I just transcoded a video stream and remuxed. When I play it back, it is REALLY blocky. The weird thing is that if I hit fast forward, it's crystal clear. I only dropped the bitrate by about ten percent and I did it TWICE just because I thought I'd done something wrong. I have NO clue what's causing this. Anyone got any bright ideas?
An update: I investigated this a little further and it turns out that every third frame is perfect. The other ones are TOTALLY crap. I don't understand what's going on. I used ReMPEG to transcode and usually I have no problems with it.
ReMPEG is only good to a certain point as all it does is allocate bits based on the original GOP, therefore if every third frame in the original GOP already had a low bitrate, reducing it by 50% will make it look crap. What you could do is re-size the video to 352x576/480 as well as reduce the bitrate. Each frame will then have more bits to play with and will look better (believe me, 352x576 is better than blocky 720x576)
I've found that Rempeg gives really poor results on some movies for no obvious reason . Sometimes I've changed the settings slightly and tried again maybe set on predictive instead of full because it should be good for 10%.
You could always try Tmpgenc , its slightly harder to use but the results are superb , I've dropped a film by 50% with no visible signs at all (OK the film was about 2hours 10mins and 8gig so it was a bit lardy)
Thanks for the input, guys. I have finally fixed my frameserving problem (which was why I was forced to use ReMPEG) so the point is now moot. Been using CCE with excellent results now. FYI, I didn't have the 'Force Film' option checked in DVD2AVI, so my output all had the interlace combing effect. Things are running pretty well now.
