Encoding help

[terry666]

I'm working on encoding a film I captured with my DVR, but I haven't had much luck getting a good quality result. For example my result looks like this:

[Image]

...and an image grab from the vob file my DVR gives me, looks like this:

[Image]

Not that the vob is entirely perfect. The interlacing is very visible when there's movement:

[Image]

..though the deinterlace filter helped a bit.

[Image]


I used VirtualDub-MPEG2 to encode a 2-pass Xvid avi. I also used the deinterlace filter as mentioned above, and Don Graft's smart resize filter which I think may be the culprit for my quality loss. I applied it to keep the file size down, but I think it may not be worth the savings.

I am going to try encoding the film again without it, but if anyone has any other tips, I sure would gratefully receive them!

[FLL]

You may well have more experience with this than I, but I'll offer my perspective anyway I myself just started ripping several titles for posting here using AutoGK (Auto Gordian Knot). It analyzes the source and calls VDubMod etc to do the conversion, including auto-resizing. You might try that as a first attempt, it might detect and solve some of the problems you are having. Ghost recommended it here, and on the newsgroup a.b.m.thelostmovies thelost mentioned it also, it seems to do a good job in many cases. Perhaps won't work for your movie, I don't know.

I am learning to do more manually myself, though, since 2 of the 3 I am working on have issues: one has an extremely ugly logo I want to erase, another has 1/2 an hour of junk recorded on the end of the DVD-R I am ripping. I am starting with Gordian Knot (which AutoGK automates). It calls a mod of VirtualDub. The reason I started with AutoGK is that while you can in theory often get better results by hand-tuning things, the better results seem not superior enough to make up for the fact that until I get a good deal of experience I am likely to make mistakes that make me worse off.

There does seem to be a lot of info on the net on how to do something once you know you need to, but things are scarcer on the high level "here's what you do to solve this problem" front. Unless you slog through endless forums. Might be a "I learned it the hard way so why should I make it easy for you" thing.

[terry666]

Thanks for you perspective. I've installed Gordian Knot and followed the guide posted in this forum. I'm off to bed now while it encodes. If my result is still crappy, I will try your suggestion of using AutoGK. Thanks!

[OrionPax]

Get the VirtualDub filter "Deinterlace - area based" from here: http://www.guthspot.se/video/index.htm

Make sure "Blend instead of interpolate" is unchecked and your resize filter is set after the deinterlace filter.

[terry666]

"By George, I think I've got it!"

Original:
[Image]

...and after encoding:
[Image]

[sodepetahi]

If this Brooke Shields and George Burns I've never seen this film ar you releasing it here?

[terry666]

This film was requested, so I posted my release as a reply (which I hope was what I was supposed to do.) I'm just waiting for the Admins to move it to the releases section, but until they do, you can find it here:

https://www.first-loves.com/forums/v ... php?t=1572

[ghost]

STOP.

In this case we are talking about capturing a VHS tape i think... (at least the picture quality looks like that).

You should use VD with some filters (deinterlace, noise reduction...)

AutoGK is a great program, but it hasn't got any filters. It is perfect for DVD Rips.

[FLL]

AutoGK is a great program, but it hasn't got any filters. It is perfect for DVD Rips.

I don't know that this is completely true. AutoGK does seem to analyze the source and apply a limited selection of filters. For example, the log file shows the following for one of the rips I am working on:

LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\AutoGK\DGMPGDec\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\AutoGK\filters\autocrop.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\AutoGK\filters\decomb.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\AutoGK\filters\ColorMatrix.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\AutoGK\filters\RemoveGrainSSE2.dll")

I know it's selectively enabling some of those since for a different rip it leaves the last two out. Now the decisions it makes might not always be the best, but it's useful to me to see how it approaches it. I was going to post a rip later today which is from VHS (via my DVD Recorder since I have no capture card) because it looked decent to me, but I do think now I will experiment a bit more first.

[terry666]

DVR= Digital Video Recorder. Much better than a VHS recording. It records in DVD MPEG2 format from an S-video source from my satellite receiver. Ideally, I'd like to capture the digital signal in my satellite box, but I don't think that's available for Starchoice in Canada. (They have PVRs, but you cannot transfer anything from them.)

My DVR has a 160GB hard drive, So I can play with the DVR quality a bit. I think it's set somewhere between 4 & 5 Mbit/sec, and I can fit about 1 hour of recordings on 1 blank DVD. Copying the DVR hard drive contents to a blank DVD is the only way I can transfer the files to my PC. If I raise the DVR quality too much, I'll have to use more blanks. (And it is a copy, not a re-encoding, which means no quality loss in the transfer.)

I used Gordian Knot, and not AutoGK to encode the film. There was a bit of a learning curve, but I'm feeling more comfortable with it now. I think the film came out pretty good. For those of you who download my release, please pass along your comments on the quality. Your help will go a long way towards my future releases. Thanks!