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[Blue Brummie]

All,

I'm new to this forum and digital media in general. Apart from a few bugs and nusances when synchronizing with my iPod, I have been very happy with the Media Center product.

I have never really learned about the pros/cons of the various encoding algorithms (mp3 vs. .....). Can someone please guide me to an article, or thread here that discusses this topic?

Thanks,
BB

[glynor]

Heh.  Let the games begin ....

I assume from your post you are referring to Audio.  I'll leave that discussion to others (I use MP3 but only because of backwards compatibility and because I started my collection back in 1997 and then that was the choice).  Everyone seems to love VBR.  You'll probably hear a bunch about APE and FLAC from some others.  Lossless codecs would be nice, but I can't afford the rediculous amount of drive space I would need to add to my RAID5 to re-rip my entire collection to lossless.  I'll probably re-rip some of my most treasured CDs at some point and use some losseless codec (for now I'm too lazy and the CDs aren't going anywhere - they can't get scratched if I never use them).

For video Codec and related information the first place I would look first would be http://www.doom9.net/.  I used to be a DivX/XviD AVI fanboy, but now I'm sliding more to Apple's MPEG4 implementation (and I still am to some degree) but the OGM wrapper has some interesting features (think OOG for video). 

You may also want to check out http://www.avsforums.com/ for more generalized Audio-Video info.

[GHammer]

You don't say what you want, quality or quantity. Meaning do you want the best (lossless) quality? Or do you need to save disk space (quantity) which would mean a 'lossy' format?

A good place to start is:
http://datacompression.info/NonCommercialProgs.shtml
Scroll down that page to Audio and have a look.

For lossless, Monkey's Audio (APE) is hard to beat. Especially since the author is also a developer of MC.

For lossy, I still have yet to find a reason to use anything except MP3 format. Why? Everything plays MP3s, closely followed by WMA format.

Hope this helps.

[Blue Brummie]

Hey Glynor and GHammer,

Thanks for your feedback. I was a bit general in my question, but my interest for now is with Audio Codecs.

GHammer, you're right with your comment. I didn't state if I was interested in quality vs. quantity, vs. other parameters because that's the type of info on trade-offs that I'm hoping to learn about.

For instance, just two of several questions I have are:

1) How does VBR MP3 work, vs. fixed bit rate MP3, and what are the trade-offs in sound quality between these two approaches?

2) Should I continue to RIP my personal CD collection in MP3, or go with the native iPod format, or both ?

I'll take a look at the links you've supplied.

Thanks again for your guidance,
BB

[GHammer]

1) How does VBR MP3 work, vs. fixed bit rate MP3, and what are the trade-offs in sound quality between these two approaches?

2) Should I continue to RIP my personal CD collection in MP3, or go with the native iPod format, or both ?

1- To make a long thing short, MP3 VBR uses less bits when there is less music to encode and more bits when there is more. So you should get the "same" sound with a smaller file than using MP3 CBR (Constant Bit Rate).

2- I don't know. It depends on your preference. It depends on if you use the iPod in your car or have an MP3 capable player in there. It depends on if you ever (God forbid) share music with a friend who does not have an iPod.

For me, if I am looking for portable music it means that I am going outside. I'm in a car or flying or biking or whatever. The thing is, I am not going to notice small differences in sound quality while I'm driving or whatnot. It's noisy, the speakers are not up to the ones I have at home, etc. So, MP3 VBR at a decent rate is quite good for my ears.

At home I like to have my music sound as good as possible, so I use a lossless format. And I like APE as a lossless format. There are many reasons, but if I'm honest, I started off using APE and since it worked well, why go try out FLAC or others?

Hope this helps somewhat, but in the end the best way to decide is to look at your uses and then rip a CD to a few formats and see which you like the best in your environment.

One thing about going with lossless is that you can always copy/convert to MP3, AAC, WMA, or whatever to put on your iPod and still have the original sound at your disposal without getting the CD and ripping again.

That is the second best part of lossless for me.