Everything I encode looks like ass.
drfacedoctor opened this issue · comments
Cranking the bitrate up does absolutely nothing, it's obvious that there's some automated process intervening here which sort of makes the bitrate thing pointless altogether.
I love this thing man but the output quality is just so awful.
What value are you inputting for the bitrate? As long as you're entering anything in the bitrate field, it should override any automatic bitrate calculation.
Also try enabling 2-pass encoding and lowering the resolution.
Tried setting the bitrate at 2500 kb/s for a 720p file and set it to 2-pass, but the actual encode wouldn't go above 1000kb/s or so and the file ended up being ~430k as opposed to a nice balanced 1.2mb I've gotten out of other encoders.
Are you sure the source video has a bitrate higher than 1000 kb/s? Because FFmpeg won't use a bitrate higher than the source video's one.
The source bitrate is above 10,000kb/s. Still produces a teeny tiny file.
Could you copy paste the entire conversion progress output here, or in a pastebin or something?
http://pastebin.com/fKfkevKC
Slightly different circumstances, tried a different scene and while it was above 1000kb/s this time it still wasn't near the bitrate I set (5000kb/s).
It appears that my program is correctly passing the desired bitrate 5000kb/s to ffmpeg, so this is definitely ffmpeg's problem. That means I unfortunately can't do much about it.
Anyway, the bitrate it uses (2000 kb/s) is still quite high, and it should look acceptable at 1080p and pretty good at 720p. Does the selected part of the video contain lots of motion or is it mostly a stationary scene?
The thing is, lowering the resolution also causes it to lower the bitrate automatically, so it's an exercise in futility. Turning off 2-pass SORT OF helps (apparently with ffmpeg, 2-pass is more of a filesize thing than a quality thing, which is weird), but it still looks a little blurry.
I noticed the crf is set to 32, which is a little higher than the default. Any chance of making that adjustable?
That's a good idea, I might add that tomorrow when I have time to work on it again. For now, you might want to use the command line and just copy the arguments generated in the output, with the crf changed.
yeah I just noticed that 2 pass shits on the bitrate for some reason; here is the output of the one pass and 2 pass
1 pass: http://pastebin.com/ywzAAiPF
2 pass: http://pastebin.com/YV8cQVQ5
These rate controllers were designed for videos that last more than 1 minute long. If you're encoding stuff that's 5 seconds or less then there's not nearly enough time for the rate controller to adjust, so you'll get inconsistent results. This goes for 2-pass too because it's simply not designed for super short clips. I don't know why you'd use a bitrate setting in the first place; just go with crf only and if the quality is too low, lower the crf.
Well obviously I should adjust the crf cxong, but the feature wasn't in the earlier version.
I've added a high quality check box, I'll close this for now until further issues.