autocratic for the people.

No one else seems willing to share this sort of thing.

Many hours of experimentation have led me to conclude that the ideal quality-to-file-size tradeoffs for encoding video to watch on a (standard def) TV are:

Encoder: Apple H.264 main profile.
Video: 512x288 (for 16x9), 600 kb/s average bit rate, single-pass.
Audio: Stereo AAC, 44.1kHz, 96kb/s.

This yields 215MB for a 44-minute show, and seems at least comparable to a 900 kb/s bitrate for XviD. Unfortunately, this H.264 encoding runs (in HandBrake) at 7fps on my machine, while the aforementioned XviD setting does more like 17fps. So, like so many things these days, H.264 is great value if your time is worthless.

(Addendum: Average encoding fps for my test was 6.62 on a 2.0 GHz G5 iMac w/ 1.5GB RAM; however, for the same settings and file, a 1.5GHz G4 Powerbook w/ 512MB RAM gets 5.67 fps. So, two conclusions: one, HandBrake is not particularly well-optimized for the G5. Two, a Mac Mini could chew this encoding up pretty well.)

posted by avixe @ 10:29 PM