Much to my surprise, I had a few people ask me how my encoding adventures were coming along. I wrote a blog post earlier about it, but I didn’t like it that much, so I set it to private. I just set it back to published, because I’m too tired to think of something coherent to share and it also includes my magical mencoder settings I decided on.
Following up on that last post though, things are going really well. These poor machines have literally been encoding non-stop for a couple of days now. Maybe even a week, I’m not sure. When I went to bed last night I remembered I had 450 episodes to encode. When I started writing this post, it was down to 303. I’m only doing the cartoons right now though, so the length of most of these episodes is either 7 minutes or 22. It seems like it’s going pretty fast. I would try and do the math, but that wouldn’t work out too well.
After this I have to re-encode all the live-action shows that are variable framerate as well. I’m a little nervous testing on those, because the results haven’t been nearly as positive as it has been on the cartoons. I really cannot say enough on how nice those look — the picture is really clear, and I seriously cannot tell that it’s a ripped copy. One of the nice things about forcing the output fps, is that mencoder doesn’t screw around with the video bitrate, so I really am getting about 2200 kbps this time. Before, if I left them to encode to 29.97, it would drop to around 1700. I think that extra 500 or so has a lot to do with the quality. They look really good.