comparison DOCS/xml/en/encoding-guide.xml @ 16086:6c16b60516f3

Moves the "audio" section just before the "muxing" section. + fixes suggested by Jeff

16085:c1dd920e736c

  Other parameters such as scaling, cropping, etc. will
  <emphasis role="bold">not</emphasis> alter the file size unless you
  change the bitrate as well!.
</para>
<para>
  Bitrate does <emphasis role="bold">not</emphasis> scale proportional
  to resolution.
  That is to say, a 320x240 file at 200 kbit/sec will not be the same
  quality as the same movie at 640x480 and 800 kbit/sec!
  There are two reasons for this:
<orderedlist>

  comparable to 640x480 at 800 kbit/sec.
  However this has not been verified with theoretical or empirical
  rigor.
  Further, given that movies vary greatly with regard to noise, detail,
  degree of motion, etc., it's futile to make general recommendations
  for bits per length-of-diagonal (the analogue of bits per pixel,
  using the square root).
</para>
<para>
  So far we have discussed the difficulty of choosing a bitrate and
  resolution.

  be wasting bits without any noticeable quality gain.
</para>
</sect3>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-audio">
<title>Audio</title>

<para>

  containers as an output, each of which may lead to audio/video
  playback synchronization problems with some players when the AVI file
  contain VBR audio streams such as Vorbis.
  Do not worry, this document will show you how you can do that with third
  party programs.
</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-interlacing">
<title>Interlacing and Telecine</title>

<para>
  Almost all movies are shot at 24 fps. Because NTSC is 30000/1001 fps, some
  processing must be done to this 24 fps video to make it run at the correct
  NTSC framerate. The process is called 3:2 pulldown, commonly referred to
  as telecine (because pulldown is often applied during the telecine
  process), and, naively described, it works by slowing the film down to
  24000/1001 fps, and repeating every fourth frame.
</para>

<para>
  No special processing, however, is done to the video for PAL DVDs, which
  run at 25 fps. (Technically, PAL can be telecined, called 2:2 pulldown,
  but this does not become an issue in practice.) The 24 fps film is simply
  played back at 25 fps. The result is that the movie runs slightly faster,
  but unless you are an alien, you probably will not notice the difference.
  Most PAL DVDs have pitch-corrected audio, so when they are played back at
  25 fps things will sound right, even though the audio track (and hence the
  whole movie) has a running time that is 4% less than NTSC DVDs.
</para>

<para>
  Because the video in a PAL DVD has not been altered, you needn't worry
  much about framerate. The source is 25 fps, and your rip will be 25
  fps. However, if you are ripping an NTSC DVD movie, you may need to
  apply inverse telecine.
</para>

<para>
  For movies shot at 24 fps, the video on the NTSC DVD is either telecined
  30000/1001, or else it is progressive 24000/1001 fps and intended to be telecined
  on-the-fly by a DVD player. On the other hand, TV series are usually
  only interlaced, not telecined. This is not a hard rule: some TV series
  are interlaced (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whereas some are a
  mixture of progressive and interlaced (such as Angel, or 24).
</para>

<para>
  It is highly recommended that you read the section on
  <link linkend="menc-feat-telecine">How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs</link>
  to learn how to handle the different possibilities.
</para>

<para>
  However, if you are mostly just ripping movies, likely you are either
  dealing with 24 fps progressive or telecined video, in which case you can
  use the <option>pullup</option> filter <option>-vf
  pullup,softskip</option>.
</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-encoding-interlaced">
<title>Encoding interlaced video</title>

<para>
  If the movie you want to encode is interlaced (NTSC video or
  PAL video), you will need to choose whether you want to
  deinterlace or not.
  While deinterlacing will make your movie usable on progressive
  scan displays such a computer monitors and projectors, it comes
  at a cost: The fieldrate of 50 or 60000/1001 fields per second
  is halved to 25 or 30000/1001 frames per second, and roughly half of
  the information in your movie will be lost during scenes with
  significant motion.
</para>

<para>
  Therefore, if you are encoding for high quality archival purposes,
  it is recommended not to deinterlace.
  You can always deinterlace the movie at playback time when
  displaying it on progressive scan devices, and future players will
  be able to deinterlace to full fieldrate, interpolating 50 or
  60000/1001 entire frames per second from the interlaced video.
</para>

<para>
Special care must be taken when working with interlaced video:
</para>

<orderedlist>
<listitem><para>
  Crop height and y-offset must be multiples of 4.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Any vertical scaling must be performed in interlaced mode.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Postprocessing and denoising filters may not work as expected
  unless you take special care to operate them a field at a time,
  and they may damage the video if used incorrectly.
</para></listitem>
</orderedlist>

<para>
With these things in mind, here is our first example:
</para>
<screen>
  mencoder <replaceable>capture.avi</replaceable> -mc 0 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
  vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=6000:ilmv:ildct:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224
</screen>
<para>
Note the <option>ilmv</option> and <option>ildct</option> options. 
</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-filtering">
<title>Filtering</title>

<para>
  In general, you want to do as little filtering as possible to the movie
  in order to remain close to the original DVD source. Cropping is often
  necessary (as described above), but do not scale the video. Although
  scaling down is sometimes preferred to using higher quantizers, we want
  to avoid both these things: remember that we decided from the start to
  trade bits for quality.
</para>

<para>
  Also, do not adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. What looks good
  on your display may not look good on others. These adjustments should
  be done on playback only.
</para>

<para>
  One thing you might want to do, however, is pass the video through a
  very light denoise filter, such as <option>-vf hqdn3d=2:1:2</option>.
  Again, it is a matter of putting those bits to better use: why waste them
  encoding noise when you can just add that noise back in during playback?
  Increasing the parameters for <option>hqdn3d</option> will further
  improve compressibility, but if you increase the values too much, you
  risk degrading the image visibily. The suggested values above
  (<option>2:1:2</option>) are quite conservative; you should feel free to
  experiment with higher values and observe the results for yourself.
</para>

</sect2>

16086:6c16b60516f3

  Other parameters such as scaling, cropping, etc. will
  <emphasis role="bold">not</emphasis> alter the file size unless you
  change the bitrate as well!.
</para>
<para>
  Bitrate does <emphasis role="bold">not</emphasis> scale proportionally
  to resolution.
  That is to say, a 320x240 file at 200 kbit/sec will not be the same
  quality as the same movie at 640x480 and 800 kbit/sec!
  There are two reasons for this:
<orderedlist>

  comparable to 640x480 at 800 kbit/sec.
  However this has not been verified with theoretical or empirical
  rigor.
  Further, given that movies vary greatly with regard to noise, detail,
  degree of motion, etc., it's futile to make general recommendations
  for bits per length-of-diagonal (the analog of bits per pixel,
  using the square root).
</para>
<para>
  So far we have discussed the difficulty of choosing a bitrate and
  resolution.

  be wasting bits without any noticeable quality gain.
</para>
</sect3>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-filtering">
<title>Filtering</title>

<para>
  In general, you want to do as little filtering as possible to the movie
  in order to remain close to the original DVD source. Cropping is often
  necessary (as described above), but avoid to scale the video. Although
  scaling down is sometimes preferred to using higher quantizers, we want
  to avoid both these things: remember that we decided from the start to
  trade bits for quality.
</para>

<para>
  Also, do not adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. What looks good
  on your display may not look good on others. These adjustments should
  be done on playback only.
</para>

<para>
  One thing you might want to do, however, is pass the video through a
  very light denoise filter, such as <option>-vf hqdn3d=2:1:2</option>.
  Again, it is a matter of putting those bits to better use: why waste them
  encoding noise when you can just add that noise back in during playback?
  Increasing the parameters for <option>hqdn3d</option> will further
  improve compressibility, but if you increase the values too much, you
  risk degrading the image visibily. The suggested values above
  (<option>2:1:2</option>) are quite conservative; you should feel free to
  experiment with higher values and observe the results for yourself.
</para>

</sect2>


<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-interlacing">
<title>Interlacing and Telecine</title>

<para>
  Almost all movies are shot at 24 fps. Because NTSC is 30000/1001 fps, some
  processing must be done to this 24 fps video to make it run at the correct
  NTSC framerate. The process is called 3:2 pulldown, commonly referred to
  as telecine (because pulldown is often applied during the telecine
  process), and, naively described, it works by slowing the film down to
  24000/1001 fps, and repeating every fourth frame.
</para>

<para>
  No special processing, however, is done to the video for PAL DVDs, which
  run at 25 fps. (Technically, PAL can be telecined, called 2:2 pulldown,
  but this does not become an issue in practice.) The 24 fps film is simply
  played back at 25 fps. The result is that the movie runs slightly faster,
  but unless you are an alien, you probably will not notice the difference.
  Most PAL DVDs have pitch-corrected audio, so when they are played back at
  25 fps things will sound right, even though the audio track (and hence the
  whole movie) has a running time that is 4% less than NTSC DVDs.
</para>

<para>
  Because the video in a PAL DVD has not been altered, you needn't worry
  much about framerate. The source is 25 fps, and your rip will be 25
  fps. However, if you are ripping an NTSC DVD movie, you may need to
  apply inverse telecine.
</para>

<para>
  For movies shot at 24 fps, the video on the NTSC DVD is either telecined
  30000/1001, or else it is progressive 24000/1001 fps and intended to be telecined
  on-the-fly by a DVD player. On the other hand, TV series are usually
  only interlaced, not telecined. This is not a hard rule: some TV series
  are interlaced (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whereas some are a
  mixture of progressive and interlaced (such as Angel, or 24).
</para>

<para>
  It is highly recommended that you read the section on
  <link linkend="menc-feat-telecine">How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs</link>
  to learn how to handle the different possibilities.
</para>

<para>
  However, if you are mostly just ripping movies, likely you are either
  dealing with 24 fps progressive or telecined video, in which case you can
  use the <option>pullup</option> filter <option>-vf
  pullup,softskip</option>.
</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-encoding-interlaced">
<title>Encoding interlaced video</title>

<para>
  If the movie you want to encode is interlaced (NTSC video or
  PAL video), you will need to choose whether you want to
  deinterlace or not.
  While deinterlacing will make your movie usable on progressive
  scan displays such a computer monitors and projectors, it comes
  at a cost: The fieldrate of 50 or 60000/1001 fields per second
  is halved to 25 or 30000/1001 frames per second, and roughly half of
  the information in your movie will be lost during scenes with
  significant motion.
</para>

<para>
  Therefore, if you are encoding for high quality archival purposes,
  it is recommended not to deinterlace.
  You can always deinterlace the movie at playback time when
  displaying it on progressive scan devices, and future players will
  be able to deinterlace to full fieldrate, interpolating 50 or
  60000/1001 entire frames per second from the interlaced video.
</para>

<para>
Special care must be taken when working with interlaced video:
</para>

<orderedlist>
<listitem><para>
  Crop height and y-offset must be multiples of 4.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Any vertical scaling must be performed in interlaced mode.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Postprocessing and denoising filters may not work as expected
  unless you take special care to operate them a field at a time,
  and they may damage the video if used incorrectly.
</para></listitem>
</orderedlist>

<para>
With these things in mind, here is our first example:
</para>
<screen>
  mencoder <replaceable>capture.avi</replaceable> -mc 0 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
  vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=6000:ilmv:ildct:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224
</screen>
<para>
Note the <option>ilmv</option> and <option>ildct</option> options. 
</para>
</sect2>


<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-audio">
<title>Audio</title>

<para>

  containers as an output, each of which may lead to audio/video
  playback synchronization problems with some players when the AVI file
  contain VBR audio streams such as Vorbis.
  Do not worry, this document will show you how you can do that with third
  party programs.
</para>

</sect2>