Anyone converting shows to H.264? What are your results?

[2FAST4U]

I have been using AutoGK to convert many of my shows to XviD format. The quality isn't the greatest going from a ~2GB 42min file to a 350mb file, but it's acceptable for the video size. I was wondering if I could get better results encoding to H.264.

Has anyone tried this? What software do you use? Is the quality better then what Divx/XviD would be? I think H.264 is much slower, but I wouldn't mind if the quality was better. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Dekard]

If you adjust the encoding settings you could possibly improve the quality a bit. But anytime you decode\recode you are going to see a loss in quality.

[valnar]

I'd stick with either MPEG2 or XVID for now. There is no pressing reason to switch from either format until another standard comes out. That may be H.264 in the near future, but the XVID people will come up with something.

Robert

PS. I used to archive my movies to either XviD or DVD43 format depending on how much I liked the movie because media was expensive. Nowadays, I don't even fire up Gordian Knot any more. With DVD-R media so cheap, I see no reason to do anything other than a strict DVD format for archiving.

[Kanati]

a 350 meg hour show compressed from HD is much better quality than I usually get from sage. So I'd suggest changing your compression settings because you shouldn't lose a whole lot of quality.

[mayamaniac]

I tried AutoGK a few times and never really got good results from it. Picture quality is okay and its an easy 123 solution for converting mpeg2 to Xvid. If you are getting good results, please post your AutoGK settings.

Personally, I don't think H.264 is better than Xvid. In my experience, the WMV9 codec gives best quality.