How are the TV show encoded

[humuhumu]

Hi HD Nation,

Love the show especially now that I can stream HD video via Boxee running under Media Centre (addin) with my 40mb fibre broadband.

I'm looking to encode my DVD's to create a library and it struck me that the HD Nation show is encoded to look really great. Better than standard TV but not quite BluRay HD. How are they encoded and what resolution/bitrate to you use. What software?

Thanks


Leonard
from Milton Keynes, England

[shamoun]

Hi,

I don't know what Revision 3 uses to encode the show, but many encoders will leave a bit of information behind in the stream to tell you. You can access it via applications like MPC-HC, VLC or ffmpeg -i. In MPC-HC and VLC right click on the video and look for properties / media info / something similar. ffmpeg can simply be run from the command line as:

ffmpeg -i /path/to/file

In my own experience I can say that handbrake produces excellent results with the "High Profile" preset. The x264 devs recommended handbrake as a front end when I asked them a while back. Also, handbrake sees pretty active development but the stable versions on the site are ancient, it is worth grabbing the nightly builds from the website every so often to make sure you are getting the latest bug fixes and features. If you find your self having issues with it the devs will point you to the nightlies anyway.

build.handbrake.fr

A nice thing about handbrake is that the High Profile preset uses quality based encoding, so you enter a value for quality (the default is 20), 18 might be good for blu ray content. and it will produce a file of a consistent level of quality allocating as much bandwidth at a given time as needed to produce the file you need. This is advantageous over the traditional multi pass approach or the constant bitrate approach because often times scenes don't need anywhere near as much bandwidth as the average so you can end up with surprisingly small files (its also nice not to have to wait for the file to encode twice with multi pass).

A fast processor is useful, my old core 2 duo T8400 estimated something like 30 hours to encode one of the pirates movies. my phenom II x4 955 does it in about 5 - 10 hours depending on the encode.

[shamoun]

Originally Posted by shamoun

Hi,
A fast processor is useful, my old core 2 duo T8400 estimated something like 30 hours to encode one of the pirates movies. my phenom II x4 955 does it in about 5 - 10 hours depending on the encode.

I probably should have mentioned that these are times for blu ray encodes. Standard def content will go by alot faster, 1/3 to half the play time of the movie on my systems.