ABR, VBR, min/max bitrate, quality especially, following, question, discuss, always

andy

Yeah yeah i know...the old subject on a group....please dont discuss how the group is, just answer my question in the following:

I am encoding divx 3.11 movies with nandub and now i searched especially for the way the group ViTE is encoding their audio...i always read in their nfos that they are using VBR 128-160 (mostly 1cd) and 160-256 or even -312 (for 2cd) or some other ranges. I have a few questions now, i am using BeSweet:

Which min/max bitrate do i have to set in VBR mode for both cases ?
Which quality (1-10) do i have to choose ?

I tried the alt-preset abr, but i want to use vbr..it has a standard setting in alt-presets, but if possible i want to make it like vite does...and since i am not so experienced with BeSweet and audio encoding in general i need to know how they make it...



Having said all that, you're probably best off going with the --alt-preset 140 or whatever you'd like your audio to come out to.

but what is meant if they write that they use 128-160 (if they do 1cd) or 160-256 (or sometimes even -320)(2cds) ? do they really use something like
--scale 1 -v --vbr-new -V 5 -b 128 -B 160

or
--scale 1 -v --vbr-new -V 5 -b 160 -B 256

?or is somethin else meant with
Audio Format: (128-160kbps VBR    )
?

most likely they mean that they use full VBR and it just happens to come out between 128-160 average bitrate.  At least this is my hope, because certainly a file that contains only 128kbps and 160kbps frames is going to 1, sound worse than a full range VBR mp3, and 2, waste space at times.

what switches do you think they use to come out at a range of 128-160
or 160-256 (-320) ? (using BeSweet)

I never used besweet command line, but documentation says it uses lame switches so, if u want ~160 Kbps, simply use --abr 160; -q0 is the best quality setting. That's all! setting  max and min bitrate is a bad idea, because lame defaults works very well

I have done a lot of mp3 encoding with music with vbr at high quality, and the average bitrate rarely exceeded 196 Kbps but, to be honest, it is oversized;
you will barely hear the difference if you go beyond 160 abr: you must have a fine ear and a great audio subsystem, including your listening room(it's not a joke)

I can't tell you about downsampling (guess why?), but, about all the rest, don't fool around and use standard settings, you'll never regret.

btw, if u want better quality/size ratios, start using ogg vorbis; I did and on my opinion it's cleary better, try to believe.

yeah, actually if you want to use abr, the best LAME setting to use is:

--alt-preset 160

and -q0 has some problems right now as stated by the LAME developers, so --alt-presets don't use it yet, but don't worry, they're highly tuned presets that will give you the best quality for their given ABR.  Now VBR as I said before, would be a better way to go, just try out those commands I gave earlier and see what bitrates they come out to.  BeSweet is nice in that it will tell your average bitrate after it's done converting.