Re: [LAU] DVD creator ?

Dave Phillips wrote: Usually 30fps actually means 29.97, depending on the tool. PCM can be used as an audio track on DVD, but it's a waste of space. Encoding to AC3 is trivial. The vast majority of commercial DVDs use that format for audio. Just use it, it's what everyone else does. :-) All my scripts encode the audio track to AC3, look there for inspiration. MP2 is the third option, but almost nobody uses it. There are many possible reasons for the poor quality. The MPEG2 encoder is the usual, but by no means the sole, suspect. If the source is noisy, it may overload the encoder. After all, there are only so many bits available in the video stream to encode the information. Reducing the input by denoising may help, provided that noise is indeed the problem. But yeah, often it's as easy as "use a better encoder". There are many professional encoders, quite expensive but quite good. HCenc is free and good enough. I did some tests with it, using commercial DVDs as a source, and re-encoded the material with HCenc, using mild compression. Even during a direct A/B comparison, I could not detect any quality loss. Also, when reducing the size of the video track, HCenc is equal to a good requantizer (like DVD Shrink) for small reduction factors (down to 70% of original track size); lower than that and HCenc becomes clearly better than any requantizer. That's kind of counter-intuitive, you would expect a full re-encoding to lose more quality than just shaving off bits with a requantizer, but the fact is that I tried several methods to put 3 hours of video on a single layer DVD and so far HCenc provided the best quality. It's also very good when the compression constraints are not so dramatic, but in that case many encoders are good enough.