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h.264 - High Quality Compressed Video in Only 36 Hrs!

In honor of the academy awards, I thought I'd talk about encoding videos.  I was going to live blog the oscars, but I lack the hard hitting journalistic skills of industry heavyweights like John Tesh, Joan Rivers, and the staff of US Weekly. If I did, it would have been something like:

8:15: Selma Hyak on stage, she's hot

8:30: Saw a glimpse of Kiera Knightly, she's hot

8:32: Reese Witherspoon, also very hot

8:45: Dolly Parton, hot for a 70yr old.

9:00: Jessica Alba, sooooo hot

9:05: Lily Tomlin is wearing a hideous dress by fashion maverick, Coco Channel.  Just horredous.  I can't believe she even left the house with that drapery cut into some sort of neo-kimono.  Bow to your sensei. Bow to your sensei!

9:10: Who is Robert Altman?

9:15: Most surreal moment ever on the Oscars, seeing "Its hard for a pimp" in old fashioned hollywood lights.  The 3-6 mafia was an inspired choice to follow up Dolly Parton and Yitzak Perlman.

9:17: Jennifer Garner, post pregnancy, still hot.

9:20: Why is Keanu Reeves in the front two rows?  Is he seriously in the top 50 hollywood celebs?

9:55: Why did Quentin Tarantino have to resurect John Travolta's career?

10:00:  Still as hot as she was at 8:32


Anyway, H.264 is one of codecs slated for use in HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.  It offers high quality and high data compression.  Apple has been touting h.264 video as the future for digital media. Sounds great, I'm on board. My dream setup would be to encode all my DVDs and be able to browse them in an iTunes-like interface.  No more getting up to change discs.  Just imagine, I could sit on the couch for 22hrs and and watch an entire season of Smallville without having to be troubled to move.  Apple frontrow is close, but it won't play dvd isos or video_ts folders.  It does however play h.264 encoded videos. No problem, pop in a disc and encode to my terrabyte NAS device, right?  Of course not.  First of all there is the unbreakable content protection system.  Oh wait, that was cracked like 2 weeks after it came out.  Why do I even have to worry about copy protection?  I bought the disc, why can't I copy it to my pc if I want to?  I don't even want to get started on the MPAA/RIAA, thats a 20K word blog entry right there.

Lets just skip right past the copy protection and go with an unencrypted disc.  There are several encoders like Quicktime 7, handbrake, x264, and Nero Digital. Doom9 has a good guide here. All of them appear to downmix 5.1 channel audio into 2 channel audio.  Sweet, now the other 7 speakers just hang out and take up space.  I tried several and in my opinion, Nero's rencode 2 has the most polished interface.  Bonus points for handling 5.1 audio.  So I woke up this morning, got some coffee and tried to encode spiderman.  14 hrs later, I've reached the halfway point.  Just brutal.  At this rate, I'll be able to encode my whole collection my 2008 when a better codec comes out and it's time to start over.  My pc isn't exactly a powerhouse, but a p4 1.6 ghz with 1.5GB of RAM should be able to encode a movie with a day.

From a sample I encode earlier, the quality is awesome.  There isn't really a difference from my dvd original and the h.264 video except that the h.264 video is only 1.2GB vs. 5GB for the original.  If only it took 2 hrs or less.
Posted: Mar 05 2006, 08:35 PM by kmarshall | with 1 comment(s)

Comments

admin said:

Seriously dude, who is Robert Altman? He's only one of the greatest American directors of the last 50 years. Nashville, The Player, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, etc. I will however have to agree with you that he isn't a hot chick.
# March 6, 2006 9:28 AM
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