[XviD-devel] Encoding TV episodes

[Felix von Leitner]

My main use for xvid and ffmpeg is to encode TV episodes that come as
SVCD so that one fits in 300 - 350 Megs, so that I can put two episodes
on one CD.  I would like to have a vertical resolution of 640, but
settle for 512 if I don't get the better source material.

When playing the episodes using TV-out on a TV set, MPEG-4 looks a lot
like MPEG-2, because TV sets have inherent softening, but when I watch
the encoded episodes on my high resolution TFT display saled up two or
three times to make them full screen, I get horriblebad artifacts, even
when watching from a distance of 3 to 5 meters.

Why am I posting this here?  Read on, please. ;)

Sometimes I get TV episodes encoded as MPEG-4 by others, and those
typically look better than my own encodings, although I am constantly
chasing development versions and obscure tuning parameters to get better
quality.  When I look at other's MPEG-4 encodings, I see that they use
neither qpel nor gmc and often not even b-frames.  How can that be?
Most of the high quality ones say they use XviD.  Is there some secret
high quality #define that I need to set?

For the record, I also get bad artifacts when I don't use qpel, gmc or
b-frames.  Two pass encoding looks a little better, but not much.

And -- what I find most interesting -- XviD encodings have different
artifacts than ffmpeg, regardless of whether I play them back using xvid
or ffmpeg.  I thought both were by and large optimized versions of some
common reference software?  And looking at the code, the algorithms look
quite close.

Felix