Encoders

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Hi,

I searched the forum concerning MPEG 1 encoder. Panasonic and LSX do the best everyone says. But I have captured several movies to AVI and encoded this to white book. I can not say that one encoder is better than another. For instance when I capture a cartoon Xing gives me less artifacts than Panasonic and LSX but when I capture live video Panasonic gives the best output. I would like to hear other peoples oppinionabout the encoders and which material they used to test this(live video, cartoons, VHS source, ...).

Any response is welcome.

-- Stephane (pliskens@yahoo.com), November 18, 1999

Answers

So far, for what I can afford, Panasonic has consistently given the best VCD quality as encoders go. It may be true that computer animation, for one may produce artifacts not evident in live video, but if the parameters in Panasonic are closely adhered to before encoding they are minimized. The help files in Panasonic talk about this at length.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), November 18, 1999.

I have tried Panasonic 2.21, demo versions of Xing 2.2 and LSX 3.0. LSX and Panasonic do give better image quality than Xing, probabbly by 10%, but Xing appears to give the closest colour /saturation/contrast match to the original AVI. With Panasonic, no matter what setting I tried, the MPEG it encords appears faded or washed out in colour, so much so that I have to increase the AVI by 15% contrast before the encording. Does anyone have the same problem? What settings do you find best for Panasonic? TIA

-- Vision (visiong@hotmail.com), November 18, 1999.

I have the same problem with panasonic and I also do the same thing as you do. I increase the colour of the AVI but about 15 to 18 percent in order to get good colour in the output MPEG file. I tried alternatieve settign with panasonic (to reduce the artifacts) they are less now but still not as less as XING. When I try live-video panasonic produces the best results..

-- stephane (pliskens@yahoo.com), November 18, 1999.

Stephane, by colour did you mean contrast, brightness or saturation? I use Ulead Medio Studio Pro video filter to increase the AVI contrast. For cartoon, I think (but never tried) you should choose "CG/animation" for Quantizer Matrix under the advanced setting.

I have read several people trashing Xing, but the more I look at the MPEG it encodes, the more I find that it does a pretty good job, almost as good as Panasonic or LSX if the source AVI are low in noise. In fact in certain cases I find that Panasonic and LSX try to smooth the picture or reduce the noise a bit too much, so much so that some details are better preserved by Xing.

-- Vision (visiong@hotmail.com), November 18, 1999.


Aggreed XING doesn't do a good job with noise input material but when the input material I simply try several encders with several setting to see which one is the best and somthimes it even is XING.

-- Stephane (pliskens@yahoo.com), November 18, 1999.


The first thing everyone has noticed about Panasonic is true: the resulting .mpg file has lower color saturation than the source .avi; sometimes it even appears washed out. Because of this I make it a point to increase the color saturation controls of my capture app by about 10% before commencing capture. The captured .avi may appear brightly unsaturated, with orange faces and all, but the resulting .mpg after Panasonic has been through with it appears okay. The Panasonic more or less produces the same quality as Xing, noise- wise, and oh okay, detail-wise, if all the options about adaptive filtering are turned off. Likewise with motion in the form of half- pixel compensation. But these controls are what make Panasonic better than Xing in varying degrees and so why turn them off? Just about everyone has noisy VHS material most of the time for capture; this is what makes Xing balk.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), November 20, 1999.

if you use s video for input as your source you will get a much beter avi that will encode in (xing encoder 3.20) and will play on almost all dvd players as well as on a computer.lsx encoder takes twice as long to encode as xing does and the finished reasult is not any better, all the caputering has to be in avi before encoding is done, (AVI_IO)BECOUSE IT CAPTURES IN BATCHS AND ELIMINATES THE 2 GIG BARRER,AND IS THE BEST programe to use for the avi capture then use xing encoderAFTER THIS INPORT THE MPG FILES STARTING WITH THE LAST FILE FIRST AND CTRL KEY PRESED SELECT THE NEXT GOING DOWN TO THE FIST FILE INTO (JIAO SYSTEM LTD VCD CUTER) AND SELECT JOIN CLIPS YOU THEN GET ONE FILE TO BURN. then use nero5 burning software unless adeptec video wont crash with your capture card then use adeptec

-- carlos de jesus (carl80a@optusnet.com.au), February 09, 2001.

dont bother with xing. tmpgenc is much better and FREE www.tmpgenc.com

-- ndumu (ndumu@hotmail.com), February 09, 2001.

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