Thinking of using H.264 MP4 rips for the season pack. Thoughts?

[chaos386]

Originally Posted by Viper007Bond

Scene releases will always be available on the day of airing. We're strickly talking about the end-of-season pack that's used for long term downloading.

The only problem I see with that scenario is that those of us who are downloading the episodes as they air won't be able to seed the season pack without re-downloading. Aside from that, H.264 plays on loads of hardware devices nowadays, and it's not that hard to transcode to xvid if your DVD player requires it.

[Clegko]

Seems that I am one of the few to vote for XviD/DivX. Generally, I encode my TG eps down to ~350mb for archival on my external drive & server and stream from one of those if I just want a quick fix, so my vote really means nothing anyway.

[cdbob]

In my side to side, I noticed a substantial improvement in quality. MP4 the win!

[Viper007Bond]

Whoops, these are H.264 rips, not x264. Dunno why Quiky went with H.

[narf]

Originally Posted by flydiscovery

If you say it'll work on my standard installation VLC in Windows than it's fine with me.

It will. The videolan people who develop VLC are also involved in x264, a codec implementation of h264. For a huge list of supported formats see http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html

Originally Posted by Dr_Grip

Go for h.264/MPEG-4 (which, actually, is h.263).

If you want nitpicking, then do it properly. MPEG-4 is a suite of standards. One part (2) of it corresponds to h263, another part (10) equals h264.
You might also say MPEG-4 = AAC, because a part of MPEG-4 specifies audio codecs.

Originally Posted by Viper007Bond

Whoops, these are H.264 rips, not x264. Dunno why Quiky went with H.

Probably because encoding with x264 will produce h264 output, just open anything encoded with it in GSpot or whatever, you'll read h264. One's the implementation, the other's the standard.



For the thread itself, i prefer x264 - especially if the BBC is considering HD. The more data you have the worse inferior compression becomes

PS: Why care for people who own Divx hardware players? Shouldn't everyone then care for people who own DVD/MPEG-2 hardware players first, them being a lot more common?

[PacketCollision]

I don't like how iPlayer clipped off the edges, and it doesn't seem as clear as the ts file. I don't know how the encoded xvid fares though.

Otherwise I'm in favor of it. With h.264 I don't have to reencode for my ipod, and linux plays either just fine.

[narf]

The iPlayer videos using their "flashvhigh"-profile shouldn't be used for long-term storage.

Let's first compare it to what we already have, the scene xvid releases. Scene on top, iPlayer below.




What do we see?

The iPlayer has quite a lot more pixels, but it's showing a lot less of the image, for example take a look at Jeremy's outboard motor. It's cropped on all four sides, not related to changing its aspect ratio to fit the iPlayer.
It's not a "better" image due to its many pixels, it's quite squishy and soft, if you know what I mean. More pixels, no more detail, less image.
When watching the iPlayer episodes some shots become quite irritating, for example the presentation of the old fast Fords. The cropping results in bits of the car cut off, even though obviously the camera crew intended to have the entire car in the frame.
Oh, and no BBC logo with the scene release

Let's zoom in on James' sailcar...



Two things to notice here, first you can see how much is missing in the iPlayer image, with that mast he would fit through all the bridges in the world
Secondly you can see a few compression artifacts in the scene release, but no overall difference in detail. You might even say that the scene release would not have those artifacts if they cropped off the same bits of the image to improve bits per pixel

In case you wanted to burn an episode onto a CD you would curse the iPlayer one for being 720MB while other episodes are well under that, for example ep4 at 661MB. Using a fixed average bitrate regardless of the duration is ok for web viewing, bad for archiving.



I'll have a video comparison of scene vs iPlayer vs h264 from the original broadcast later

[Viper007Bond]

I think that pretty much seals the deal for using non-iPlayer rips.

[klankymen]

Originally Posted by PacketCollision

Otherwise I'm in favor of it. With h.264 I don't have to reencode for my ipod, and linux plays either just fine.

Not true, I think. I got one of the h.264 rips Q made, and tried to put it on my iPod, but iTunes just said "format not supported". Probably because it's in an mkv container instead of a mov container.

Originally Posted by narf

bla bla bla

Epic post, you deserve some rep for that. I'd like to change my vote from iPlayer back to Scene if that's possible!

[narf]

Originally Posted by klankymen

I'd like to change my vote from iPlayer back to Scene if that's possible!

Voting for h264 is fine it's quite superior to xvid. Trouble is, as long as there only are low-res DVB sources then it's not worth the extra effort. Here's how the first 4000 frames of 13x1 would look like in different formats:

original transport stream, mpeg-2

scene rip, xvid

iPlayer, h264

x264 from the ts above, decreased height to fit width

x264 from the ts above, increased width to fit height

The increased resolution for the last two compared to the scene release doesn't really help the overall quality much. It's a bit better, but probably not worth the effort of having different versions floating around.
While creating these I noticed another flaw concerning archiving in the iPlayer versions: Its video bitrate is less variable, probably to better support streaming capabilities. This means intense scenes get less bits per pixel compared to proper encodes while bits are wasted on boring bits. Same source, same average bitrate, better result with regular distributions...


Would be a different story if there were HD sources... but then again there would be scene x264 rips

[Ilpav]

I voted for H.264 before I read narf's post. I was all for better quality for the same amount of space, but the H.264 rips will be cropped. Can't someone get H.264 quality without cropping the image so much, while keeping the file size at 700 MB?

[Viper007Bond]

Don't worry, the poll is irrelevant now.

[Dr_Grip]

Originally Posted by Ilpav

I voted for H.264 before I read narf's post. I was all for better quality for the same amount of space, but the H.264 rips will be cropped. Can't someone get H.264 quality without cropping the image so much, while keeping the file size at 700 MB?

As far as i understood it, that's not really possible because the .ts-streams are already MPEG-2 encoded, so re-encoding them in H.264 will result in additional quality loss, while the H.264-streams from iPlayer suffer from the cropping and not-so-variable bitrate problems.

[narf]

Originally Posted by Dr_Grip

As far as i understood it, that's not really possible because the .ts-streams are already MPEG-2 encoded, so re-encoding them in H.264 will result in additional quality loss, while the H.264-streams from iPlayer suffer from the cropping and not-so-variable bitrate problems.

the scene xvid is reencoded from mpeg-2, hence a new h264 encode would not suffer from any additional issues. Besides, we don't know what the iPlayer people use as their source - maybe they didn't get the original DV or whatever to work with but an MPEG-2 or similar version.

Originally Posted by Ilpav

Can't someone get H.264 quality without cropping the image so much, while keeping the file size at 700 MB?

Check the videos i posted earlier. That's what's possible from the original TS without any encoder magic, there may be more potential with specific settings.

[Root Moose]

FWIW, my process of watching the Top Gear episodes is as follows:

- transcode to h.264/.m4v via Handbrake
- Add meta data via MetaX
- scp file to my iTunes server
- Add to iTunes via "File -> Add to Library"
- Sync all AppleTVs in the house and find an unused TV to watch the programme
- Enjoy!

If I could avoid the first two steps via downloading an already transcoded .m4v with meta data I'd be happy.

$0.02

[Viper007Bond]

I'm just gonna kill this thread. iPlayer rips are cropped (major boo!) and I don't want to explain how to play these files to all non-Mac users.