AutoGK vs. Stattik Mencoder Script

[theredbaron]

Hey all, I've been using GBPVR for some time, recording everything on medium, and I've found space to be an issue. There are a few shows that I like to keep and rewatch, and I've been wanting to compress the episodes to Xvid. I searched the boards and tried AutoGK and Stattik's tool ("Automated Cutting and Transcoding Guide Using Mencoder") and I was wondering if people could share their experiences.

I like the contribution from the community a lot here, but I'm not as good as I'd like to be with tweaking settings (which is why I'm looking for a do-everything solution). The episodes I have are half-hour sitcoms, with commercials stripped (although there are some stragglers I'd like to get rid of). I would like to compress them to about 175 MB and maintain fluidity and quality as much as possible. I tried one episode with AutoGK, and one with the Mencoder tool. At first glance, the quality came out better with the AutoGK epi so I'm enclined to keep using that. Problem is, I have 80+ episodes to process. It's also possible that I wasn't sure how to configure bitrate/codec settings in the Mencoder tool. So if anyone would like to share their experiences (with example settings), I would be very grateful. Thanks!

[Koenie]

Well, I never used AutoGK, so I cant comment whether it is better or worse than mencoder. I found that most people try to fix themselves to a bitrate. This is perfect if you have to stream over a limited bandwith network, however in the vast majority of cases the content will not be streamed at all. So I went for a fixed quantizer (= fixed quality in understandable english) and found a quantizer setting of 8 or 9 to be virtually undistinguishable from the original MPEG (6 mbit). The resulting xVid bitrate is between 300 and 1200 kbps simply depending on the amount of activity in the show (300 being a typical talkshow, 1200 a formula 1 race). On average the bitrate is about 600 kbps which would fit your 300 mb/hr target.

[theredbaron]

So do you use Mencoder on its own (command line) or a script? How do you find quantizer settings?