Picture Quality....no complaints, just some questions

[Ronstang 202]

I have no complaints about picture quality but I am curious about some things.  I am actually surprised with just how good the picture quality is of all my compressed content.  I always use MCEBuddy to convert everything to mp4 at normal quality regardless of the source.  Most of my content is recorded from HD TV channels and at the moment the rest is all DVDs, I have not gotten to ripping my Blu-Rays.

I play everything on one of my 3 Firesticks.  I used to use my Xbox but I had playback issues that were performance based, not picture quality based.  I am confused in a good way because I think the picture quality of my compressed content viewed on a 4K TV is better than the original source viewed on my computer....especially compressed DVDs.  If the DVDs are good quality it's hard to tell the difference between a compressed DVD and HD sourced TV.  I even think my compressed HDTV recorded movies look better than watching the same movie on the same channel on the cable box.

I was wondering if the reason the picture quality is so good is due to the ability of the TV to upscale content?  And if so does the brand TV matter?  I have all Sony TVs downstairs and they arguably have unparalleled picture quality to other brands and they also posses top of the line video processing engines so I'm trying to determine if my TVs are making part of the difference.....because if so it will definitely affect my purchase choices when I buy new TVs for upstairs.

My biggest surprise is my DVD collection seems to have new life when compressed to 1/3 or 1/4 the original file size seem to look better using Emby and the Firestick than putting the DVD in an standalone DVD drive.  Even low quality source DVDs look better, much better actually and I am wondering how this is possible.  

 

[Luke 37050]

@cayars

[Carlo 4330]

Hi, I would surely agree that a recorded HD TV station movie/show that's been ran through MCEBuddy and converted to either H.264 or H.265 can look better than original DVR material.  Unless you use poor compression it should look better because you have higher resolution with HD content! Remember DVD is SD content so you have less pixels (resolution) to work with.

It will likely look best directly viewed from the recording itself in HD as it's the "raw" broadcast footage.

You made another nice observation about upscaling.  Many TVs or devices such as the Shield TV 2019 edition can do a super job of upscaling content to 4K TVs that simply make them look fantastic compared to the same image on a normal HD TV.  Many TVs can do this for SD content as well.

A proper conversion of DVD or BluRay rips can easily hold 95 to 98% of the original quality at 1/3 the storage space.  Some times on fast action scenes you can loose a bit detail compared to the raw footage but overall most people would never notice.

Anyone who watches Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime is already numb to this as they use heavy compression and do loose detail in parts of scenes.

So yes, personally I agree with you for reasons mentioned

Regardless isn't it nice to view your old DVDs again and think how nice they are?  Now think how nice BluRay rips will be or 4K UHD releases will look. 

 

[Ronstang 202]

On 10/21/2020 at 12:40 AM, cayars said:

It will likely look best directly viewed from the recording itself in HD as it's the "raw" broadcast footage.

Actually I have a lot of rare movies that rarely ever show up on movie channels and are either unavailable on media or are really expensive so I did a lot of testing with MCEBuddy before I started compressing my collection. Even on older content, which is usually lower quality even in HD, I could not tell the difference between the original recording, mp4 normal quality, and mp4 high quality.  Once played through Emby on the TV using a Firestick 4K the quality of the mp4 normal quality is exceptional.  The only time I notice any compression is when viewing on my 65" Sony 4K in the den, which I sit closer to than the 56' Sony 4K in the bedroom.....but I see the compression in normally viewed TV at times to so perceptually there is no difference except I can have 3 times the movies on the same hard drive array.

On 10/21/2020 at 12:40 AM, cayars said:

Regardless isn't it nice to view your old DVDs again and think how nice they are?  Now think how nice BluRay rips will be or 4K UHD releases will look. 

Actually this is the biggest surprise and really nice.  My old TV shows from the 60's look fantastic as compressed DVDs and I have a lot of old 70's and 80''s horror movies on a hard drive as images that I have never watched until now an they look spectacular considering the low quality of the DVDs to begin with....truly surprising.

I'm looking forward to ripping my Blu-Ray collection because I have hundreds of discs but I am doing th DVDs first as they are much faster to rip and encode and all my older content that hasn't been viewed in decades is on DVD and I am enjoying horror movies with some form of a plot, character development, without nonstop blood and gore.

My only concern with the Blu-Ray discs is how to compress them as I have not done any real research on the issue and I would like as small a file as possible with good quality.  I will try a few  images I have of Blu-Rays on various hard drives as an experiment in MCEBuddy with my current settings and see what happens.  I think the bigger issue is time to encode as my Blu-Rays are usually 3-4 times larger than an HD recorded movie.

[nmkaufman 49]

It's either that the h264/h265 has a "de-noising" effect (film grain/other noise disappears) that you like, or you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned scaling.

Some of the scaling build into modern TVs is pretty slick, and rivals anything you can do with a computer, minus maybe MadrVR.

And when you mention the quality looking worse on your computer, most PC media software defaults to bilinear scaling so it doesn't tank older systems.

Try using a media player that allows you to choose bicubic, Lanczos or the aforementioned MadVR.

There's some advanced scaling options built into Emby Theater, but they require adding a custom config file.

Edited October 23, 2020 by nmkaufman

[Ronstang 202]

A nice surprise.....I decided to rip and compress my Steel Box Set of Friday the 13th series for Halloween.....and my girlfriend wants to watch them....and although it takes a while to get the image onto the hard drive in MKV format MCEBuddy actually converts them faster, I assume because the source is so clean and high resolution.  Part two is only taking 39 minutes.

[Carlo 4330]

Probably the wrong tool for this type of thing, not that it won't work but there are better choices.

You should check out xmedia recode.

[Ronstang 202]

What's wrong with Handbrake?  Because it's been doing a good job on all my tasks so far, and MCEBuddy is just a front end for Handbrake.

[Carlo 4330]

Handbrake always converts the files.  Xmedia Recode can do conversions or just remuxing and gives you more control. You can easily remove audio or subtitle tracks not needed, create 2 channel default audio, etc.

But that wasn't my point.  If running through MCEBuddy it's going through several processes like looking for commercials which shouldn't exist if these are disc rips.
Many of us won't even allow MCEBuddy to do the conversions of Live TV recordings as again it's going to reencode H.264 streams.

 

[Ronstang 202]

I have commercial skipping turned off already so that isn't an issue, and I use MKV to strip out any audio or subtitle streams I don't want.  And what TV stations broadcast in H.264?  And if they do why are they so large?  To get the file size down I am going to have to reencode anyway so I still don't understand the issue.  It is using ffmpeg just the same as as Xmedia Recode.

[Carlo 4330]

Kind  of doesn't make sense to most people to use MCEBuddy without commercial detection as that's the heart of what most people use it for, but I certainly understand how/why you're doing this to feed Handbrake conversions. If using MakeMKV to choose your streams you sort of have it covered.

In the USA where you are located if talking OTA it will be all mpeg2.  However if using a cable service you typically get many HD streams as h.264 instead.  It's these channels that don't make sense to reconvert using Handbrake because they are already h.264.  If converting to h.265 then of course it still might make sense.

But for single task or doing queued conversions you should check out Xmedia Recode as it's very easy to use and quite powerful and allows copying streams instead of conversions as well which helps to keep quality better.  Basically it can do what you're doing with multiple steps from other programs.

[Ronstang 202]

I use MCEBuddy because I can queue up 100 conversions and leave for a few days.  I manually edit all my TV recordings using Avidemux because the commercial removing software blows goats and never gets it right.  My edited movies are ready for archiving to watch commercial free and commercial fragment free and aren't missing a few seconds of the program anywhere.

How can I tell if recoded cable content is already H.264?  All the recorded files are  in the transport stream format which I thought was always mpeg-2?  

I don't know what H.265 is or what it's benefits are over H.264.  Should I be converting my Blu-Rays to H.265?  Currently everything is converted to mp4/H.264.

[pwhodges 1527]

H.265 (aka HEVC) is a more recent codec, intended as the successor to h.264 (aka AVC) - as the name suggests.  It can be as little as half the size for equivalent quality, but is slower to encode; but more importantly, not all clients can direct play it (notably, web browsers can't).

Using h.265 is a useful way to save on storage requirements if you have enough server power to do the more-often necessary transcoding and are happy with the resulting viewing quality.

Paul

[nmkaufman 49]

H.265 Is capable of some really trick stuff to save space while preserving quality vs. H.264.

It's only as good as the codec and settings you're using, though, and Handbrake's implementation is far from mature.

If you're storing 4K video, it may be worth learning the ropes with H.265. Otherwise, H.264 is pretty much idiot proof in 2020.

BTW,  I saw you mentioned previously that you preferred an app that finished encodes  faster.

Faster encodes with the same hardware can only come at the expense of quality.

Be sure to actually compare the output of these various apps you're auditioning.

Especially if these rips are intended to be an actual backup of your phsyical media. You can never get quality back.

Pay attention to how much film grain is retained/lost with each codec/program. This should give you an idea of overall lossiness.

Edited October 25, 2020 by nmkaufman

[Ronstang 202]

 

I only prefer faster conversions with quality.  When I finally got hardware acceleration working my conversion times were cut by 75%, so about an hour instead of FOUR.  I read there was a small quality hit so I have been testing it for 4 months and keeping all my TS files in archive just in case.  Well after thorough testing and lots of movie and DVD watching on Emby I am quite satisfied I can't see a quality difference between software only encoding and hardware accelerated.  Not only am I very happy with H.264 hardware accelerated at the moment  I am now confident enough to delete all my TS files and gain my hard drive space back.  The only TS files I'm keeping in archive are some really super rare hard to find movie favorites.

 

[Carlo 4330]

See if your hardware can also do h.265 besides h.264 and try that with your originals before deleting them.

Then see if these 265 files will direct play on your devices.

If so compare quality to 264 versions and then look at space/storage differences and conversion times.

I'm converting everything to h.265 these days.

[nmkaufman 49]

13 hours ago, Ronstang said:

 

I only prefer faster conversions with quality.  When I finally got hardware acceleration working my conversion times were cut by 75%, so about an hour instead of FOUR.  I read there was a small quality hit so I have been testing it for 4 months and keeping all my TS files in archive just in case.  Well after thorough testing and lots of movie and DVD watching on Emby I am quite satisfied I can't see a quality difference between software only encoding and hardware accelerated.  Not only am I very happy with H.264 hardware accelerated at the moment  I am now confident enough to delete all my TS files and gain my hard drive space back.  The only TS files I'm keeping in archive are some really super rare hard to find movie favorites.

 

Right on. As long as you did some side-by-side testing, by all means save yourself the extra time.

In my early days of collecting, I transcoded a bunch of stuff (very poorly) to save space and have since lost a few of the discs.

[Ronstang 202]

On 10/25/2020 at 10:55 PM, cayars said:

Then see if these 265 files will direct play on your devices.

I play everything on Firestick 4Ks to my TVs these days, can they direct play 265?

[Carlo 4330]

It should as it's a 4K device.

[Ronstang 202]

I have a bunch of newly recorded old horror favorites sitting on my hard drive right now, I will test these with both 264 and 265 as not only are they important to me I know these movies and what kind of quality to expect.  These are all great HD transfers.

[Carlo 4330]

While you're add it maybe try to get in the habit of adding a 2 channel ACC (default) audio track while copying the better tracks.

This way you never cause a transcode because of audio

[Ronstang 202]

Will do as soon as I figure out how to do that with MCEBuddy

[Carlo 4330]

You could always do that with ffmpeg itself after running MCEBuddy.

Just for testing you can do this pretty easily with a GUI in Xmedia Recode as well.

Figure out what you need/like then we can help with automatation.

[Ronstang 202]

I can't figure out how to even  start with xmedia recode and if I can't queue up a bunch of files and have it create names and folders for each video the way I like it simply won't work for me.....as it will create way more work trying to organize things the way I like.

[Carlo 4330]

You can queue up files but that wasn't the point.  I suggested it just so you could easily make a stereo channel from 5.1 or 7.1 audio.

Record is rather easy to use. Key us to load a file then use the tabs to select container, video, audio etc then add it to the queue for processing then encode.