comparison DOCS/xml/en/encoding-guide.xml @ 16085:c1dd920e736c

New item: "Choosing resolution and bitrate", from Rich's encoding guide

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  should be done on playback, and the player will use the aspect stored in
  the AVI to determine the correct resolution.
  Unfortunately, not all players enforce this auto-scaling information,
  therefore you may still want to rescale.
</para>

<para>
  First, you should compute the encoded aspect ratio:
  <systemitem>ARc = (Wc x (ARa / PRdvd )) / Hc</systemitem>
<itemizedlist>
<title>where:</title>

  the encoded content, a CQ of 0.18 may look just fine for a Bergman, contrary
  to a movie such as The Matrix, which contains many high-motion scenes.
  On the other hand, it is worthless to raise CQ higher than 0.30 as you would
  be wasting bits without any noticeable quality gain.
</para>

</sect2>

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

16085:c1dd920e736c

  should be done on playback, and the player will use the aspect stored in
  the AVI to determine the correct resolution.
  Unfortunately, not all players enforce this auto-scaling information,
  therefore you may still want to rescale.
</para>
</sect2>


<sect2 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-resolution-bitrate">
<title>Choosing resolution and bitrate</title>

<para>
  If you will not be encoding in constant quantizer mode, you need to
  select a bitrate.
  The concept of bitrate is quite simple.
  It's the (average) number of bits that will be consumed to store your
  movie, per second.
  Normally bitrate is measured in kilobits (1000 bits) per second.
  The size of your movie on disk is the bitrate times the length of the
  movie in time, plus a small amount of "overhead" (see the section on
  <link linkend="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-muxing-avi-limitations">the AVI container</link>
  for instance).
  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>
  <listitem><para>
    <emphasis role="bold">Perceptual</emphasis>: You notice MPEG
    artifacts more if they're scaled up bigger!
    Artifacts appear on the scale of blocks (8x8).
    Your eye will not see errors in 4800 small blocks as easily as it
    sees errors in 1200 large blocks (assuming you'll be scaling both
    to fullscreen).
  </para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>
    <emphasis role="bold">Theoretical</emphasis>: When you scale down
    an image but still use the same size (8x8) blocks for the frequency
    space transform, you move more data to the high frequency bands.
    Roughly speaking, each pixel contains more of the detail than it
    did before.
    So even though your scaled-down picture contains 1/4 the information
    in the spacial directions, it could still contain a large portion
    of the information in the frequency domain (assuming that the high
    frequencies were underutilized in the original 640x480 image).
  </para></listitem>
  </orderedlist>
</para>
<para>
  Past guides have recommended choosing a bitrate and resolution based
  on a "bits per pixel" approach, but this is usually not valid due to
  the above reasons.
  A better estimate seems to be that bitrates scale proportional to the
  square root of resolution, so that 320x240 and 400 kbit/sec would be
  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.
</para>


<sect3 id="menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4-resolution-bitrate-compute">
<title>Computing the resolution</title>
<para>
  First, you should compute the encoded aspect ratio:
  <systemitem>ARc = (Wc x (ARa / PRdvd )) / Hc</systemitem>
<itemizedlist>
<title>where:</title>

  the encoded content, a CQ of 0.18 may look just fine for a Bergman, contrary
  to a movie such as The Matrix, which contains many high-motion scenes.
  On the other hand, it is worthless to raise CQ higher than 0.30 as you would
  be wasting bits without any noticeable quality gain.
</para>
</sect3>

</sect2>

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