depends on your source.
But the MP4 will fare much better in this situation than AVI.
Make sure to use "x264" as your encoder.

And with old sources, picture filters should help,
like de-noise. Set it to weak and encode a chapter.
Also, advanced settings will help with quality when
using average bitrate.

Although you could use constant quality, and then adjust advanced settings
until your satisfied with the size. What are you going to be playing your video files
back on, just your compy?

I personally use 59% CQ for my encodes (adjusting denoise very rarely, mostly only for anime).

Edit: Oops, ted beat me to it, but yeah, you gotta love constant quality.
jeffcobb
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2009 3:33 am

Re: What is the best quality rescue mode?

Post by jeffcobb »

I am playing these shows back on laptops/appliance I am hacking up for the purpose. Some things I run through iriverter to get it in the finicky mode my pocket mp4 player wants.

I will have to try out some of these different approaches. Cheers. Videos-to-DVD xfers of 60's TV shows are some of the worst offenders here and the 80s shows seems to be particularly bad.

Jeff
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