It seems a little weird to me to post something on my blog that I already posted on our blog at work, but whatever. I figured it’d get more visibility if I wrote about it, since I already cover multimedia stuff sometimes, plus I’m excited about this thing anyway. 🙂
At work, I get to do all kinds of stuff, and working with video is one of them. I threw together an x264 reference guide on my devspace for what the settings of each preset covers, compared to the defaults. I’ve even translated it to spanish! Vamos, che!
The thing I like about this, is that it helps me see which areas to start tweaking to get higher quality gains, and which ones to stay away from. It kind of sheds light on where the best places to start tweaking are. For instance, the settings that are changed on the ultrafast preset should never be messed with at all, if you want a good outcome. And on the flipside, the ones under the placebo preset are going to slow down the encode greatly if you start beefing them up.
Generally speaking, though, it’s a best approach to use presets set by developers. Every now and then I get the idea in my head that I can somehow make things better just by tweaking a few of the variables. That never works out too well. I always end up spending like 60 minutes to encode a 5 minute video, and then I can’t tell a difference after that. Whoopsie fail.
Next, I want to put together a similar type guide for Handbrake presets, both to compare their presets to each other, and then how to duplicate the same x264 settings using both the x264 cli encoder, and libav. The reason being that, a lot of times I really like the output that Handbrake delivers, and I want to duplicate that using other encoders, but I’m not sure how. That’s what I’m planning to target.