I'm ripping some DVDs to my Mac to watch on my new and fairly large (19" widescreen) monitor. I'm curious as to how to achieve the highest quality video when ripping from a DVD. I typically use Handbrake with H.264 and the rest as default. This looks great, but I'm curious if it is the best quality, especially since I have not watched any video on my monitor yet.
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Highest Quality Video
- Thread starter theman5725
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Well, the absolute best way will be to leave the content in its original MPEG-2. Basically, we won't be able to tell you which compression is "good enough" for you, you'll just need to experiment and see what you're happy with.
I'm probably just over anticipating what it will look like, but I read somewhere that H.264 only supports 640x480, which seems small on a large screen.
That's plain wrong. iPods support 640x480 H.264, but you can use higher resolutions (I've seen up to 1920x1080) when there's no iPod involved.
Your DVDs will be either 720x480 or 720x576 though, so you're limited there.
Not only is Nermal correct on the facts, he is correct on the spirit. To say that H.264 supports only 640x480 is like saying that .mov is the standard Windows Media file extension. The exact opposite is true. The point of H.264 is that it is highly scalable. This can be used to encode video for high-definition or for the video screen of your cellphone. At either resolution or any resolution in between, you can expect the highest quality video at the selected resolution.
Alright thanks for the help but I have another question:
Exactly what is 2-pass encoding? I read somewhere on the internet that it increases the quality and decreases the file size, but takes longer to encode. Is this true? I wouldn't mind ripping my DVDs with 2-pass if the size was smaller and stuff, but I want to know if it really makes a difference.
Exactly what is 2-pass encoding? I read somewhere on the internet that it increases the quality and decreases the file size, but takes longer to encode. Is this true? I wouldn't mind ripping my DVDs with 2-pass if the size was smaller and stuff, but I want to know if it really makes a difference.