Sage mpeg settings and DivX/Xvid/H264

[mike1961]

Hello - I'm encoding things to Neros AVC which gives great quality and very high compression when encoding from a DVD. Now, I know it's best to start with the best quality possible before converting the mpeg file to a super compressed format.

My question is this - will I gain anything by going to a higher compression than say 3.2 gb/hour. Obviously I won't sacrafice disk space at all because eventually I will just delete those files and they will be replaced with the files AVC format. I was wondering whether the 5.9 gb/hour is going to make any difference in quality. The reason I wonder is because if I have my video going to Svideo in and in addition files on dvd don't occupy more than around 3.2 gb hour in the mpeg format I was not sure whether the Sage 5.9gb hour is any better than 3.2 gb / hour. Perhaps if one had a HD card with HD video it might be.

Any thoughts / suggestions on this?
Thanks,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

I have been doing Nero avc for quite a while and although I still use it for my DVD encodes, I find Staxrip with X264 better for my Sage recordings. You can find them both HEREIf you have a Dual Core CPU you'd find it TWICE as fast. First off X264 is faster then Nero Recode CPU cycle for CPU cycle, it supports High Profile(Better Quality) where Nero only supports Main Profile, X264 is SMP enabled so it utilizes both Cores and is FREE.
Now as for Recording quality to use:
I used to record using 5.9GB\Hr quality and I found it to slow the encoding process a little compared to the 3.2GB\Hr. Also, I was noticing alot of digitizing and green lines in my 5.9GB recordings. I have 5 tuners and 3 Clients so I was also noticing a little stuttering when too much was going on. So, I have since gone to recording with the 3.2GB again. I do not notice any significant quality difference between the two. In fact when taking the digitizing into account I am much happier with 3.2GB...
ther's my 2 cents

[ben_95sl1]

Am I able to play any of these 264 mpeg4 files directly in sage yet?

[dvd_maniac]

According to THIS thread you can...
I have gotten the ASP version of .mp4 to play in Sage a long time ago, but could not get it to work via SageClient. I do not know if it is the same with H.264 as well. I did notice that ShowTime and Zoomplayer has better playback quality in general so I prefer the external player anyways. You can display subtitles and mantain chapters with them as well, not with Sage though...

[mike1961]

DVDManiac - you said you like Staxrip better for your sage recordings because it supports the high quality compression and you also said it's faster if one has a dual core processor. How will it run with single core processor compared to Nero? Also - are you saying that the final end product will have a better quality video with the same file size as Nero's AVC? If so - why not use it for dvd encodes as well? Finally - will Nero's Showtime run the mp4 created with Staxrip?

Thanks again for the input.
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

Yes ShowTime will play the resulting files from StaxRip.

The quality is better because X264 uses the latest Profile of the H.264 standard. HIGH Profile uses better compression techniques than the Main Profile found in Nero's AVC version. Nero & it's Video compression partner (Atame) have been in Beta for over 6 months and saying that they will incorporate their High Profile version into Recode for some time now. I got sick of waiting.

I find that X264 is about 15-20% faster then Nero on my P4 2.8 Single Core processor. However I am getting over 25fps on my 4400+ AMD X2 compared to 13fps using Nero on the same file and on the same PC. So yes I find it to be faster. It is also more configurable then Nero.

There are many GUI's you could use X264 with, but I find Staxrip to be the easiest to use, especailly for newbies.

The reason I have not started using it for DVD's is that I have not figured out a proper ripping technique to import the Chapters and Subtitles into Staxrip yet. With Sage recordings there are no external subtitles and I automatically create Chapter files when cutting out commercails with VideoReDo. These are supported by Staxrip.
As soon as I get the ripping down I will switch.

[mike1961]

Wow - it's almost hard to imagine how much more compression they will be able to get in the future than what we already have; I thought Nero AVC was really pushing the limit on compression. What kbs and any other settings do you like to use when encoding Sage mpeg files?

Thanks again,
Mike

[mike1961]

There seem to be a lot of settings for first pass, second pass, compressibility check, etc. Seems very overwhelming. Do you have any suggestions or should I just use all the defaults?

Thanks,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

after installing Staxrip and all external apllications it tells you to, click Profiles on the menu and change to: Encoder -> X264 -> X264 CE-HighProfile.
Then again under Profiles change Audio 1 to: AAC -> AAC HE VBR 50-70.
(I changed the bitrate to 40 since AAC HE is a great codec and Audio doesn't seem to suffer)
Then Profiles -> Container -> MP4. Then finally under Size: Edit Menu... Change the Name and Bitrate to whatever you usually use.
After commercials taken out I use 150-175MB\Hr depending on what it is.
and 75-80MB\ 1/2 Hr. So I changed the profiles to my desired filesize.
Once you have this done... go File -> Default Project -> Save.
Save this in the Staxrip\settings folder as default.rip.
Now everytime you open up Staxrip it will open with these settings.
Should take less then 10 minutes.

Now open a file and it will analyze it. If you create chapter text file with VideoReDo then click Container Configuration and specify path to Chapter file, if not then do not worry about it.

I have never had to adjust the crop yet. So I just click next, Filters will be the same for every encode so again, just click next, I cut out using VideoReDo so I do not need to do any additional cutting, So I just click next.
This leaves you to the Compression Test portion. Every show seems to have comparable compressionability so after doing a few you get to know what resolution you should use at your desired filesize. When doing a new show I test, when doing a show that I've tested a few times before I guess and "JUST CLICK NEXT."

So after a few trials you should open file, wait a few seconds and click next a whole bunch of times, adjust resolution and either add to batch or start encode.

PS> You add to batch by clicking on the bottom sentence, click add, save rip file.

Hope this helps you out...

[mike1961]

I did not see where you can change it to 40 and do you know how much space is saved by doing so?

Thanks again,
Mike

[mike1961]

One other thing - it seems like the "temporary work area" defaults to the source file location. Any way to change that?

Thanks again,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

It shouldn't. It hould default to where the source file is... It creates the temp folder in the folder of the source.

How's everything else going? Were my instructions clear enough?

[mike1961]

I think they were pretty clear. It seems that the program automatically tries to find the right bit rate (is that correct)? It seems a little more difficult than Nero but that may be just because I'm new at it. So, as I understand it the quality is better than Nero and it encodes quicker right?

I like the idea of being able to batch several files but I haven't quite figured that out yet because it just seems to automatically start processing when I select the first file.

Thanks again for all the help,
Mike

[mike1961]

Okay - one thing I'm noticing is that it is a lot more disk intensive than Nero which doesn't make me happy because I'm starting to wonder if I should copy the movie to my local computer rather than process it from my Sage server. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again,
Mike

[mike1961]

This seems to be taking way too long. The ETA seems to be as long as Nero on my computer (this will take at least 8-9 hours) to encode. I'm not so sure it's worth it unless I can get better quality with a smaller file size.

Mike

[dvd_maniac]

batching is easy:
when you are ready to start the encode after hitting next for a while, just hit the sentence to click here to add or next to start encode. then click add, then save and finally close. repeat this process until your ready to start encoding.

I usually encode from the same PC. Do you use a comm cutting app first? If so, point the output to the encoding machine.

8-9 hours?
What cpu do you have? What are you encoding? how long is it?
My 4400+ takes about 1:15:00 to encode a 43 minute video. Even at almost half that with single-core 2.2ghz is less than 2:30:00...

As far as the quality, judge for yourself. Take a hard to encode movie either from dvd or tv and encode a 10 minute segment in both and compare.
I like to use the fight in the rain-scene in Matrix III.

[mike1961]

Okay, I see how to add multiple files but here's an example - the moment I select an option to add multiple files, let's say I just select one. Right when I close that dialog, it immediately goes into a "DOS" prompt mode launching java.exe where it says "dripping useless B-Frames" and takes a little while. I'm thinking that I want to crop the video and perhaps test a very small segment (like a minute or two) and it is already analzying the entire video before I can even get to that section. I don't quite understand why it is doing that.

Thanks for the input. By the way - my client is a 2.66 GHZ, 1gb pentium.

Mike

[mike1961]

Another thing is that I cannot seem to figure out how to trim the video. I mark the start and end cut and it highlights that section in green but what do I do next? I tried cutting the selection and it doesn't seem to do anything to the video. It is not very intuitive here at all and I checked the help file also. Any ideas what I can do to trim the video to like 5 min or so to test it?

Thanks again,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

adding multiple files is for adding vob files or mpegs that are segmented, like lost-pilot_0, Lost-pilot_1, _2,_3 etc...
Batching jobs is different. add file, not files for batching. You have to set up each one seperately. That is the main reason of setting up your default.rip.'
add file and go through the crop, filter, cutting, compression and right before you would click next to start encode...Read the sentence on the bottom. It states:
"Click on the next Button to start the encode or click here to add the project to the job list."

Click on this sentence, click add, save the project file and click close.
Add another file go through the crop, filter, cutting, compression and then repeat the add to job list steps etc...

I cut out commercails first so I don't know too much, but I know it works. It doesn't show the updated time but after the encode is done and you play the file it works.

Hope this helps?

[mike1961]

I think I got it to work and I'm testing a 2 min sample against Nero Recode. One big problem I continue to have though is I have Win TV 500 dual tuner cards and I think the original quality is just not that good so I'm thinking about getting different tuner cards because I just cannot seem to improve the quality - any thoughts on the Win TV 500 or another Tuner card?

Thanks,
Mike