Single pass for quick AVC encoding of TV recordings
One of the benefits of AVC is the ability to adapt the compression to suit the target device or quality. So you can use a very high quality set of settings and take 19 hours to compress a 2 hour movie. By the way even these are not the highest quality (read: slowest) settings.
The good people over at the doom9 forum have already created a number of Profiles which you load into MeGUI and then choose from a drop down list. They range from the above multi-pass through to ” I just need an okay compression” quick single pass.
Even within such single passes they offer at least 3 profiles, balancing speed of encoding against quality:
1P-Maxspeed: Everything disabled for max encoding speed (good for live capturing).
1P-Intermediate: Intermediate settings for average speed and final quality.
1P-Goodquality: Settings for good quality with 1 pass.
(Source: above doom9 forum post)
You can also use these as a basis and create your own profiles too.
I did a quick series of tests on a 2 minute DVD sample (video only) to confirm these three – unchanged from defaults – work as designed :
- 1P-Maxspeed: About 2 mins
- 1P-Intermediate: About 5 mins
- 1P-Goodquality: About 8.5 mins
On balance, I’d be aiming for 1P-Intermediate. If it’s a show that has little or no movement – say, a chat or comedy show – I’d probably copy that profile and drop the data rate to say 700kpbs from the default of 1000.
