Sorry, didn't know which forum this should go in. Please move if I got it wrong.

I haven't visited these forums much in the last few years because with the availability and capacity of DVD-R and DVD-R DL, I had sort of thought KVCD compression techniques were neat but pretty much moot. However, now that I have a shiny new iPhone and space is once again at a premium, the fun is back.

I'm currently using Quicktime Pro to export to iPhone and it looks great, but I'm not at all satisfied that I'm getting the best quality/compression ratio out of my files. Right now, QT is getting a 45-min episode of Doctor Who into ~300MB at 480x272. But because just about nothing with Apple is transparent, I'm really not sure what's going on behind the scenes with the encoding. CQ, CBR, or VBR? Min/max bitrate? etc...

I found a pretty good resource here:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/art...y-resolutions/

Based on that information, I've managed to produce some iPhone-legal files with megui that come in well under 200MB, but at a noticeable quality drop. That's no good, of course.....

So I knew exactly where to come.

Has anybody experimented with this yet, or am I out there by myself?

KVCD Notch is aimed to MPEG2 encoding, it has never been of great interrest for MPEG4 (whatever the flavour), that is probably what iphone uses. isn't it ?

Yeah, I know that... I'm not trying to use existing KVCD techniques (outside of a few scripting ideas). I'm thinking more in terms of a "start from scratch" approach because we're talking about x264 encoding, which is fundamentally different and new to me. I've mostly always used Mpeg-2.

I realize that Mpeg-4 isn't the focus of these forums, but this is the only forum I know of where this kind of extreme quality/compression work has been done. People said 2hrs on a CD was impossible, and then KVCD made it work. You guys are the best at stretching the boundaries of the possible. I want to get the very best I can out of the limited space in my iPhone, and this just seems like the best source of knowledge around.

Ok . I can't speak for the others, I never encoded any x264 except to test some tools