I'd like to get some opitions on the constant quality setting in MeGui. I'm not sure if the MeGui setting and the Constant Quality setting in other transcoders is the same.
I transcoded 10 minutes of SD video in settings from 2-28. I found that anything under 16 was actually larger than the parent file. I finally settled on 22 for HD video and 24 for SD video. These settings seemed to give me the best trade off between quality and file size.
What are your perferences and if you can give some insight into why you picked these setting I'd appreciate hearing them.
I do not use MeGui, so cannot advise about it much, don't know what those settings mean.
However, 2 movies of the exact same length before the conversion might come out totally different when converted, using same tools, same settings you choose constant quality.
It is not all about the length of the movie, that would be too simple.
What it matters, is how busy the background is, how much "detail" it shows, how much/fast paced the action is, how many dark scenes... When you choose constant quality, a dark scene with no detail should be converted to same quality as a fast paced action scene. However, the dark scene will maybe require half the bitrate required by the action scene, which means it size(MB) will be significantly smaller.
Your 10 min sample might not be a very good sample. Each movie will require a different setting. You might convert some sloppy love story under the moon and find out the quality is awesome, then under the same settings do some Transformers action flick in the desert and the quality might not be as satisfactory.
