[MEncoder-users] Encoding interlaced content: what am I doing wrong?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 07:52:24AM +0100, Martijn van Beurden wrote:
> >
> >In short, going from one codec to another will lose more quality than
> >not, and the only benefit to newer codecs like x264 is in squeezing
> >slightly higher quality out of slightly smaller files, at the expense of
> >lots of CPU time.  At high bitrates, H.264 has nothing special to offer.
> 
> But going from MPEG-2 to MPEG-2 is losing quality too, not? Going in
> two steps is AFAIK the only way to use an EDL. And I thought because
> x.264 has the possibility to encode on quality instead of bitrate
> (I'm using --crf 15) that would result in big but quite good files.

If you want good quality but size does not matter (much), you
can use any other codec with vqscale=2 just as well.
CRF is only an advantage over (v)qscale if you are going for a final
encode.