The AppleTV encode continues.

So the encoding of my DVD library has been going on for a while now and I've now stored over 200 of them but there seems to be and endless list to go. I'll warn you now. I've been accused of having a "geek out" about this so read on if you dare.

I did some experimenting with the bit rates and conversion settings in handbrake this week. On the whole the conversions using the standard handbrake appletv settings have been excellent. I watched Galaxy Quest the other night and even with it upscaled on my 54" Panasonic plasma the picture was fantastic. Of course it wasn't hd and lacked the crispness of a HD transfer, but in comparison to a full DVD there was very little noticeable difference. There certainly wasn't anything that you would pick up without a direct side by side comparison.

The quest for better transfer came from the (numerous) animated movies I have as they seem to look the worst on the standard preset. The first option I tried was to simply increase the constant quality factor for the movie but quickly discovered that putting this marker too high hit the limitations of the Apple TV and it just turned into a blocky mess. The key seems to be a balance between keeping the quality high enough whilst still ensuring but rate spikes stay below
1200kbps.

In the end I captured the same sequence of a movie with various quality settings and bit rate limits ( about 9 different combos to be honest) until I came to something that appeared a good compromise. Monsters Inc. Was my first animated movie that I did a full transfer on and the size ended about 1.85GB for the whole movie compared with the standard preset transfer coming it at 1.38 and the iTunes version at 1.31.

I had a chance to watch the whole thing today and the transfer was great apart from a few spots in the credits (of all places) where it gets blocky so I fear there might be a few more tweaks to be done. Stay tuned

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