WinFF - Best Free RB Mpeg Converter (In my trials beats everything else)

[dangerousd777]

I've tried several commercial softwares, free converters, everything else including WinAVI (which gets a letterboxing since the res isn't exact).

WinFF is as fast as WinAVI, gets the res exact, lets you customize all the parameters, and even allows 2-pass encoding for the highest quality possible (you can reach Youtube .flv file sizes easily while maintaining quality).

On my Sansa e260 Mpeg decoding only goes as fast as 20-21 FPS, otherwise it has to frame skip a lot to keep up, well now you can restrict it to whichever you feel (I use 15-20) because other converters don't allow under 23/24 FPS and some get errors even if they support it and you try. Now I can leave frame skip off, and if I display the FPS it's at what it should be, and if I don't limit the frames it actually goes a few fps too fast for the audio...

I haven't done extensive testing, but the quality, features, and ease of use are all 100% excellent.

Test it out and see if it works pretty good for you. Click options for the advanced parameters.

Set it to "Convert to: ......." "Device Preset: RB __________  (ratio)" and select your output folder

Update: It works perfectly with 2-pass, 182kbps video stream and 112 kbps audio @ 224x176 mpeg-2 means a 20 minute 42 second episode can be compressed to 46.8 MB without too much loss of quality.

[cool_walking_]

WinFF has been listed on the PluginMpegplayer wiki page for a long time and is tends to be the software recommended here to anyone who asks for an encoder.  WinFF is a frontend for the quite famous and well-regarded ffmpeg.

You're doing 2-pass encodes on 220x176 video?

[dangerousd777]

WinFF has been listed on the PluginMpegplayer wiki page for a long time and is tends to be the software recommended here to anyone who asks for an encoder.  WinFF is a frontend for the quite famous and well-regarded ffmpeg.

You're doing 2-pass encodes on 220x176 video?

2-pass is good if you want to choose a slightly lower bitrate... (depending on motion and scene/chroma/color complexity you should select from 125-400) it takes a bit longer but you get much better results.

It also helps to choose dithering in the display options because usually you'll get weird Mpeg decoding 'color banding' artifacts when it plays back on the Sansa if you don't for some reason.

If you have a multi-core CPU it might help to add -threads (number of cores here) [I use 2 since I have p4 'prescott' w/ ht 3.2 ghz oc'd to 4 ghz].

I'd like to try TMPGEnc but I'd rather not waste my time anymore with proprietary software. I seemed to have a bit of success with SUPER but it doesn't correctly install for some reason without error (Mencoder.exe never gets installed, oddly).

I'm still on my quest to find a balance between Mpeg 1/2 quality/speed. Mpeg-1 is optimized for lower bitrates and is used in VHS and VCD. Mpeg-2 isn't optimized and is used in DVDs.

Mpeg on other converters has a limit of 23.997 FPS minimum, which you end up getting skipped frames and if you disable that it loses sync. The Mpeg decoding usually ranges between 18/19-21 FPS, so anything below or around that you can disable frame skip.

I wonder though... if there are any formats that are as fast as Mpeg yet have a better quality/file size ratio... more compression.

Kind of unlikely, but I'll keep searching. 

[soap]

It also helps to choose dithering in the display options because usually you'll get weird Mpeg decoding 'color banding' artifacts when it plays back on the Sansa if you don't for some reason.

I believe you see the banding as the Sansa has a 16 bit screen.

I'd like to try TMPGEnc but I'd rather not waste my time anymore with proprietary software. I seemed to have a bit of success with SUPER but it doesn't correctly install for some reason without error (Mencoder.exe never gets installed, oddly).

I used to be a huge user of TMPGEnc, but that was years and years ago.  Now not only is it not as high quality of an encoder as the competition, it is lacking in features.  When doing non-standard framerates (12 / 15) it doubles frames instead of creating an "invalid" stream.  And regardless of the settings I use I can not match the decoding speed of ffmpeg.  I have no idea why.  I'm far from an expert on MPEG, but I've used every tool I could find to compare streams and could not find a quantifiable difference except their Rockbox decode rates.  I created over 50 encodes of "Elephant's Dream", tweaking everything from the frame sequence to the VBV buffer size to the quant. matrix.  No luck.

[dangerousd777]

FFMpeg/WinFF clearly has the FASTEST encoding speed I have ever seen from a Mpeg encoder, maybe for any format encoder (does XviD pretty nicely).

The quality is also superb, and the 2-pass even for Mpeg is another major plus. For a free encoder I think it is absolutely the best I can find...

I used to be a huge user of TMPGEnc, but that was years and years ago.  Now not only is it not as high quality of an encoder as the competition, it is lacking in features.  When doing non-standard framerates (12 / 15) it doubles frames instead of creating an "invalid" stream.  And regardless of the settings I use I can not match the decoding speed of ffmpeg.  I have no idea why.  I'm far from an expert on MPEG, but I've used every tool I could find to compare streams and could not find a quantifiable difference except their Rockbox decode rates.  I created over 50 encodes of "Elephant's Dream", tweaking everything from the frame sequence to the VBV buffer size to the quant. matrix.  No luck.

What would be the fastest to decode and render in Rockbox? The one with the most quality/size? And the one with the most speed is obviously FFMpeg, thus far anyways.