I've been on the forums many times to find solutions to my problems and have always had great answers. Thanks!
OK THE PROBLEM:
I've been recording music videos with my DVD Recorder. I am familiar with AviSynth, XviD, VirtualDubMOD and all the programs necessairy for XviD encoding, and have sucessfully encoded many.
THE PICKLE (#1))
Naitive DVD resolution is 720x480. This gives me an aspect ratio of 1.5. The music videos are traditionnaly 4:3 or 1.3333 aspect ratio. I've been solving the problem by resizing using Lanczos4Resize (avisyth script) and resizing to 720x540 (which gives me the correct aspect ratio.)
So my first question is: how do I get the correct resolution (720x480) to be displayed in the correct ratio (4:3)? Is there a setting in XviD that I'm forgetting?
THE PICKLE (#2)
I encode to XviD to save space. However I do often recode them to MPEG2 to create a DVD. I encoded videos at 2pass VBR quality 3750kbps.Is this too much, or is it smart as I will eventually "uncompress" the video to MPEG2. (As opposed to compressing at say, 1500kbps) Is it best for me to keep the full resolution (720x480) or should I resize it to say 512x384?
Basically I'm looking for a good quality/resolution ratio. I always thought it was best to keep resolution as high as possible but I truly don't know which is best.
SAMPLE to help you answer (the following is a music video and it's not my intention to distribute it, just want people to see whats' going on) It's a 3 part Rar archive, and all 3 parts must be downloaded.
In XviD's config, click on the more next to the profile setting and go into the Aspect Ratio tab. There you can set the AR the same as the MPEG2 source. The warning really needs updating, XviD's dshow decoder now fully supports AR resizing under windows as does I believe DivX's.
If you have already encoded something you can set the AR with MPEG4Modifier.
Ok, that's good news. I always stayed away from those settings exactly because of the warning. One new question and one question remains:
1-Who/where/what is the best XviD codec out there. I see one (koepi's)here on Afterdawn but am not sure if that's the latest.
2-Is it best to have low resolution/medium bitrate or high resolution/high bitrate??
Thanks in advance,,
steve7777
EDIT!: Ok, we have a problem: I just tried encoding some stuff and used the 4:3 settings as described above. Result? Works in Mediaplayer classic and VLC but it looks "widescreen" in Windows Media Player 10. Is there a solution?
Don't use WMP10? Seriously though it is hard to tell what is going on since WMP10 doesn't give you access to filters. So you don't really know what decoder is being used. The only real difference though between MPC's graph should be the AVI splitter (MPC has an internal one) and possibly the video renderer.
Doesn't really matter too much since as a general rule all builds are based on the same code.
My builds are however more recent. As of last night the cvs had not changed since my last build.
Koepi's dshow decoder won't work for AR resizing if you use bframes that aren't packed since as I said it is based on older code. Good news, especially for fans of Koepi's builds is that a new offical XviD release should be out soon. I wouldn't expect it to be much different from my last cvs compile though.
And another question: Are you familiar with FFDShow? I was told that I should install it on my PC to get better looking video. I tried using the resize function (scale it to 1280 x 720 ) and the postprocessing on (not too high) and the video plays great for about 30 seconds, but then my PC lags for about 5 seconds, and then it plays pack at the correct fps for another 30 seconds and so on. I have a P4 3.06GHZ w/ 512MB ram and a NVidia GeForce 5200 (64MB) vid card.
