H:264 capture/render software

Thanks for this one! This site is way more useful than Google, Google didn't bring up this Handbrake software, I've just done a bit of experimenting with it and the video quality is stunning with file sizes 70% smaller than the original. The only thing it doesn't have is direct capture from a DV/firewiwre device so i would have to capture with Sony Vegas or Virtual dub and then render but it may be well worth it.

I just turned a few 500mb files into 90mb H:264's and I can't tell the difference in quality, encoding time was not bad at all, quad core i7 CPU on my laptop ran at 100% and is providing some additional heat for my room right now actually

In Ontario Telus has launched it's new 3.5G network which means I am getting FTP upload speeds of around 500k/s from my laptop in my truck as I am uploading news video to the FTP server, of course now I want even smaller file sizes so that by the time I am finished typing up the shot list on my blackberry and send the email notification the file is already on the server.

Amazing, 2 years ago these ftp feeds took 2-4 hours and it was considered amazing to be able to send video back from wherever I was stuck in ontario covering a snowstorm as opposed to 6 hours to drive it back and now 15 min feed times seem long and I'm aiming for 1min 30sec feed times

mark

Originally Posted by NickE

I like the h264 codec a lot. For videos on our team website, I've been exporting them as a Mpeg2 from premiere at the resolution that I want. I then run them through HandBrake with a size entered (I use about 12-15mb for match videos. Longer Videos obviously need a larger size.). You can also just specify an average bit rate. Be sure it's doing 2 passes.

It doesn't get the integrated capture that you want, but it works pretty well. The key to getting high quality with h264 is having 2 pass encoding, I've found. The first pass analyzes the video so that the second pass can allocate the variable bit rate, giving a higher bit rate to the parts that need it while still keeping the specified average bit rate.