Midiman
03-09-2007, 03:44 AM
Hmm.. not crazy about the language on the update page saying this version has been somehow dummied down or advanced features turned off to favor faster render times. I'm not in a hurry and prefer the best quality I can get. I can run 6 systems at once in my house so... time is not a factor for me.
Confused a little about some new profile settings. I see the H.264 QVGA 384/128 profile now has a new setting in the Advanced 1 Tab that sets the max bitrate to 768. Seems high for a 384 bitrate profile. I'll see what I end up with for filesize when I'm done. It does seem to be encoding twice as fast as 2.06... but I smell quality loss.
Midiman
03-09-2007, 04:05 AM
First test render looks good... filesize in in the ballpark of where it should be. Specs seem to pan out. I don't have Videora automatically transfer stuff to iTunes because I use 6 different systems to transfer stuff to my iPod... they all have iTunes setup to manually manage my iPod contents. Can't tell you anything there.
What's the new parameter in Advanced 3 Tab?
Red Kawa
03-09-2007, 09:15 AM
We prefer encoding with the advanced features as well and were reluctant to remove them from the default profiles. But now that we have, hopefully it will stop all this Videora iPod Converter is "slow" nonsense.
Turning these features back on for a specific profile is a pretty straight forward process. Open up one of the profiles with "Advanced" that relates to your specific codec and resolution case (ie H.264 VGA). Goto Video > General 2 and copy the contents of the "Additional CLI Parameters" textbox. Then copy them into the textbox of the profile you want to use. The parameters are different for MPEG-4, H.264 QVGA and H.264 VGA so make sure you choose the right "Advanced" profile.
The maxrate settings has actually always been used, it just used to reside in the CLI Parameters box pre-2.07. We use it to enforce the codec-bitrate restrictions that the iPod puts in place. It may cause your average bitrate to bulge a little but generally it will be on target to what you set your bitrate. You can always set it lower if you'd like.
Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) - is a clever technique to losslessly compress syntax elements in the video stream knowing the probabilities of syntax elements in a given context.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
CABAC is only in H.264 and must be off since it is not supported in the Baseline Profiles which the iPod supports. We put that in there for the Apple TV which will support the Main Profile and therefore CABAC.