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[NickM]

Is there an equivalent of APE for DVD lossless encoding?  Something that MC supports?

nick

[IanG]

Is there an equivalent of APE for DVD lossless encoding?  Something that MC supports?

nick

Assuming you're interested in video, the answer's no - the DVD standard requires MPEG2, though the audio stream can be PCM for NTSC players.

For DVD Audio,  it has to be LPCM.  The DVD Forum's Working Group for audio has approved Meridian's MLP format, which gives lossless compression of about 2:1.  Sony and Philips are pushing the SACD format, which I believe gives similar results, though they claim the quality's better!  I've no idea whether MC can support these.

Ian G.

[NickM]

Sadly, I was looking for a Video solution - but seeing DVD's standard is MPEG2, it was a futile question(!).

Thanks, nick

[IanG]

If you're trying to save HD space, have a look at DVDShrink.  It's not lossless, but you can often shrink a commercial DVD to about 70% without any obvious loss of quality.

Ian G.

[glynor]

Just being a video nerd here but MPEG-2 is actually quite lossy itself!  If you want to store very high quality video, generally DV (either DV25 or DVC50) provides acceptable quality at a fraction of the file size of uncompressed 10-bit video (there are also some nice M-JPEG codecs out there though they generally require specialized hardware).

Of course, those file sizes are still enormous compared to MPEG-2 compressed video.  DV uses roughly 14 GB/hour (depending on the specific codec used and the file wrapper used), whereas 10-bit uncompressed Standard Def video will use about 400 GB/hour.  Obviously neither of these choices would be acceptable for storing on a standard DVD-R (4.6 GB wouldn't provide much runtime)!

[dlone]

Theres also a few lossless avi codecs

Huffy (very fast - largeish video files)
Lagariith  (slower - smaller files sizes)
MSU Lossless Video Codec (small files - slow)

Doing a test encode of 1 minutes worth of video gave these results (on a 4200 x2 amd cpu using all multithreading options and not encoding the audio)

Time to encode
Huffy 4 sec
Lagariith  15 sec
Divx 6.2.5 29 sec (using quality 5, insane)
MSU 29 sec

File Size
Huffy 94 Meg
Lagarith 75 Meg
MSU 9 Meg
Divx 2 Meg

[edit]
Scaling up the file size to 1 hour 30 mins
Huffy 8.4 Gig
Lagarith 6.7 Gig
MSU 0.8 Gig
Divx 0.2 Gig
[end edit]

For use on my own pc I tend to use Lagarith [edit]and looking at that data I'll go with Huffy from now on[end edit] for all the steps before encoding my final video and then use Divx in quality based mode for the final avi

I used to use Divx in multi-pass, but with the price of hard drives I've found that it's faster and produces better results to use quality mode
The only down side to quality mode is that you can't aim for exactly 650/700Mb etc
The plus is that you get a better picture and usually the files are smaller as well (in quality mode divx works much like mjpg but with the advantages of a better compression system, b-frames etc) - unless it's a vid of continuous explosions