Hand Brake, How Good is it

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Hi,

so, since getitng my MBL 3TB and WDTV Live, ive obvioulsy been messing with both to figure out the best configurations

for both, i actually have 2 3TB mbl’s, one i use for user accounts of home users and storage for critical downloads i want to keep, programs, pictures, backups, userfiles ect. On my second mbl i use this for media storage, movies, mp3, youtube videos, ect.

now all my movies use the Xvid codec, and obviously my youtube videos are FLV’s, ive noticed on some of my movies,

i will get stutter, yes im using wireless to stream my movies to my smp from my mbl, hardly any of my youtube flv clips play on my smp, yet ALL of my youtube .mp4 clips play, even the 1080p HD ones i have downloaded, so i downloaded hand brake and converted all my FLV’s to .mp4, it took a good few hours, the .mp4 folder size is compareable to the FLV folder size and now ALL my clips play across wireless with no problems at all.

The reason for this post is, should i also convert all my movies to mp4 using handbrake, ive obvioulsy seen good results from the FLV’s, id also like to ask is it normal that a full lengh film transcode from xvid to mp4 using handbrake only takes around 8 minutes per film to complete on the normal profile and 15-20 mins on the high profile.

i think it will take me around 2 weeks to convert all my media to mp4 leaving my pc on during the night for 8 hours transcoding.

what would you do?

2

Well, unless you need .mp4 (such as for IOS devices), then I would convert your videos to MKV.

MVK is a more versitle container than mp4, you can use DTS passthough and if you use one of the HB nightly builds you can “burn in”  BD PGS subtitles, which can be useful.

Now, if you are just converting FLV to MKV, you don’t what to use HB, instead use mkvmerge.

But for your files (the ones you have ripped), if you are concerned about disc space, then yes I would use HB, but set it to MKV.  My personal setting in HB are to use the “High Profile” setting, then in the VIdeo Settings, set the Constant Quality to 19, then use passthrough Audio (either AC3 or DTS) depending on what the movie has.   I use these settting for BD and SD video with pretty good results, and really no difference in quaility from the original.

BD will take a long time, SD videos about an hour or so.

3

Hand Brake is great.

I use VidCoder myself (vidcoder.codeplex.com). Same engine, but I find it easier to use.

If Your source of FLV is YouTube, and your banwidth (internet) is not an issue, you should try and get hem again, as MP4 from YouTube - use  JDownloader (jdownloader.org) as it gives all the options for a link (720p, 1080p, etc).

FLVs are already a very compressed format. Compressing it again even when using x264, just for the sake of changing the container (MP4) is not a quality option. I would not recoomend it just because “some” files skip/stutter. Same argument for XViD. Why? as WDTV-Live-SMP is quite capable of playing either just fine.

Using High-Profile (and x264 in general) makes sense for high quality material (DVD-MPG2, BluRay, 720P/1080p HDTV). If you have a couple of 700MB AVI that stutter, do you really want to degrade them (smaller is never better) just so they play over WiFi?

I have observed that 720p AVI (XViD/DivX) work better from a MKV container.

To make MKV, just use MKVToolnix and it’s all just a matter of how fast you cand copy form one place to another (no conversion). Advantage is that MKV is much more versatile (for freeware tools) - think subtitles.

I have a Core2Duo 6550 (old stuff) and an AMD5850 (no use since HandBrake/VidCoder only uses NVidia CUDA).

For 1h30m x264 @ 720x400 resolution and decent settings, it takes roughly the same time (less than 2h)

If you have a i7 and a CUDA video card (NVidia with many cores) that can be done in 10-15 minutes easy.

There are advanced settings that can add significantly to that time, but fom a YouTube FLV I doubt you need HiQuality.

VidCoder_Advanced_FAST.png

See my other post here.

4

Umm.

Couple of things, VIdCoder, althought built off of HB isn’t as far as I know capable of burning in PGS subs (or even adding them) because that is only availble in HB nightlies.  Burning in the subs for movies is handy for BD’s when some one is speaking a foreign language to keep from having to remember to select the subtitle when you play a movie.  Think, Avengers, when Black Widow is speaking Russian, those subtitles want display with out the PGS.

Another thing, MKVtoolnix is MKVmerge, same thing.

5

Hi,

Thx for the replies, ill concider using mkv, however in the past ive had problems burning mkv’s to disk, they dont sync the video and audio, maybe the software got better regarding this, as quite a while ago i stopped using mkv for this reason.

i find it strange that low quality FLV’s with a file size of 15MB wont play on the smp, it tries to load it, but the screen stays black for a long period then it starts but then stutters shortly after and will not play normally, lots of others just stay on the blank screen, yet a high quality 1080P .mp4 HD of the same video with a file size of 150MB plays perfectly no stutter or pauses and the pricture is in perfect HD. Why does it play HD movies just fine, yet smaller less quality clips will not play.

Ive already converted the FLV to .mp4 and spent 2 hours playing random clips from the 1000 clips i have, not a single one stuttered or paused, they also start instantly, comparing the clips side by side, i can see the differance in quality, the .mp4’s seem slightly “hazed” compared to the originals, but on my HD tv this differance is hard to see.

ideally id want to convert them to a format that is good quality, plays well on the smp over wifi and generates roughly the same file size as the original, if thats possible, im just used to having good quality xvids with a file size of around 700MB, if i have to i can keep them in Xvid, and find a wired solution for the smp.

6

Well, I have encoded over 1000 movies to mkv, both BD & SD and have only ever had one that had a audio sync issue, but this was due to a file corruption.

As for why your FLV’s want play, it’s most likely because they aren’t encoded correclty.  FLV is just a container, and the SMP only supports FLV (h.264) and if you videos are FLV (On2 VPS, Sorenson Spark(Sorenson H.263), or Screen video) then they most likely will not play.  It has nothing to do with the video size.

Also, as I said, if your are going to re-encoded the FLV’s, it is best to use MKVmerge (MKVtoolnix), which is one to one converter, so what you put in is what you get out, unlike HB which will compress your files and since FLV is already a compressed file you don’t want to further compress them since doing so affects the quality.

7

My experience with Handbrake is fairly recent, and I have made around ten M4V files specifically for use on the iPad. 

My source files are ISO files I made with AnyDVD.  All the Handbrake movies work and look/sound great on the Pad, whether they are on the Pad, or streamed to the Pad via the File Browser app (which streams to Pad within the home network) or streamed via the Pogoplug app (which streams my data from Pogoplug through the Internet to wherever the iPad is wirelessly connected.)

But, if these Handbrake movies are viewed on the TV, they suffer in picture quality (compared to the parent ISO file) because they are a reduced picture format (they are not 1080p anymore) and appear somewhat grainy on TV.   I would not use Handbrake to make movies for viewing on a HDTV.  Besides, Handbrake movies take longer to make and they use 100% of the computer’s CPU while doing so.  It takes my dual-core laptop about 2 hours to convert a hour long ISO file.

I plan to use Handbrake for iPad movies only, and not that often.

8

Hi,

Yes they are a little grainy this is what i meant when i said they are “hazed”

imma give MKVmerge a go later to compare quality and file size compared to the original,

ill let you know how it works out.

9

@mike27oct,

If your quality of your movies isn’t that good, then it is most likely because you are using the wrong settings.  In particular your Constant quality settings are to low and you are probably using the wrong profile.  And even a bad quaility encode is still 1080, since that refers to the display size and not the quaility of the encode.  If it only taking you 2 hrs to do a BD (1080p) encode, then I can diffenently tell you that your settings are wrong because it should take much longer.

As I stated before, using the High Profile Preset and setting your Constant Quality to about 19 will give your an output quaility that is nearly the same as the input.

10

I use Hand Brake to encode everything to MKV now.  It streams much better than Xvid on the WD TV SMP for some reason.  Also, for standard definition stuff, you can trim up to 50% of the file size while keeping quality constant I’ve found encoding it to H264 mkv.   

11

Tinwarble:

Thanks for the suggestions.  I make the Handbrake movies for use only on the iPad, and use Handbrake’s built in preset for iPad.  The scale of the videos is made smaller for an iPad screen, and it is understandable they would not look so good on the 54" plasma HDTV.

On an iPad, the videos (from SD ISO files) are quite sharp and look good.  The only issue I have is that sometimes the video and audio are a wee bit out of sync, and I can find no control in Handbrake to adjust that.  When these videos are viewed on the TV, they look like a photo that has been enlarged a little too much, they have a bit of jerkiness at times, during movement there are artifacts that look like raster lines, and the audio sync problem is a little more apparent.

I have no desire to make Handbrake videos that are intended for use on the TV.  As I said, I use AnyDVD HD to make ISO files from SD and BD disks. and the videos they make are indistinguishable from the originals.  If I want an MKV from the BD ISO files, I used Bytecopy to do that.  I have made less BD/MKV files after I saw how much disk space they take up!  I’ll just watch the BD disk instead.

12

Yes, the audio sync problem can be an issue when using the iPad setting, that has a  lot to do with the compression.

However, those settings are not for watching on a big screen anyway, hence, the preset name iPad.  That’s why they don’t have the same quality.

As for ISO’s, will of course it is going to look the same as the original, it is the original unless your ripped it to DVD5 (for SD) or BD25 (for BD’s) since they are uncompressed and are basically the same as the original.

“I have made less BD/MKV files after I saw how much disk space they take up!”

 

I’m not sure what you are talking about here, since a HB encoded mkv only takes up about 1/3 of what the orginial takes up.  I can take a 30GB BD and re-encode it with HB and get a 8 - 10GB mkv out that has the same quaility as the original.

“I’ll just watch the BD disk instead”

That pretty much defeats the purpose of having the SMP then, since it’s meant to be a device that allows you to access your media with out having to pop in a disk.

13

Tinwarble wrote:>  

“I have made less BD/MKV files after I saw how much disk space they take up!”

 

I’m not sure what you are talking about here, since a HB encoded mkv only takes up about 1/3 of what the orginial takes up.  I can take a 30GB BD and re-encode it with HB and get a 8 - 10GB mkv out that has the same quaility as the original.

 

“I’ll just watch the BD disk instead”

 

That pretty much defeats the purpose of having the SMP then, since it’s meant to be a device that allows you to access your media with out having to pop in a disk.

Agree; mostly all true.   Although the “space used” also includes that a BD ISO was made to make the MKV, and I don’t toss that out, as the PC’s BD player plays the ISO file with menus and such.  Anyway, many BD disc sets also come with a standard DVD.  The DVD goes on the the HD for the media player, and the BD disc can go in the BD player.  The grandkids can watch (DVD) stuff on the iPad or the media player, I/we watch the BD the first time…  So, the media player is not out of the loop except for most BD discs.  Popping a disc into a blu-ray player once in a while is not an onerous task  :-)  

Also, the purpose of the media player is not defeated at all.  I use the media player for more than watching movies; e.g. my entire iTunes Media folder is duplicated and kept up-to-date for playing on the WD player – including “iTunes DJ” generated random playlists.  It is a heck of a jukebox! 

We do not use the WD for Netflix watching – the Roku does a much better job at that. (Did anyone at WD hear me say this?)

14

mike27oct wrote:

Agree; mostly all true.  

Ummm… actually it’s all true.:stuck_out_tongue:

As for how you have and keep your files, this is not how most people use or want to use there media.  Most just want an easy way to play their files without having to pop in a disc every time.

Personally, for my BD movies I have both BD & SD mkv versions, that only adds about 1GB to the HDD.  The BD versions I play on one of my 4 media players and the SD versions I can play on my tablet or phone.  I don’t really see any need for menus or extras (watch them once and that’s about all their good for),  I just want to watch my movies.

We do not use the WD for Netflix watching – the Roku does a much better job at that. (Did anyone at WD hear me say this?)

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