HandBrake: Best Practices for Encoding to h.264 - Page 3

The best quality you can get is watch the original rip, ANY re-encoding will reduce quality (other than RF: 0 - 100% which will be the same quality as the original rip, but the file will be much larger, so it's a pointless setting).

The whole point of using handbrake is reducing the file size, if you don't care about file size then don't transcode at all, just keep the original.

If you want a smaller file and 16 is not good enough quality, then try 15 or 14.

Gotcha. Thanks, man.

How do I rip a DVD to an ISO? With Avatar, I think it would be best to just keep the original quality and not encode it but I don't want to deal with a folder. Can I use the original MPEG2 and put it in a MKV container?

I do care about file size, but not with Avatar. And I also want VDPAU in XBMC.

Install mkvtoolnix (it's in the Mandriva repos) and use the 'Mkvmerge GUI' to put the DVD (starting from the ripped VIDEO_TS folder) into a MKV container. This will keep the original MPEG2 video and the soundtrack but you might lose forced subtitles.

What version is the most stable right now? I have been using 0.9.4 for most of my SD DVD rips. However, when I tried to do some iPhone rips, they were all out of sync.

Perhaps technically, but whether a re-encode's quality is perceivably different from the original is up for debate...

Remember- most DVD's are ED resolution- higher than SD and (maybe) less detail than most HD-

http://www.projectorcentral.com/video_signals.htm

Just a pet peeve of mine, since too many BluRay/HD fanboi's dismiss DVD's as comparable to SD digital sat/cable, which are overcompressed, detail-reduced, artifact-laden examples of bad SD.

Film/progressive source DVD's are a true 480p's worth of resolution, examples of good quality ED, not 480i...

Thought I'd let everyone know that the GUI version of HandBrake does not work with Lucid 10.04. I believe the CLI version is still functional. On that note, can someone please post a CLI command(s) to rip a DVD? I normally rip mine to a h.264 m4v with forced subtitles. Any help would be appreciated until the next release of HandBrake.

EDIT:
Looks like I jumped the gun. Instructions here to add the latest PPA.
https://edge.launchpad.net/~stebbins...rake-snapshots

I assume you used the correct PPA?

https://edge.launchpad.net/~stebbins...rake-snapshots

9.10/10.04:

ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots

or

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stebbins/ha...apshots/ubuntu lucid main

The 'Copy' profile in OGMRip serves the same function, right? I've been debating what to do with my collection. I'd like to rip everything, or at least the stuff that's worth a damn, but I don't know if I want to compress it or not. It'd take forever. I'd also like to keep the quality lossless in case I ever get a projector; only watching on a 50 inch DLP right now. I'm more inclined to compress the 4+ gig titles a bit though. I don't think I could fit everything on my RAID even with 7TB. I initially started ripping my PAL imports to avoid re-encoding those to NTSC and burning them or getting a region free player. They play on the PC, so why mess around and lose quality?

p.s. Why does encoding still take so long, but that CinemaCraft **** on Windows can encode a whole movie to MPEG2 in like 20 minutes? Do the encoders even make use of 64-bit chips and multiple cores yet?

I don't compress DVDs, I find it's not worth the hassle and I have yet to see a truly satifactory result. IMHO since DVDs themselves are at the lower limit of what I consider decent picture quality, messing with them always produces visible quality reduction (unless the you ramp up the quality so much that the ouput file is only marginally smaller than the original).

HD material OTOH is perfect for compressing, since the quality is way better than what my eyes are able to see (and I have good eyesight).

I find the following parameters perfect to compress 20+GB 1080p Bluray backups down to approximetely 4GB 720p files, that look still as perfect as the original to me:
This keeps the original audio track untouched, just the video is compressed.

On a quad core 2.6GHz AMD Phenom II it takes about 4 hours to compress a 1h45m movie.

Just wanted to say you can also use DD this was taken from a linux journal article listed here. This gives you a complete .iso file that you can mount on the loop back device or store on hard drive.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/copy-cd-or-dvd-dd

If you need to copy a CD to your hard drive:
prompt@shell$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/cdcopy.iso
For a DVD:
prompt@shell$ dd if=/dev/dvd of=/path/to/dvdcopy.iso

Don't forget vobcopy as well which a lot of people use to get the main files off the dvd.

Doesn't that choke on disks that have intentionally bad sectors as copy protection?

Just wanted to add my 2 cents re: Handbrake. I've been ripping with HB for over a year now, but made some mistakes along the way. Since I never had a good way to play the rips until now, I kept making the same mistakes over and over.
Just recently I picked up a WDTV (2nd generation) at our nearby Staples. It was on the clearance rack. The WDTV plays .mkv's better than .m4v.
My comments would be for those of you who want to rip your collection and play on a home theater setup.

- So, first piece of advice. As has been mentioned, rip in .mkv container. .mkv appears to be more compatible with various devices. I ripped numerous movies in the .m4v default for months. WDTV can't find the AC3 track in an .m4v container. We get Dolby Stereo instead.
- If you want AC3 passthru, go to the Audio tab on the Handbrake GUI, click on the AAC line to highlight it, then click the "minus" sign to make it go away. HB will transcode only the AC3 track. If your home theater doesn't pick it up, at least you can be reasonably sure that it's not the rip.
- I've had spotty results using mkvtoolnix to remux .m4v to .mkv. With some rips the AC3 sound is available on the WDTV. With at least one other, the AC3 sound was there but it was unacceptable. Kept skipping, like a Gatling Gun. I've only tried a few remuxes, but the biggest lesson is "don't rip in .m4v anymore".
- This is a WDTV trick, not a Handbrake trick. If you did rip an .mkv with AC3 and AAC, and WDTV wants to play the AAC track, click the "Options" button on the remote after starting the movie, click on the Audio tab, and push Enter. WDTV will search for an alternate audio track. It should pick up the AC3 track.
- You probably know about making a default. Pick .mkv, then click on the "Options" tab in Handbrake (lower right corner) and choose "Make Default". Name it something you'll recognize. I'm pretty sure you'll still have to tweak in the Audio tab each time if you're getting rid of AAC track.

Regarding using Ubuntu, my understanding is that there is not yet a stable release of Handbrake for anything beyond 9.10. You have to take your chances with the ppa snapshots, as described in earlier post. These directions worked for me.
As long as your PC is online with a broadband connection, and you've got a little experience with copy/pasting text into terminal, this is pretty darned straightforward. No guarantees of course, but worked for me on two different PC's running Ubuntu 10.04 just a coupla weeks ago.

If you don't have much experience copy/pasting text, open a terminal and paste one line at a time, beginning with the first one in the directions. Paste the line into terminal, click Enter key, wait for the computer to finish. Go onto next line, same thing.

One more thing - Handbrake can take advantage of multiple cores and it's pretty aggressive. Our Core 2 Duo laptop runs at about 198% to 200% when Handbrake is busy. I only have one screw holding the bottom cover on. I take the back cover off, set the laptop on a stand, and run a small fan underneath it that blows directly onto the CPU heatsink. That one little fan knocks the peak temps down about 10 degrees C.

I agree MKV is the best container format, and I highly recommend to upgrade to the latest version 4.4 of mkvtoolnix, it has alot of bug and compatibility fixes compared to earlier versions. Version 3.2 was solid but the first 4.x releases had several small niggles that made my remuxing tasks hell, until 4.4 came out that so far seems perfect to me.


Yeah I guess that's a workaround to make handbrake run on a laptop, but laptops aren't built to run at full cpu load for hours on end, it will only reduce their lifetime.

Handbrake should really run on a well vented desktop/tower PC, ideally with a powerful quad-core cpu.

BTW, running handbrake is a very good way to stress test your PC, if 5 hours of handbrake encoding doesn't overheat or crash it then it's a solid system.

The laptop, with a Core 2 Duo, is the fastest tool we've got for Handbrake. Our desktop PC is an old Pentium 4. A rip that takes about 3 to 3.5 hours on the laptop takes 5 to 6+ hours on the old clunker.

Now you've got me worrying about smoking the lappy - maybe I'd better bite the bullet and get a capable desktop PC. As you say, well ventilated!

I agree it's not a good idea to stress a typical laptop at 200% CPU utilization for hours and hours.

How many rips a day are you doing? Does it really matter if a rip takes 6 hours instead of 3.5 hours? That's still four a day. Patience, grasshopper.

Of course, if you're looking for an excuse for a new desktop, ... go for it! You can always say you're "thinking of the environment". The new CPUs are much faster and use much less power than the Pentium 4.

That so true, my current quad-core AMD Phenom II 910e uses less power at full cpu load then my old Northwood Pentium 4 2.5GHz (not even a Prescott!) was using under normal desktop usage load.

Ok, I did opt for the AMD cpu with the best cpu-power to power-consumption ratio out there (65W TDP for a 2.6GHz quad-core with 8MB L2+L3 cache!), but still even a normal quad-core is a lot more power-efficient than any Pentium 4.

BTW, I can really recommend the 910e, at idle it uses less power than my previous AMD Athlon dual core 4850e, which was also a energy-efficient cpu with a 45W TDP (on the same mobo with all other components unchanged).

Average is maybe two rips a week.

You hit it on the head - this is as good an excuse as any to go shopping. Looks like cost of a quad-core store-bought PC is roughly equivalent to new motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. even if I use an existing case, power supply, & optical drive. Of course the store-bought PC would include W7, which is a bonus, right?

Either way, I'm going to stop beating up on the laptop. Going back to the inefficient P4's 6 hour rips for now.

Please forgive me for getting off the thread's subject..

Does anyone have suggestions to prevent audio sync issues while encoding using handbrake? I'll occasionally get an encode that the audio is noticeably off by ~.25 seconds or so. Just enough to make it distracting.

I'm not sure what causes it or no but I have a number of movies I'd like to encode and throw on my media server for my kid...

The only "solution" that I've ever heard of is to demux the audio and video (usually before doing the transcode of the video) and then manually remux them after the transcode.

But I've never actually done it, so I don't know the details of how to change the audio offset during the remux.

Anyone know how to encode a movie with subtitles? I have the rip of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and I could easily just use the dubbed English audio track, but I hate dubbed movies. I'd much rather read sub-titles. I tried adding the English subtitle track to the encode and I checked the "Default" bubble on it but when playing back the .mkv in XBMC, there's not subtitle track. XBMC doesn't find it.

I'd also like to be able to turn the subtitles on and off which is why I avoided the "Burned in" option. Some movies only need the subtitles for part of it.

Any ideas?

Since handbreak seems to use ffmpeg to do the transcoding, you may just need to do it in the terminal.

The ffmpeg man page says this:

Subtitle options:
-scodec codec
Force subtitle codec ('copy' to copy stream).

-newsubtitle
Add a new subtitle stream to the current output stream.

-slang code
Set the ISO 639 language code (3 letters) of the current subtitle stream.

-sn Disable subtitle recording.

-sbsf bitstream_filter
Bitstream filters available are "mov2textsub", "text2movsub".

ffmpeg -i file.mov -an -vn -sbsf mov2textsub -scodec copy -f rawvideo sub.txt


I think that handbreak shows you what the command output is after choosing your settings. You could use that as a starting point and add the subtitle options to it.

You will have to work out the details, as I have never done subtitles in ffmpeg. To add them to a DVD you usually need a separate file with the subtitles in it. Don't know if ffmpeg does it this way.

You can do partial encodes, just to shorten the time it takes to test options. See my thread about using ffmpeg:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1219959

I don't think handbrake is a front end for ffmpeg - perhaps they use snapshots of libraries so there is common code. Anyway I assume you have seen this page:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Subtitles

I've never bothered with subtitles but will play with them today to see if I can help figure anything out.

One other thing - there are two ends to this - perhaps XBMC is not happy with the subtitles in some way - I would try something like VLC just as a sanity check - perhaps you have handbrake configured right and it's something with XBMC for why you are not seeing them.

Shane,

I tried what you described and it works for me. At least using mplayer and vlc they display nicely. My test DVD is "Human Target" and I added the French subtitles - looks like french but I have to admit it's all greek to me. :-)

I do use a PPA for handbrake:

https://launchpad.net/~stebbins/+arc...rake-snapshots

So we may not comparing apples to apples if you have the stock ubuntu one.

Anything else you want me to try? Want me to put my mkv file somewhere so you can try to play it with XBMC?

djb

I never said it was a front end for ffmpeg. But, it does use ffmpeg. If you use the terminal version (aka:CLI), this is what you will find:

Video Options

• -e or --encoder: selects the video encoder. The default is ffmpeg (similar to DivX). The other options are xvid, x264, and theora..

That is documented here:
https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/CLIGuide

Also, it has three video encoders that it can use:

Video

• H.264 (x264): For MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264/AVC.
  o This gives much better quality and lower file sizes than the MPEG-4 and VP3 encoders.
  o Most modern devices will support this format. (iPhone/iPods, BluRay? Players, PS3, XBox360 etc)
  
• MPEG-4 (ffmpeg): HandBrake offers FFmpeg's MPEG-4 part 2 encoder for fast, low quality encoding.
  o Better support from older devices such as DVD players and cheap "MP4 Players"
  o Lower quality than the H.264 encode option but typically faster encodes.
  
• VP3 (Theora): HandBrake can also encode Theora video. Theora video with Vorbis audio in the Matroska container represents a truly free option for multimedia encoding.
  o However, Theora has yet to reach maturity when measured by quality at a given bitrate.

That is documented here:
https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Encoders

Of the two times that I've tried adding (or retaining) subtitles in the MKV container using Handbrake, I've had it fail once for no apparent reason (on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and had it work once (on a title I'm too embarrassed to name ).

Personally, I find it easier and more convenient to extract the subtitles to a separate .srt file using AVIDEMUX. Because if SMPlayer (which is the media player I use 98% of the time) finds an srt file that has the same name as the mkv file in the folder then it automatically loads it. And even if the name is different, I can manually select an srt file and have SMPlayer use that instead. So solving the issue of getting subtitles into the mkv container issue hasn't really been high on my TODO list.

Most of the "torrents" I've seen also come with seperate srt files, so I'd recommend figuring out how to get the XBMC media player to load separate srt files rather than trying to solve the MKV container issue.

Mkay, your clip that you PM'd me works fine in XBMC! I can switch on and off the subtitles as I should be able to.

You added the track and selected the "Default" bubble right? Wonder why CTHD isn't working...

Yeah, thats all I did. At least you know that you did it right and XMBC is correct. I guess you could try another DVD to see if you could get it to work, then you would know it's something with CTHD.

10-4. Gonna try another one tonight and let y'all know.

Thanks!

Update: I re-encoded CTHD along with encoding a few more movies and all of them worked this time. The other movies are all in English and therefore didn't need subtitles, but I was just testing with them.

Don't know why it didn't work the first time with CTHD, but it did the second. The subtitles show up fine in XBMC and are switchable with the 'T' key.

For future reference if anyone else has trouble: import the subtitle track you want in HB by clicking the "+" button and then click the bubble next to "Default."

Thanks once again, everyone. Hope y'all have a great weekend.