Question About XVID4PSP XVID4PSP User's Out There

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Format ??

MP4 PSP AVC
MP4 PSP AVC TV
MP4 PSP ASP

Diff Of These 3 Format

Base On My Experiment I Tested MP4 AVC and MP4 PSP AVC TV The MP4 PSP AVC TV It's Much Bigger Size Compare To MP4 AVC And The MP4 PSP AVC TV It's Not Full 480 x 272


VIDEO ENCODING

X264 1P 768k Turbo
X264 2P 512k Extreme
X264 2P 768k Extreme
X264 2P 768k Ultra
X264 HQ Extreme
X264 HQ Turbo
X264 HQ Ultra
X264 HQ2 Extreme
X264 HQ2 Ultra
Disabled
Copy

This Video Encoding I'm Little Confuse And Don't Know Which Type Is More Quality The X264 1P 768k Turbo Or The X264 HQ2 Ultra?

I Tested This Two In The Psp The Quality It's Almost Desame I Guess I Can't Figure It Out But The Size Of X264 1P 768k Turbo is 25mb But The X264 HQ2 Ultra is 19mb Which One Video Encoding It's More Quality In My Post

[ZiNgABuRgA]

Base On My Experiment I Tested MP4 AVC and MP4 PSP AVC TV The MP4 PSP AVC TV It's Much Bigger Size Compare To MP4 AVC And The MP4 PSP AVC TV It's Not Full 480 x 272

They have nothing to do with each other...

I'd recommend the X264 HQ Ultra profile -> try changing the quantizer to 26 (21 is a little low IMO).

[Haxxor]

Weird how the turbo is larger than the ultra.

[lusid]

remember lower numbers = higher picture quality = larger file size. going from 21 to 26 will make the files smaller, but they won't look as good, esp on a TV.

Also all of the CQ profiles tend to get too aggressive on simple scenes so smooth gradients and dark scenes will have visible artifacts on a larger display. It's not bad on the PSP screen, but on a larger screen it can be distracting.

One more tip: If you are doing a 720x480 profile, be sure to turn off autocrop and set AR correction to SAR, otherwise you'll lose the anamorphic benefits and end up with a letterboxed 4x3 video and waste lots of CPU time encoding black bars.

Now having said all that, I do things a little differently myself. I make a HQ encode that will look great on my 60+" tv, one that I can play on PSP, PS3, or PC. I try to avoid any PSP specific optimizations. I can always reduce the PQ and PSP optimize it later if I need to.

Essentially, I imitate the settings used on the PSN Video store. Start with the MP4 PSP AVC TV profile, set the video encoder to CBR 2000 mb/s AVC, set the audio encoder to AAC-LC ABR 256k, set video cropping to 0 (turn off autocrop) and AR correction to SAR. Disable mpeg2fix. Movies will average 1gig/hour, but they will look excellent over TV out, on a PC/laptop, or PS3 on a big screen.

If I need a PSP only (small screen) version, I'll use the big one as the source, and reduce it to 480x272 using the standard MP4 PSP AVC profile with autocrop and AR correction set to black and mpeg2fix/ghostbusters turned on. If you know you are never going to watch it on anything bigger than a PSP screen you can get really aggressive with the encoder.

Functionally, this is how DVDFab's DVD2Mobile product operates, but they use a really crappy divx profile for the initial full size encode.

[ZiNgABuRgA]

The PSP only goes up to 720x480, and you only benefit if you're watching it on TV, so there's really no point in going aggressively high on the settings. I would highly recommend a constant QP or CQ over ABR (I assume you didn't mean CBR) encodes. A QP encode will practically always be better than a ABR one. A QP/CRF of 18 should be very good quality - or if you've got super sharp eyes, and like pausing an examining video defects, 16 (16 is generally considered perceptually transparent). Aggressive rate distortion in CQ can be fixed in a number of ways, including lowering the QP step, the QP range, and turning AQ up more (but x264 is already pretty good with it's default ratecontrol settings).

AAC 256k is far above what you need for stereo audio. 192k is more than perceptually transparent to most people. A 128k ABR encode in LC-AAC should be more than enough quality, even on high end sound systems.

[Haxxor]

Zinga, why the hell are you so smart?

[lusid]

XVid4PSP calls it 1 pass bitrate. 256k on the audio is probably overkill. I was using 192 before I cloned the PSN settings. Most people want a high quality video in the smallest possible file, I want consistently high quality and a repeatable process. File size is a secondary consideration.

I would like to get to the bottom of the CQ artifacting. CQ18 looked really promising, but getting consistent, repeatable quality across source material was a problem.
The defaults for PSP AVC TV looked deceptively good at first. Fantastic on the PSP, darn good on my laptop display, and definitely watchable on an SDTV but even there the artifacting was becoming apparent. Once I started testing playback on the big HDTV I realized Q21 was not going to cut it. I tested Q levels down to 18 with clips that had known artifacting at Q21 until I realized rate control was choking on dark scenes and gradients regardless of the Q setting. Switching to ABR solved those problems and gave similar file sizes to Q18 on the harder material. Throwing the extra bitrate at the first attempt meant I didn't have to QA every encode and reprocess the duds. Once the PSN video store went online I realized they had probably chosen their settings for similar reasons to my own (only want to encode it once, has to look good on a big HDTV, has to play on a PSP), so I cloned their bitrates in my config. I was pretty close as it was (1800 video, 192 audio).

Watching on the PSP itself is something I only really do when I am traveling or at the gym. For short flights I can fit enough material on an 8g card to make it where I am going, If I am going to be on a long flight I'll queue a batch of stuff to convert to 480x272. The PSP optimised encodes don't take nearly as long as the HQ ones, and since they aren't mpeg2 I can queue them up pretty quickly without getting bogged down in the indexing dialog.

I'd also like to conquer switchable subs at some point, but I don't even think the PSN downloads have those. UMDs apparently use a VOBSUB like encoding - prerendered text with transparency, except their sub frames are PNG. I haven't found a tool that can generate anything close enough to test, but it probably wouldn't work anyway or Sony would include it in their video store downloads.

I would appreciate your input on the CQ artifacting. I struggled with it for quite a while before arriving at my current solution.

[ZiNgABuRgA]

Well if size isn't really an issue, yeah, just stick some arbitrarily high bitrate and you should be fine.

If CQ is distorting too much, try a fixed QP encode instead (not sure if Xvid4PSP has all these options; I typically use the x264 CLI directly) and see if it looks better. If you check the command-line reference, x264 has various settings in regards to ratecontrol - one particular one that may interest you is AQ (adaptive quantization) - it aims to fix this problem of distorting the rate too much on these dark scenes.
Hope that helps