[MPlayer-users] tweaking the MP3

[Rocky Hetherington]

On Sun, 2002-07-07 at 09:33, steffen wrote:

> I think someone shouldnt go under 128 kbps CBR. If I watch a video and use a 
> bitrate lower than that , a big part of the video will be lost , since 
> explosions and over things will sound worse.

Depends on the content you're encoding.  Very little of the stuff i have
has explosions in it, and most of the sound is in the midrange, which
MP3 seems to deal OK with at lower bitrates.

> I think the best would be to 
> have ogg-vorbis in video, because it gave a good sound at low bitrates.

Yep, if you haven't tried RC4 from CVS i'd recommend it, the
improvements over RC3 (which was very good itself) are staggering.  q0
is good enough to replace a 128kbps MP3 stream at half the average
bitrate.
 
> Time to have a real good new multimedia 
> container format that is open source ( with features like OGM but free ).

That would be Ogg. ^_^

As i understand it, the OGM format is just OGG with a few changes to
make it more suitable for video.  Now that the Xiph guys have a working
video codec, in the form of Theora/VP3.2, i think they are considering
implementing similar changes in the OGG format for better video support.

At least that's the impression i get from reading their mailing lists,
i'm not a developer though.

> For 
> now I would say an abr of 128 kbps for vbr-mp3 is the best to use. I can't 
> believe that anyone use a bitrate of 96 kbps CBR for it unless the sound 
> isn't important for the content of the movie ...

I have a TV/DVD/sound system for watching stuff in good quality.  The
stuff i encode is usually just on the computer either for sharing (in
which case small filesizes are essential) or for the occasional watching
of something while i'm using the computer.  56kbps is usually good
enough for both those cases with the majority of my content.

-- 
Rocky Hetherington
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