Archive for the 'Multimedia' Category

I only came across H.264 recently, up to that point I thought DivX was supposed to be the be all and end all of video encoding. Two things brought it to my attention, first the promise of much smaller video sizes, and secondly, the new AppleTV doesn’t support DivX, but does support H.264.

So I installed thin liquid film, which is a Python QT frontend for ffmpeg. Once installed the program is very straightforward:

1. Select the file
2. Select the encoding (H.264)
3. Select the audio quality (I went for 128kbps)
4. Select the output directory
5. Click ‘Encode’

My test program was an old episode of Stargate SG-1 that had been recorded via a TV card, then encoded with DivX. The quality is pretty good, and the 45 minute show took 347M. The re-encoding took just under an hour (P4 - 2Ghz laptop, with stuff running in the background), pretty long if I’m going to re-encode every video I have. First impression, great, the file size dropped to 98M! More than a threefold saving, that would put off the construction of that 1TB NAS device I keep thinking about. Sadly it was not to last. The quality suffered a lot, even on my 14″ laptop screen the image was blurry. I guess two lossy encodings is too much, no matter how fancy they are.

But all might not be lost, I also have several DVD boxsets that I’d like available on my PC. With a DVD as a source it should produce a good quality video.