Quality Dilemma

[buddyweiser 105]

I have the first 5 seasons of Smallville on DVD(because they have not been released on Blu-Ray, nor will they in the foreseeable future) and seasons 6-10 on Blu-Ray. What is the best alternative to up-converting seasons 1-5 to as high def as possible without actually having them on blu-ray? I know there are up-scaling dvd players out there that use advanced algorithms to fill in the spaces between pixels etc for increasing resolution. So my question is this. Is there a way for MBT to automatically upscale? Is there a video encoding software to up-convert the video files at least to "near" HD quality?

[Tikuf 663]

Is there a video encoding software to up-convert the video files at least to "near" HD quality?

 

It is really hard to get upscaling to give a super clear picture.

 

Are your dvd rips full rips or are they mkv with mpeg2/ac3 audio (or similar)?

[buddyweiser 105]

The rips are MP4 with x264/AAC. But as I said, I own the actual dvd's so if it would be best to go straight from the disc, I have that option.

[Tikuf 663]

Ok that is good.

 

I would re rip them to mkv using the original codecs (ith say make mkv or similar so that they are all nicely split into ep's)

 

I would then run the conversion of the video and audio upsizing to 720p (i wouldn't go higher or the video will start to look a little grainy) to h264/aac

 

Grab a copy of avisynth and relevant filters (it has some good resizing filters you may need to download each of the filters some may be included i can't remember which ones)

 

there is a good example here> http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/340566-Upscaling-480p-vid-to-720p-without-big-quality-loss

ffVideoSource("d:\pathtosource\input.mkv") 
DeBlock()
Sharpen(0,1.0)
santiag(strh=2,strv=2)
Nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, cshift="BiCubicResize", fwidth=1280, fheight=720)
AwarpSharp2(depth=20)
MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=32))

Copy the above and save to a text file and rename to input.avs - after editing the first line to suit your file.

 

The ffmpeg  version (you can find it in the ffmpeg dir of your server install) we use in media browser will accept avisynth scripts as input.

 

I would then run something like

ffmpeg.exe -i "input.avs" -force_key_frames expr:if(isnan(prev_forced_t),gte(t,.1),gte(t,prev_forced_t+5)) -vcodec libx264 -preset slow -profile high -level 4.1 -threads 0 -crf 18 -maxrate 5000000 -minrate 5000000 -bufsize 5000000 -vf "scale=trunc(1280/2)*2:trunc(720/2)*2" -vsync vfr -strict experimental -c:a aac -b:a 384000 -ac 6 -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -af "aresample=async=1" "output-new.mkv"

If the original audio is only 2 channel change -ac from 6 to 2 (6 will give you 5.1).

 

This is not the easiest method and may require some tweaking it will also be quite slow (it will give you good compression) but it should give you pretty good results. You may want to automate the process with a batch file to save you a bunch of time.

 

This is only how I would do it there are most likely some tools out there that will give you good results - handbrake is one but personally I don't use it so someone else would have to walk you thru it.

 

 

p.s I haven't tested the conversion command line so if it errors let me know.

 

Edit: with a dvd source the avs script may not even be required so I would test the ffmpeg c/l first and see if the quality meets your expectations

 

Edited March 20, 2014 by Tikuf

[gcw07 347]

This is what I use lav, madvr and cuda (not sure that is still needed). It does a decent job of upscaling DVDs to look better. Obviously not as good looking as blu-rays, but it isn't too bad.

[swhitmore 781]

Is madvr that good? It sounds hard to setup/maintain. Is it worth the effort?

[gcw07 347]

Looks good to me. It took me a couple hours to set it up originally, but I haven't' touched it since then and that has been a year+. So not really hard to maintain. I do think it was worth it.

[swhitmore 781]

Looks good to me. It took me a couple hours to set it up originally, but I haven't' touched it since then and that has been a year+. So not really hard to maintain. I do think it was worth it.

 

Thanks, I'll give it a go. Another thing on my ever growing to-do list. Do I need a guide? Or is it pretty straight forward? (sorry for the thread hi-jack)

Edited March 20, 2014 by swhitmore

[gcw07 347]

I used a guide when I did it. But that was almost 2 years ago so things could have got a lot easier. For instance all the Lav CUDA stuff was directly integrated into Lav.

[buddyweiser 105]

I would prefer not to use Madvr as it is only client-side. If possible I would like to increase the quality of the video server-side to transfer that increase in quality to all clients. Is this possible? Or maybe possible to use Madvr to re-encode the video? If this is not possible, then I can settle for viewing in MBT with Madvr.

[Tikuf 663]

There is no real way to inject quality into a video (you can increase the size and it will effect the quality a bit but you can get acceptable results) you can try the ffmpeg command line I posted above and see how that works for you.