Hi!

I just wonder, what are the recommended settings for Nero Digital?

Two different needs:

1: I want to make excellent quality movie-mp4:s out of my dvd:s, encoding time is not the most important factor... Should still be reasonable... Result file could be 1.2-1.5gigs

2: one cd movie-mp4:s, ending file size 790-800megs

at the moment I just use Maximum definition, and Best quality, but I don't understand, what settings in Advanced are:

h263/ MPEG quantization
Half/Quarter pixel

-Spatial Prediction
-Predicted VOB
-Unrestricted Motion vectors
-4 motions vectors per macroblock
-Bidirectional VOP
-Support of interlaced VOP
-Global Motion Compensation

Which ones are important, which are not??? Enable or disable what?
Those terms are like ancient Greek for, can't understand a word....
If there some good information on other sites, too, links would be highly appreciated...

I know now little bit about audio formats, but I am just in the very beginning of video....

i did just one movie with three different settings, resolution was 512x288 with bitrate 716 kbits/s, turns out it looks pretty much like boiling soup whatever one choooses (at that bitrate?), i think best looking picture was imho with the 'enable b-frames only' (Bidirectional VOP) version, i left pretty much everything at default for that one (including psyvisuals). (i guess it depend on the bitrate a lot, plus the source was kinda grainny in my specific example. (Dracula - A Francis Ford Coppola Film))

note that you cant split the output if you want to put it on 2 cds


use mpeg for high bitrates and h263 for low


qpel results in much more sharpness without the loss of compressibility

i always use xvids qpel for my 1cd encodes, cant say much about neros implementation


normally the b-frames shouldnt hurt the quality (perhaps a little less sharpness) but help compressibiliy
for low bitrates i would enable it, for high bitrates it depends on the movie i guess (hard to compress or not...)


some like it some not
i personally dont use it (in xvid)


512x... is very low
depending on the compressibility of the movie i would choose 640x... to 576x... for 16:9 movies on low bitrates

that was what nerodigital app decided to use when i lowered the audio to he aac 64..., why low btw, it should look even worse at higher res., no? (will post some samples later maybe, i did the same movie using divx at the same bitrate, same resolution)

Ok, I am under the impression GMC isn't that helpful in ND. Basically, from what I have heard from ND people is that GMC will not give any large gains in quality. Plus, ND implementation of GMC is 3 warping point and GMC encodes are already less compatible with DXN hardware profiles so I would just leave it off. For qpel, it definitely will give a sharper image which some people like (me in particular) personally I use it always. But there are some who prefer a smoother picture with a little less blocks, qpel sometimes will produce artifacts. The other thing about qpel is that it takes more cpu to decode and it isn't compatible with DXN hardware profiles (yes I know DXN hardware profiles suck don't they.) So I suppose it is your call on this one, encode a couple small clips to see if you prefer the "qpel look" or not. All of the other things I would enable except interlacing VOP unless of course your movie is interlaced and you don't want to deinterlace (probably this isn't the case). As for a 1cd encode use high to low Psycho-visual quality. For a two cd encode I would either disable Pyschovisual or use it on low. Psycho-visual quality is similar to DXN Pyscho visual enhancements, basically it uses decimal quants to shave off bitrate, it will make the image smoother and it will appear a little more washed out which is better than blocking for 1 cd but if you have bitrate to space for 2 cds disable it or use low. As for the quantization type, h.263 will work well IMO for 1 and 2 cd encodes. Mpeg can work nicely for 2 cd encodes, but try it to see what you prefer, personally I use h.263 for everything.

simply the lower the res the less the details/quality
as always it depends on the source to what res to use (ie lotr vs matrix on 1cd )

on hardly to compress movies a higher res maybe will lead to more blocks and more sharpness, its a matter of taste after all, but 512x... is really too low for a normal movie imho

yes they really do
and they are outdated also cause the mediatek chip already supports gmc and qpel too...


according to bobololo psych doesnt hurt quality in ND (the same as inxvids adaptive quant), in contrary to divx5 where the psych only seem to blurr the picture

on the issues of boiling soup,somebody told me that it seems how ND is not inserting KF's on scene changes(?)
can anyone affirm that?
(although boiling can be just the encoder inefficiency and/or big differences between i/p/b frames etc.)

if ND was standalone vfw codec i would try it by now,but as such,i choose to believe doom9's test [ ]

It really isn't too much a problem for me to use just Nero Showtime with ND movies... at least for now, of course it would be nice to have a broader support in players... hopefully guys at Ahead at least keep on improving Nero Showtime with new features (for example Dolby Virtual Speakers or something similar..)

But first I really like too see 2-cd option and an option to put multiple encoding processes in a waiting line, so I can rip my dvd's to hard disk, put my settings in Recode2 and leave computer to do the crunching during night... It takes about 2-3 hours per movie with 2-pass, so I could create 4 mp4 movies per night.
( -> Menno & Ivan )

The settings I currently use come from the comparison at doom9, the creator of the comparison contacted the makers of the codecs and asked their recommended settings, so if I figured out correctly, those settings came from Ahead

Settings (copy/paste from doom9):
ND: Best quality 2 pass encoding, MV range: -128 to 127.5, psychovisual high, H.263 quantization, halfpel, spatial prediction, PVOP, unrestricted MV and BVOP (B-frames)

I really love the options for different soundtracks, subtitles and chapters in ND movies. The quality and sound (HE-AAC) are by far good enough _for my eyes and ears_, and the encoding speed is excellent


edit: typos

what would be the minimun width in your opinion ? (just courious)