I don't know if this has been addressed before, but I would be very interested in hearing everyone's input on what factors determine which template gives the best result. Here's some of my thoughts:

* Movie length, obviously
* Amount of camera motion
* Whether the movie is "slow" or "fast"
* Sharpness of the source material

I've not done enough encodes with kwag's templates yet, but I have a feeling that overall luminosity will also contribute to the decision. And from Resident Evil I took the lesson that metal surfaces are particularly prone to a lack of detail and so require more dithering. This in turn means less compressibility.

Can anyone else add to this list, or confirm or deny my impressions regarding luminosity and metal?

Oh yeah , here's what I have to say:
"The Princess Diaries", Full Screen version. That is a VERY hard movie to compress, because of the luma levels used. Even though it's a two hour movie, I was never able to put it in one CD-R with descent quality even at 352x240. I must try that again now, with the new techniques + LegalClip, etc. Still it's a very hard movie for the encoder.
Then the other extreme is "The Others". That movie compressed to about 500MB before we had prediction And it looked great! Now that's a movie that is candidate for full 704x480 on a single CD-R, and will probably look like the original DVD

-kwag

You mean it's very dark or very bright? I've never seen it.

Now this one I have seen. It's fairly sedate, quite dark, and IIRC the director uses a lot of static camera shots. That would work towards explaining its high compressibility. Can you think of other factors? How sharp is the source material? I couldn't tell because I watched it on PPV.

Incidentally, do you notice that much of a difference between 528x480 and 704x480?

Very bright I don't remember. That was over six months ago! Visual difference on a HDTV, virtually zero . Must look REALLY hard to tell the difference. I do because I'm specially trying to focus on picking out every fault

-kwag

In that case, would you say as a rule of thumb that x3 is the "ideal" template to use, if the source material will allow it?

As it says in the templates page: "KVCDX3 Templates The "Official" KVCD template"

-kwag

Oh yeah .

Hi All,

KVCDx3 is also my favorite. It's smaller resolutions (528x480 vs 704x480)
gives it greated compressibility and in high action scenes it exhibits less
Gibbs effects. I use LBR for portable laptop and small screen TV (27" or
less) and KVCDx3 for larger TV and HDTV (don't have one yet)
It's sometimes a pain to encode two sets of the same movie, but
with the new GOP there may be hope eventually to just create one for
everything.

-black prince

I just encoded American Pie with x3 (have already done it 704x480) so I'm going to compare them tonight on my TV. I must say I had a hard time telling the difference between my Untouchables x3 encode and the original DVD, though I think with the x3 version there was some "staircasing" on diagonals. But otherwise it was extremely close.

Time to write a "Descalator" AviSynth filter

(Just kidding )

-kwag

I'm doing some test encodes and I think that 480x480 (I know you don't like it, kwag ) produces less "staircasing" on diagonals than x3! How could it be possible?

Now you have me thinking about how to soften only straight diagonal lines.....

Actually, staircasing is worse at 480 than at 528 or 544 At least that's the reports I've read.
The closer the numbers are to the original source ( 720 ), the less the staircase effect. Theoretically

-kwag

I should have made a bet of $1,000 with anyone. I would have won I just knew you would say something about that

-kwag

i was "talk" about this in this thread:
http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic....9a9ee93fc22aaa

remember?

I must say that's been my experience too, but I don't remember what resizer I used and that makes a difference.

Well, that's ok... but I'll make another test!

we post at the same time!then again..

I encoded "Out cold" using SimpleResize at CQ 70 for 2 CDRs - very good quality, but the staircasing effect was quite strong when I watched it on the 'puter monitor...

I've missed your research results in the last months, so I've got one question on the x3 template:
While encoding with Mpeg 2 "interlace" is enabled - does that lower the needed bitrate?