7.11. Making a high quality MPEG-4 ("DivX") rip of a DVD movie
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## 7.11. Making a high quality MPEG-4 ("DivX") rip of a DVD movie

One frequently asked question is "How do I make the highest quality DVD rip possible? I don't care about file size, I just want the best quality."

This question is perhaps at least somewhat wrongly posed. After all, if you don't care about file size, why not simply copy the MPEG-2 video stream from the DVD whole? Sure, your AVI will end up being 5GB, give or take, but if you want the best quality and don't care about size, this is certainly your best option.

In fact, the reason you want to transcode a DVD into MPEG-4 is specifically because you do care about file size.

It's difficult to offer a cookbook recipe on how to create a very high quality DVD rip. There are several factors to consider, and you should understand these details or else you're likely to end up disappointed with your results. Below we'll investigate some of these issues, and then have a look at an example. We assume you're using `libavcodec` to encode the video, although the theory applies to other codecs as well.

The main assumption of this guide is that you have no specific file size constraints and have no problem giving up bits in exchange for quality. While much of the information presented here is useful in any case, some of it may work against you if you have a file size goal, such as fitting a video on a CD.

### 7.11.1. Constant Quantizer vs. 2-pass

There are three approaches to encoding the video: constant bitrate (CBR), constant quantizer, and two-pass (ABR, or average bitrate).

In each of these modes, `libavcodec` breaks the video frame into 16x16 pixel macroblocks and then applies a quantizer to each macroblock. The lower the quantizer, the better the quality and higher the bitrate. The method `libavcodec` uses to determine which quantizer to use for a given macroblock varies and is highly tunable. (This is an extreme over-simplification of the actual process, but the basic concept is useful to understand.)

When you specify a constant bitrate, `libavcodec` will encode the video, discarding detail as much as necessary and as little as possible in order to remain lower than the given bitrate. If you truly don't care about file size, you could as well use CBR and specify a bitrate of infinity. (In practice, this means a value high enough so that it poses no limit, like 10000Kbit.) With no real restriction on bitrate, the result is that `libavcodec` will use the lowest possible quantizer for each macroblock (as specified by `vqmin`, which is 2 by default). As soon as you specify a low enough bitrate that `libavcodec` is forced to use a higher quantizer, then you're almost certainly ruining the quality of your video. In general, you should avoid CBR altogether if you care about quality.

With constant quantizer, `libavcodec` uses the same quantizer, as specified by the `vqscale` option, on every macroblock. If you want the highest quality rip possible, again ignoring bitrate, you can use `vqscale=2`. This will yield the same bitrate and PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) as CBR with `vbitrate`=infinity and the default `vqmin` of 2.

The problem with constant quantizing is that it uses the given quantizer whether the macroblock needs it or not. That is, it might be possible to use a higher quantizer on a macroblock without sacrificing visual quality. Why waste the bits on an unnecessarily low quantizer? Your CPU has as many cycles as there is time, but there's only so many bits on your hard disk.

With a two-pass encode, the first pass will rip the movie as though it were CBR, but it will keep a log of properties for each frame. This data is then used during the second pass in order to make intelligent decisions about which quantizers to use. During fast action or low detail scenes, higher quantizers will likely be used, and during slow moving or high detail scenes, lower quantizers will be used.

If you use `vqscale=2`, then you're wasting bits. If you use `vqscale=3`, then you're not getting the highest quality rip. Suppose you rip a DVD at `vqscale=3`, and the result is 1800Kbit. If you do a two-pass encode with `vbitrate=1800`, the resulting video will have higher quality for the same bitrate.

Since you're now convinced that two-pass is the way to go, the real question now is what bitrate to use? The answer is that there's no single answer. Ideally you want to choose a bitrate that yields the best balance between quality and file size. This is going to vary depending on the source video.

A good starting point for a very high quality rip is about 2000Kbit plus or minus 200Kbit. For fast action or high detail source video, or if you just have a very critical eye, you might decide on 2400 or 2600. For some DVDs, you might not notice a difference at 1400Kbit. It's a good idea to experiment with scenes at different bitrates to get a feel.

### 7.11.2. Cropping and Scaling

Native DVD resolution is 720x480 for NTSC, and 720x576 for PAL, but there's an aspect flag that specifies whether it's full-screen (4:3) or wide-screen (16:9). Many (if not most) widescreen DVDs are not strictly 16:9, and will be either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 (cinescope). This means that there will be black bands in the video that will need to be cropped out.

MPlayer provides a crop detection filter that will determine the crop rectangle (`-vf cropdetect`). Because MPEG-4 uses 16x16 macroblocks, you'll want to make sure that each dimension of the video you're encoding is a multiple of 16 or else you will be degrading quality, especially at lower bitrates. You can do this by rounding the width and height of the crop rectangle down to the nearest multiple of 16. When cropping, you'll want to increase the y-offset by half the difference of the old and the new height so that the resulting video is taken from the center of the frame. And because of the way DVD video is sampled, make sure the offset is an even number. (In fact, as a rule, never use odd values for any parameter when you're cropping and scaling video.) If you're not comfortable throwing a few extra pixels away, you might prefer instead to scale the video instead. We'll look at this in our example below.

Also, be careful about "half black" pixels at the edges. Make sure you crop these out too, or else you'll be wasting bits there that are better spent elsewhere.

After all is said and done, you'll probably end up with video whose pixels aren't quite 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but rather something close to that. You could calculate the new aspect ratio manually, but MEncoder offers an option for `libavcodec` called `autoaspect` that will do this for you. Absolutely do not scale this video in order to square the pixels unless you like to waste your hard disk space. Scaling should be done on playback, and the player will use the aspect stored in the AVI to determine the correct resolution.

### 7.11.3. Audio

Audio is a much simpler problem to solve: just leave it as is. Even AC3 5.1 streams are at most 448Kbit/s, and they're worth every bit. You might be tempted to transcode the audio to high quality Ogg Vorbis, but just because you don't have an A/V receiver for AC3 pass-through today doesn't mean you won't have one tomorrow. Future-proof your DVD rips by preserving the AC3 stream.

### 7.11.4. Interlacing and Telecine

Almost all movies are shot at 24 fps. Because NTSC is 29.97 fps, some processing must be done to this 24 fps video to make it run at the correct NTSC framerate. The process is called 3:2 pulldown, commonly referred to as telecine (because pulldown is often applied during the telecine process), and, naively described, it works by slowing the film down to 23.976 fps, and repeating every fourth frame.

No special processing, however, is done to the video for PAL DVDs, which run at 25 fps. (Technically, PAL can be telecined, called 2:2 pulldown, but this doesn't become an issue in practice.) The 24 fps film is simply played back at 25 fps. The result is that the movie runs slightly faster, but unless you're an alien, you probably won't notice the difference. Most PAL DVDs have pitch-corrected audio, so when they're played back at 25 fps things will sound right, even though the audio track (and hence the whole movie) has a running time that's 4% less than NTSC DVDs.

Because the video in a PAL DVD hasn't been altered, you needn't worry much about frame rate. The source is 25 fps, and your rip will be 25 fps. However, if you're ripping an NTSC DVD movie, you may need to apply inverse telecine.

For movies shot at 24 fps, the video on the NTSC DVD is either telecined 29.97 fps, or else it is progressive 24 fps and intended to be telecined on-the-fly by a DVD player. On the other hand, TV series are usually only interlaced, not telecined. This is not a hard rule: some TV series are interlaced (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whereas some are a mixture of progressive and interlaced (such as Angel, or 24).

It's highly recommended that you read the section on How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs to learn how to handle the different possibilities.

However, if you're mostly just ripping movies, likely you're either dealing with 24 fps progressive or telecined video, in which case you can use the `pullup` filter `-vf pullup,softskip`.

### 7.11.5. Filtering

In general, you want to do as little filtering as possible to the movie in order to remain close to the original DVD source. Cropping is often necessary (as described above), but do not scale the video. Although scaling down is sometimes preferred to using higher quantizers, we want to avoid both these things: remember that we decided from the start to trade bits for quality.

Also, do not adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. What looks good on your display may not look good on others. These adjustments should be done on playback only.

One thing you might want to do, however, is pass the video through a very light denoise filter, such as `-vf hqdn3d=2:1:2`. Again, it's a matter of putting those bits to better use: why waste them encoding noise when you can just add that noise back in during playback? Increasing the parameters for `hqdn3d` will further improve compressibility, but if you increase the values too much, you risk degrading the image visibily. The suggested values above (`2:1:2`) are quite conservative; you should feel free to experiment with higher values and observe the results for yourself.

### 7.11.6. Example

So, you've just bought your shiny new copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (widescreen edition, of course), and you want to rip this DVD so that you can add it to your Home Theatre PC. This is a region 1 DVD, so it's NTSC. The example below will still apply to PAL, except you'll omit `-ofps 23.976` (because the output framerate is the same as the input framerate), and of course the crop dimensions will be different.

After running `mplayer dvd://1`, we follow the process detailed in the section How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs and discover that it's 24 fps progressive video, which means that we needn't use an inverse telecine filter, such as `pullup` or `filmdint`.

Next, we want to determine the appropriate crop rectangle, so we use the cropdetect filter:

    mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect

Make sure you seek to a fully filled frame (such as a bright scene), and you'll see in MPlayer's console output:

    crop area: X: 0..719  Y: 57..419  (-vf crop=720:362:0:58)

We then play the movie back with this filter to test its correctness:

    mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:362:0:58

And we see that it looks perfectly fine. Next, we ensure the width and height are a multiple of 16. The width is fine, however the height is not. Since we didn't fail 7th grade math, we know that the nearest multiple of 16 lower than 362 is 352.

We could just use `crop=720:352:0:58`, but it'd be nice to take a little off the top and a little off the bottom so that we retain the center. We've shrunk the height by 10 pixels, but we don't want to increase the y-offset by 5-pixels since that's an odd number and will adversely affect quality. Instead, we'll increase the y-offset by 4 pixels:

    mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:352:0:62

Another reason to shave pixels from both the top and the bottom is that we ensure we've eliminated any half-black pixels if they exist. Note that if your video is telecined, make sure the `pullup` filter (or whichever inverse telecine filter you decide to use) appears in the filter chain before you crop. If it is interlaced, deinterlace before cropping. (If you choose to preserve the interlaced video, then make sure your vertical crop offset is a multiple of 4.)

If you're really concerned about losing those 10 pixels, you might prefer instead to scale the dimensions down to the nearest multiple of 16. The filter chain would look like:

    -vf crop=720:362:0:58,scale=720:352

Scaling the video down like this will mean that some small amount of detail is lost, though it probably won't be perceptible. Scaling up will result in lower quality (unless you increase the bitrate). Cropping discards those pixels altogether. It's a tradeoff that you'll want to consider for each circumstance. For example, if the DVD video was made for television, you might want to avoid vertical scaling, since the line sampling corresponds to the way the content was originally recorded.

On inspection, we see that our movie has a fair bit of action and high amounts of detail, so we pick 2400Kbit for our bitrate.

We're now ready to do the 2-pass encode. Pass 1:

    mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 23.976 -oac copy -vf crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:mbcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=1 \
    -o Harry_Potter_2.avi

And pass 2 is the same, except that we specify `vpass=2`:

    mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 23.976 -oac copy -vf crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:mbcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=2 \
    -o Harry_Potter_2.avi

The options `v4mv:mbd=2:trell` will greatly increase the quality at the expense of encoding time. There's little reason to leave these options out when the primary goal is quality. The options `cmp=3:subcmp=3:mbcmp=3` select a comparison function that yields higher quality than the defaults. You might try experimenting with this parameter (refer to the man page for the possible values) as different functions can have a large impact on quality depending on the source material. For example, if you find `libavcodec` produces too much blocky artifacting, you could try selecting the experimental NSSE as comparison function via `*cmp=10`.

For this movie, the resulting AVI will be 138 minutes long and nearly 3GB. And because you said that file size doesn't matter, this is a perfectly acceptable size. However, if you had wanted it smaller, you could try a lower bitrate. Increasing bitrates have diminishing returns, so while we might clearly see an improvement from 1800Kbit to 2000Kbit, it might not be so noticeable above 2000Kbit. Feel free to experiment until you're happy.

Because we passed the source video through a denoise filter, you may want to add some of it back during playback. This, along with the `spp` post-processing filter, drastically improves the perception of quality and helps eliminate blocky artifacts in the video. With MPlayer's `autoq` option, you can vary the amount of post-processing done by the spp filter depending on available CPU. Also, at this point, you may want to apply gamma and/or color correction to best suit your display. For example:

    mplayer Harry_Potter_2.avi -vf spp,noise=9ah:5ah,eq2=1.2 -autoq 3

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