Which Megui x264 profile would suit my needs?

DDogg - I totally agree with you about the grain issues that can crop up with too much compression on certain sources. I find that some movies, especially older movies that haven't been cleaned up, suffer from this. I noticed that I needed a crazy high bitrate on "Superman - The Movie" to get a reasonable quality encode. There are a few others that I recently enocded that I particularly wish I had given a bit more bitrate for grain purposes (The Princess Bride and Top Gun). But all in all, I was able to enjoy these movies with the encode I had, so I didn't re-encode. Alot of this depends on whether you want your encodes to be "back-ups" of your collection, or just conveniences. For me, it's hard drive HTPC access convenience so quality takes a step back from the quality goal. Anyways, I think I get what you are saying to do, but could you put a sample code for how to do this? A x264 cmd line with the CRF mode you are recommending would be nice. Also, a sample script with the lines for bitrate sampling a source would be great. I'm not a noob, but I don't know what a script to do what you speak of would be or look like. I would gladly take 2-15min to know what kind of bitrate I should look for in each of my encodes. Anyway thanks for the help/info!!

DL small batch file and let me know if it is helpful to you. Put it on your desktop and drag your sample avs onto it. You should end up with 2 sample files in the same directory as the avs. Remember to edit the batchfile with notepad and make sure both commandlines point to where you have x264.exe [also make sure you have x264.exe build r591 or higher]

My file structure isn't getting recognized...Thanks anyway, but using MeGUI and making a couple profiles to que up is doing the same thing for me. I totally am liking this method though. It really helps, and I've run quite a few tests looking at how resolution and options/features of x264 really do affect the bitrate needed for the identical quality. This also will probably help me with hitting approximate file sizes doing only a 1-pass CRF. Very good. 2-pass is gonna go bye bye :D!!

:thanks: Thanx DDog for this great little tool. Guess I must be the 3rd to dl it :-) I do a lot of encodes from satellite .ts rips. The tool is perfect for this. I did however make a few adjustments to make it more accurate (at least with my samples). Changed the Q-samples from 18.0/18.1 to 18.0/20.0 and SelectRangeEvery(600,12) to SelectRangeEvery(1250,25). And added a few more .bat files to make life easier. Sample % is calculated from actual # of frames in the samples. Size of Audio and Subs can be entered as well as desired filesize. Files and functions are explained in the xl-file. Cheers

Look forward to seeing checking it out when approved. It takes several days normally. Thanks.

If Excel ask if you want to run macros, just say no - they are not used. I used some macros while editing and I don't know how to get rid of them again.