Overview
Obviously, the greater the bitrate, the better the picture. But when you are going to backup these DVDs, which bitrate are you going to use? That's the very question I asked myself. And here are my results.
The first pass took 2 hours and 50 minutes. The second pass took a little more than 4 hours on my Sempron 2500+, for all the bitrates. Encodes: 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000 and 4000 kbps
I chose Nemo because it's time for me to back it up ;). This is a good test I wanted to do because there is one thing all MPEG encoders fear: encoding smooth gradation, like most scenes underwater. I noticed that when I encoded U-571. I had to raise the bitrate so much it was almost ridiculous to make it a DivX... Let's see if XviD has the same problem.
Encodes were done using native resolution: 720x480. I used DVD2AVI, vfapi_reader, and VDubMod to get the encoding done. Not the best (quality and time-wise) but that's what I used...
There is a forum over here to allow you any feedback, bug report, feature request or anything else you see fit.
Well, let's get to the point. The comparison is made on 8 different frames of the anime:
| 19617 |  | This frame is all quiet: Apart from the movement of the water, slow and repetitive, nothing moves. |
| 20237 |  | Here we can see the surface. Apart from the camera, Nemo is the only object in motion. |
| 22016 |  | Lots of motion as Nemo's father is thrown away by the boat's engine. Lots of bubbles moving around. |
| 36120 |  | Here again, nothing moves apart from waves. It is taken outside and the scene is very dark. |
| 50815 |  | Nemo's father is facing a fish and there is quite a bit of motion. The scene goes from dark to clear. |
| 119047 |  | Here Dory is moving a bit, but apart from that the scene is pretty calm. |
| 126847 |  | The last scene, with very high motion and details. |
The images that you are going to see in the next step are JPEG images. I have compressed them using the MAX QUALITY setting, so it is going to be slow as hell but accurate...