Movie clips in H.264 to demo superior quality ripping

Contents are 2 movie clips, a 5 minute clip from 5 movies, received on a satellite TV receiver at 4:3 aspect ration, and a 3 minute clip made up of 6 x 30s clips from movies, of a widescreen transmission. Both movies have been trimmed to a 16:10 aspect ration to completely fill a standard widescreen TV or Monitor. They are best played with Quicktime player or VLC. This is a 5 minute demonstration of how much better H.264 can be compared to the usual formats seen in torrents. It consists of 5 random 1 minute pieces taken from TV transmissions made in 4:3 Format, copied with a PVR, ripped to MP4/H.264/AAC with MPEG Streamclip on a Mac (Software available free for both Mac and PC) Trimmed the black from the sides (132 pixels of just black cut from left and right sides, and 40 pixels from top and bottom (so that 16:10 aspect ratio results) The MPEG Streamclip settings for 4:3 broadcast TV caught on a PVR are: 45% quality, 1024x576 (16:9) Audio MPEG-4 AAC 128 kbps De-interlace Video (needed from PVR format) Multipass B-Frames Better Downscaling Brightness +10% Contrast 118% Saturation 100% Volume +6dB The result is a file that is usually same or smaller size than a DIVX or XVID file, but much larger image (760x496 with these settings) compared with average Divx being only 288-352 pixels High. These 5 clips from different movies (a Disney Movie, Simpsons, Scrubs, American Dad, Seinfeld) are joined together and average 1036kbps I suggest you view these Fullscreen mode in a large widescreen monitor, eg, 1680x1024 to really see how they beat Divx hands-down. Listen also the the sound, been amplified to a decent but clear level so that even a laptop speaker can allow you to listen to it without straining your ears. For Widescreen TV broadcast caught on PVR, I use a Top/Bottom Crop of 26 each, and a Left/Right crop of 92 each. This gives a result of 840 x 524 pixels, The Second sample is made up of 6 clips of 30 seconds each from a variety of movies/shows, starting with Paycheck. The other settings are the same As I use a PERCENTAGE QUALITY rather than setting a kbps rate, the final size of movies can vary a bit, but the quality is excellent always. The 6 clips will represent an average bitrate obtained, and to see that size an average complexity 90 minute movie would be, multiply the 5 minute sample by 18, and the 3 minute sample by 30 Darker movies use less kbps and are smaller, and bright action movies are larger. Paycheck off TX was 1519kbps, duration 109 min for 1.16Gb I believe the extra size well worth it for the extra quality, and disk space is so cheap, and blank DVD\'s are only 25c a disk, so why be bound by an outdated 700Mb CD size limit. DVD players that read Divx can read it off a DVD just as well as off a CD. And a lot of us are using small lounge PC\'s as DVD players, with a large LCD monitor as a TV screen. Even so, at the samples attached show, even at these higher resolutions, H.264 delivers superior quality, (especially when viewed on a large widescreen monitor, where the poorer quality torrents really look poorly) BUT could still produce most 90 minute videos at less than 700Mb Tough luck about not being playable on a Divx player, if you cannot watch it on your PC, then just make a quick divx conversion to copy to CD/DVD to do that, the high quality of the \"original\" will ensure you could make a better than OK Divx from the samples attached. Try it. I put these up as an example of what other formats than the standard .avi or .divx can look like, and hope that more and more uploaders will make movies of this quality available.

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

Lyph3 (2008-05-07)

The scene will never change because they have their heads up their asses. Two CDs in an age where everyone has a DVD burner? Tons of RARs when everyone has broadband?
You'll get them to change that stuff before they do anything about quality.
And don't get me started on axxo. The man's a thief. He steals other releases and just re-tags his name on them, stripping all the credit from the original release group.

jasonbir (2008-05-08)

i appreciate this tutorial, and i would like more people to use h.264 instead of divx or xvid. You can't watch these on divx compatible dvd players, but we need larger files, not 700 thats too shitty, but 4.7gb dvds are toooooooo big for people like me with bandwidth limits here in Canada. Shitty eh.

miknos (2008-05-09)

You need to download NewArtRiot releases. They have AWESOME quality and upload a lot of movies. Another one is nHaNc3, but don't upload so often. Both use H264 codec.

mrspock (2008-05-09)

That is great write-up. As you have a vast knowledge of the H.264, can you please explain or post a document torrent with detailed guide on what tool to use and how one can converted a DVD ripped movie to mp4 (h.264) either to 700MB or 1.4GB to give the best possible result spcifying exact settings that need to be specified in the tool.
Thanks

Mac Boc (2008-05-16)

for making H264 movies:
FairUse Wizard 2.8
it makes excelent quality 264 movies from DVD
Just rip the DVD to hard disk first with DVD Decrypter (make it iso image) cause Fairuse only reads iso images on hdd
another guide :

Mac Boc (2008-05-16)

another guide for 264 here
http://home.insightbb DOT com/~encodingheaven/index.htm