I thought I might have screwed up my codecs and stuff at one point through this, it was after I installed the lagarith codec, nothing wanted to play. I forget what I did to fix it though, I think I just installed Xvid again or something... Or maybe I just restarted my comp? The problem didn't last very long so it's hard to remember the fix.
I definitely prefer the quality I get from the step by step routine, but to me the step by step by step by sept yb stpe vy esiop routine gets old.
Here's a couple more things I've learned...
There's an AVISynth filter called "
SSIM" which uses an advanced seudo-subjective algorithm to compare 2 videos. It generates a score for every frame; "1" means the frames are identical, "0" means they're completely different. It takes all these scores and spits them out as a CSV (spreadsheet) file which can be used to create graphs. It's pretty cool! You can even compare 2 videos to a source video at the same time using other AVISynth functions...
Like Dis
A=AVISource("F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats.avi").Trim(0,61426)
B=AVCSource("F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 19.dga")
C=AVCSource("F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 3 Pass.dga")
StackVertical(ssim(A,B,"F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 19.csv","F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 19.txt",lumimask=0),ssim(A,C,"F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 3 pass.csv","F:\!TV - Seperated\Seinfeld\05\z-Compare\0519 + 0520 The Raincoats - 3 pass.txt",lumimask=0))
x264 single pass "constant quality" produces very good quality video. I used SSIM to compare different quality levels to an existing 3 pass encode (set to "75%" in StaxRip). Quality:19 produced almost identical scores (almost always
very slightly higher) and almost identical size (slightly smaller (353MB instead of 356MB)). To save a little space (with virtually 0 quality loss) I'm going to use Quality:20 (this particular video dropped to 298MB).
For some odd reason using the same source file, the same settings, with the same version of
x264 (661) (the same everything) I'm getting slightly different encodes. It's definitely not enough to notice, but Beyond Compare and SSIM can tell. I don't care very much, but it does bug me a little... I didn't think this was suppose to be possible with com-poo-tars. It's as if x264 has a random number generator in it somewhere...
There's a tool and plugin for parsing AVC video into AVISynth. It's quite handy... It's made by the same dude that wrote
DGIndex (formally DVD2AVI). It's called
DGAVCDec and works exactly the same way.
