Best MPEG settings for given bit rate?

[PaulyT]

Hi! I've seen various pages/posts where people are using different MPEG settings in SS, and I'm a little confused about how each setting affects "perceived" quality - that is, how good the playback looks on my TV (regular 27" CRT, nothing fancy).

So that files don't grow too big, I'm using a bit rate of 4M. But that still leaves lots of other settings to play with... Currently I've got it set to 29.97fps, 640x480 resolution, 2B/5P frames, 10% video noise reduction, and 1% motion precision. Does that seem reasonable?

Setting motion precision to ~80% seems to increase CPU time for processing by 5-10% on my system, but doesn't affect the quality much as far as I can see. Does anyone use motion precision > 1%? What's this for, exactly?

Noise reduction makes a bigger difference on a few noisy stations, and doesn't hit the CPU much. But these B/P things don't seem to make much difference. Is there some reason to use 5 vs. 4 for P frames?

Anyway, if anyone has some recommendations on how to set all these variables - aside from the usual "just try it and see what looks best" approach - I'd be grateful for any advice.

Thanks!

[riekl]

I to would love a description of all these variables and also whether using a custom resolution of say 800x600 is helpful when your outputing to a hdtv or if since the incoming source is 480i 640x480 is the highest ..

[viguera]

Originally posted by merrypig


That make any sense? not my most concise description today I admit.

I don't think it did... sorry...

So you're saying that you shouldn't jack up the bitrate or that you should?

Let's say that I'm getting mediocre quality @ 800*600 (or whatever), would jacking up the rate from the default actually increase PQ or just eat up disk space?