TMPGEnc questions

[Jump]

1) What is bitrate?

2) What would happen if you had low bitrate?

3) What does quality level do?

4) What happens when quality is low?

5) Does my minimum bitrate matter? i.e. if it is 300, and there's a scene that uses 1000, it will use 1000, but if it was 3000 min, it would use 3000 in a 1000 scene? Or am I stupid? Feel free to call me stupid anytime.

6)In One Piece, the subtitles flicker a lot. What causes this? I have this problem on the lowest quality all the way up to the highest quality. Thanks.

[_Sin_]

Originally Posted by Jump

1) What is bitrate?

2) What would happen if you had low bitrate?

3) What does quality level do?

4) What happens when quality is low?

5) Does my minimum bitrate matter? i.e. if it is 300, and there's a scene that uses 1000, it will use 1000, but if it was 3000 min, it would use 3000 in a 1000 scene? Or am I stupid? Feel free to call me stupid anytime.

6)In One Piece, the subtitles flicker a lot. What causes this? I have this problem on the lowest quality all the way up to the highest quality. Thanks.

I honestly don't know much about encoding and similar stuff, but I'll try to help nonetheless:

1) Bitrate is normally specified in Kb(its) per second and directly influences the quality of your video. Rule of thumb: The higher the bitrate, the better the video - especially in scenes with lots of movement.

2) Low video quality
3/4) Dunno

5) Yup, you are right with that. If a scene can be encoded with let's say 1000 Kb/s because there is less movement, and your minimum bitrate is 3000 Kb/s, it will still use up 3000 KB/s

6) A codec/player problem maybe? Check out the Media Configuration Guide, uninstall all your codecs and install ffdshow-alpha and - optionally - install a different player like Windows Media Player Classic.

[Jump]

Thanks for the info. And sorry- I meant- I see the subtitles just fine. But after i encode it into m2k format, they start flickering.

And what I meant when I asked what would happen if they are too low, was what would happen on screen. Would it get blurry? Pixellated? Lag? Same thing for the question about quality level.

[_Sin_]

Originally Posted by Jump

Thanks for the info. And sorry- I meant- I see the subtitles just fine. But after i encode it into m2k format, they start flickering.

And what I meant when I asked what would happen if they are too low, was what would happen on screen. Would it get blurry? Pixellated? Lag? Same thing for the question about quality level.

No lag, but blurry and pixellated. How much? Just take a 1min file and try encoding it in different bitrates etc and you can see what each option does. (If you don't know how to cut the video, say so and I'll give you instructions)

[Jump]

Hmm. I tried encoding in various quality/bitrate, and could not see any difference. I figured it was just that I did not have the 'eye' for video, but I wanted to make sure because I didn't want to suddenly notice the difference and be annoyed by it constantly.

[KeinikuSuki]

Originally Posted by Jump

Hmm. I tried encoding in various quality/bitrate, and could not see any difference. I figured it was just that I did not have the 'eye' for video, but I wanted to make sure because I didn't want to suddenly notice the difference and be annoyed by it constantly.

Consider it this way:

You're probably using a Fan Sub or DVD Rip for you source media. The best quality you can possibly get is controlled not only by the bit rate, but also the quality of the source media. Usually the lowest bitrate on TMPGEnc is sufficient to get the quality in normal Fansubs/DVD Rips you find on the internet.

[anime_layer]

Originally Posted by Jump

1) What is bitrate?

As mentioned, the bitrate sets how much data you want to give the movie per second. More data -> better quality -> higher bitrate.
Though it's not wise to set the bitrate too high because that will only create junk data.

2) What would happen if you had low bitrate?

Then the encoder will have to make compromises. If it isn't given enough data to put all the details of a scene it will have to leave things out.

3) What does quality level do?
4) What happens when quality is low?

In this context it's probaly how much time you give the encoder. If you give it little time it will have to hurry and can't compress the data very well. If you set it to high quality it will take its time to compress the movie the best it can.

5) Does my minimum bitrate matter? i.e. if it is 300, and there's a scene that uses 1000, it will use 1000, but if it was 3000 min, it would use 3000 in a 1000 scene? Or am I stupid? Feel free to call me stupid anytime.

Exactly. But I'm not sure what minimum bitrate means in this context...
[/quote]6)In One Piece, the subtitles flicker a lot. What causes this? I have this problem on the lowest quality all the way up to the highest quality. Thanks.[/QUOTE] I doubt they'll flicker because of a bad encoding. They will only smear and blur. If they flicker they were badly encoded (the filter that should provide the subs for the encoder to encode didn't provide them for each frame) or the movie uses soft subs and you've got some codec issues.

[Jump]

Thanks for the help. I have one more question. Every once in a while, a .avi file I encode goes from 23 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes, with 23 minutes of video and 57 minutes of just black screen. What is causing this? I re-encode the same file several times with the same results, I tried different codecs even though the source .avi file worked fine already (uninstalling previous codecs, of course).

Happens to about 5% of the stuff.

[MTB{SOLO}]

Perhaps you can provide some more detailed information. Like: what episodes, divx or xvid, what codecs you have installed, what you were encoding: VCD, SVCD or DVD, 1 pass cbr, 2 pass vbr?

I have had this happen a while ago with some Naruto episodes in which the fansubs were strangely encode @120fps or so. It only happened when I encoded SVCD at a 2pass vbr. The first pass looked normal but the second pass would get stuck and the episode would have a blank patch for like an hour (the audio would keep going and end during the blank patch as well).......laaaamme...lol.

So provide a little more info and we'll see if we cant figure it out ~(>_< )