L
Larkin78
Guest
We'll it took a lot of playing around with different bit rates, reinstalling codecs and such like but I've finally got DVD quality video out of Windows Media Encoder (WME).
A couple issues I hit working from a clean Windows XP installation:
- There seems to be a conflict between the current WME and WMP11. To get any conversion to work I had to roll back to WMP9/10. A shame as WMP11 is now used to stream media to the Xbox 360 so I'm copying stuff on portable hard drives until they fix this : (
- A DVD driver needs be installed before WMP or WME can read mpeg-2 data (the native format on a DVD or indeed a ripped VOB file). Don't know why this surprised me, I just expected the drivers to there out of the box.
For quality settings I've jumped back to WMV8 and used Quality based VBR (with 95% quality). This is a massive improvement over WMV9 CBR as it allows the encoder to change the bitrate depending on the amount of onscreen action. I've seen music videos go as high as 3.4 Mbps but movies seem to be around 2Mbps. This works out at around 1G per hour.
Not bad results considering the tool is free but there are still a few things I haven't figured out how to do with this method:
- Colour is slightly washed when shown sideby side with original. May need to play with some gamma settings.
- No subtiltes. I'm sure this is possible but can't see how it's done yet.
- Audio is two channel basic stereo. You can differnt audio and video settings and WMV9 audio does support 5.1 but I get some pesky error message when I try.
- Would be nice to have second audio tracks muxed in too (commentaries, etc)
If anyone's figured out any of the above, I'd be interested. : )
A couple issues I hit working from a clean Windows XP installation:
- There seems to be a conflict between the current WME and WMP11. To get any conversion to work I had to roll back to WMP9/10. A shame as WMP11 is now used to stream media to the Xbox 360 so I'm copying stuff on portable hard drives until they fix this : (
- A DVD driver needs be installed before WMP or WME can read mpeg-2 data (the native format on a DVD or indeed a ripped VOB file). Don't know why this surprised me, I just expected the drivers to there out of the box.
For quality settings I've jumped back to WMV8 and used Quality based VBR (with 95% quality). This is a massive improvement over WMV9 CBR as it allows the encoder to change the bitrate depending on the amount of onscreen action. I've seen music videos go as high as 3.4 Mbps but movies seem to be around 2Mbps. This works out at around 1G per hour.
Not bad results considering the tool is free but there are still a few things I haven't figured out how to do with this method:
- Colour is slightly washed when shown sideby side with original. May need to play with some gamma settings.
- No subtiltes. I'm sure this is possible but can't see how it's done yet.
- Audio is two channel basic stereo. You can differnt audio and video settings and WMV9 audio does support 5.1 but I get some pesky error message when I try.
- Would be nice to have second audio tracks muxed in too (commentaries, etc)
If anyone's figured out any of the above, I'd be interested. : )
