[MPlayer-users] bpp expressed quality for mpeg4?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 06:36:56PM -0500, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Matthew W. Miller wrote:
> >That is, (by the author's recommendation) 0.25 bits/pixel will look 
> >really good, but having more than 0.25 bits/pixel won't really bring 
> >dramatic improvements.
> >	That said, of course, the best options are what looks good 
> >enough to the viewer(s).
> 
> This can't be over-emphasized: it's all about viewer perception, which 
> is subjective. Also, the quality of the equipment (monitor, video card, 
> etc) will affect how much detail and artifacting can be seen. To me, the 
> decision about bpp is mostly about optimizing picture quality given a 
> certain total video size. Is it better to go with .2 bpp and 560x320, or 
> go for .25 with a smaller frame size? It all depends on the source material.

If you ever intend to output on NTSC TV, I would suggest *always*
using 640 as the width, and whatever height goes with that to preserve
aspect. Otherwise you'll have to scale by some fairly small amount
(somewhere between 1x and 1.5x) to watch on TV, which tends to look
bad from my experience.

Also, lavc is good enough to fit any sane-length movie (i.e. not LOTR
;) on a single CD with 640x??? video and have it look good (at least
IMO).

Rich