[FFmpeg-user] Encoding at highest quality

[Miguel Guedes]

Hi,

I've been trying to transcode video from hidef sources (bluray and hddvd 
mostly) to MPEG-2 format at the highest quality possible with complete 
disregard to size. However I've found that so far all my efforts result in 
video that is noticeably blocky, particularly in darker scenes, or just 
doesn't look nearly as sharp/good as the source video. Even the size of the 
transcoded video I find suspicious as it is always considerably lower than 
the source video, i.e. source is 4.4-6.4 GB in size, transcoded video 
shrinks to 1.8Gb-2.5GB, suggesting video was stored at a *very* high 
compression ratio!

My question to you guys is what options to feed to ffmpeg to achieve the 
highest quality possible video transcoding? So quality is what I'm 
concerned; not size.

Here is how I'm invoking ffmpeg:

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i "$FILE_INPUT" -f dvd -target pal-dvd -aspect 16:9 -
qscale 1 -mbd rd -trellis 2 -g 100 -flags mv0 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -threads 
$THREADS "$FILE_OUTPUT"

-- 
Miguel