2 replies to this topic

[sndgeek]

Hey everyone,

I surfed through the forum here to see if anyone else seems to be having this problem..I saw one poster who noted a significant discrepancy in file size and picture quality between Popcorn and QT Pro encodings.

I bought Popcorn with the idea of getting a DVD-to-mp4 solution all in one. My path before this was to do an analog capture thru a Canopus box (DV) and compress from QT Pro. This of course takes twice as long as I'd like.

I tried Handbrake, which afforded excellent picture quality and good speed. However the loss of frames ruled it unacceptable (we do pro audio and video). I also tried a combination of MTR and various VOB-to-mp4 compressors, with varying degrees of success. Popcorn seemed like the perfect solution -- great interface, one step process, faster than realtime. Fantastic. Put my $50 down, started hacking away with it.

My tests involve the MPEG-4 Basic and Advanced protocols. We are using a non-Macrovision 29.97 fps DVD-R recorded by a Samsung recorder (I don't know which model.), 720x480. The picture quality at quarter frame resolution (360x240) is awful. It doesn't really seem to matter what data rate is, or the frequency of keyframes. The video is chunky and streaky, and keyframes do the opposite of what you would think -- the picture goes super chunky instead of clarifying. We tried everything from 400kbits/sec to 2000kbits/sec, and while there was a small difference in picture quality, the overall result was unusable.

I'm having a hard time understanding this -- isn't Popcorn using the Quicktime compressor? How come I can get a decent mp4 from a DV file recorded from the same DVD? Is it really that much better to do an analog real time capture and recompress the file? What makes Handbrake's output so much better??

Any help is greatly appreciated. Popcorn has a great interface and I'd much rather use it than go through a double capture.

[John at Roxio]

I have noticed that boxes that convert from analogue to firewire are not always the best sources for video capture.  If your original source is DVD, then there are solutions out there but we cant talk about them here.

[sndgeek]

John at Roxio, on Oct 5 2006, 01:30 PM, said:

I have noticed that boxes that convert from analogue to firewire are not always the best sources for video capture.  If your original source is DVD, then there are solutions out there but we cant talk about them here.

Hi John,

Thank you for replying. I think I may have been unclear.

The whole idea of Popcorn is to turn a DVD or similar video source into an mp4 or iPod/PSP-compatible video, right? My point was that analog captured video converted in QT Pro has a significantly better quality than using Popcorn to go directly from DVD to mp4.

The DVD's we receive are not commercial. I'm not looking for an illegal solution, I just want to know if there's something I missed when using Popcorn. As far as I can tell, all you've got is a GUI on a QT Pro process...

Edited by sndgeek, 05 October 2006 - 12:57 PM.