Dick Balaska <dic### [at] buckosoftcom> wrote:
: So i discovered VirtualDub.
: I run my 3500 720x512 PNG frames through mpeg_encode at the highest
: quality.
: This yields a pretty unplayable, yet correct mpeg.
: I then pass that through VirtualDub using the Microsoft MPEG-4 Video
: Codec V2
: which gives me decent avi file.  Actually, it looks like crap next to
: the
: aforementioned South Park DVD, but it is getting there. (slow movement
: is bad
: and gets that avi blocky look)

: I'm going to try Flask MPEG next.

  Eh, I think that you confuse a couple of things here.

  Firstly, it's not VirtualDub which encodes the video/audio stream. VirtualDub
just let's you choose a video/audio codec installed in your system and then
let's that codec to do the job. VirtualDub is merely a user interface for
using the installed codecs (VirtualDub doesn't actually care which codecs you
have installed; it just looks at what you have and then lets you choose among
them).
  So if you have any concern about the quality of a video, don't blame
VirtualDub, but blame the codec and settings you are using (it's not VirtualDub
which generates the quality you are seeing, but the codec, which has nothing
to do with it).

  Secondly, encoding frames first to MPEG-1 and then from that to MPEG-4 is
a *REALLY BAD IDEA*.
  When you encode to MPEG-1 you lose the most. After this what was lost, is
lost; you can't get it back. Thus converting it to MPEG-4 can't give you any
more quality. MPEG-1 does a really bad job in encoding, so don't use it.
  What you should do is to convert your frames directly to an AVI with raw
video (there are tools for that in the net; they just take the frames and
put them in a raw format in the AVI and that's it). Then you can open this
AVI in VirtualDub and encode it to another AVI using MPEG-4 (I suggest using
the latest DivX codec as it has lots of quality fine-tuning options and
optimizations; http://divx.com).

  What a DVD uses is the MPEG-2 format. MPEG-4 can reach the same image
quality with smaller file sizes. It's just a question of encoding it in
the right way (ie. *don't* use MPEG-1 as an intermediate format) and choosing
the proper quality settings.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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