Phil's Blog

Hi again !

I am thinking of a project of a huge video database at home. The main idea is that :

1. encoding all my dvds on one hard drive,

2. the videos may be broadcastable on my WAN based on wifi (802.11b, so only 11Mb/s),

3. quality must be pretty good on a laptop.


So I was looking for the more interesting audio/video setting for a movie which rispond on these criteria.About the video codec, the choice is pretty easy :

1. xvid/divx is an old generation of codec mpeg4-part 2,

2. or H264 the new generation of video codec (mpeg4-part10). This one is used by HD-DVD.


So I choosed the video codec x264 (open source implementation of h264). I am using this setting : 2 pass, 384kb/s, width 352x288 (around this, it is the analog TV resolution). Quality from 25 to 51 step 4.


About the audio codec, I found two interesting test :

1. @ 80kb/s

2. @96kb/s


To sum up, the winners are AAC and Vorbis codecs. But, under linux, you can use faac for AAC codec, which is really bad according this test today. So I am using Vorbis, with quality 1,5 (around 80kb/s) or 2,3 (around 98kb/s). It is better than the old mp3 codec.


Finally, about the container, I don't really have the choice. So I am using ogm container, even if I would like to use mp4 container. But to do that, faac have to be better than today.


Now I have to find a way to configure vlc-server ;).

Have a lot of fun.