What media for 4K

[Eric Santiago]

[Vasco daNeva] “But H264 could be a lot of things. What plays best at highest quality?
“

Can you be more specific as to the target player/display.

I use a few options such as the REDRAY player and the basic desktop playback using VLC.

h264 at highest as 20MB is Ive done with full feature for test (desktop).

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Vasco daNeva] “But H264 could be a lot of things. “

It’s a fairly simple thing but depending on the device playing it back it probably needs to be a certain level/profile/bitrate. Which we don’t know because you don’t know the device this should be played back on.

[Vasco Daneva]

The device videos will be played on is Zappiti Player 4K (please see https://www.zappiti.com/zappiti_player_4k.html )

[Tero Ahlfors]

“Playback HD and SD video in MKV containers and other modern video file formats, including top quality
HD video with very high bit-rates > 120 Mbp/s.”

I didn’t find an actual manual but that’s from the quick start guide. I don’t know if they tell what the “other modern formats” are somewhere else.

[Vasco Daneva]

Thank you very much, Tero. Do you know if Adobe Encore can do MKV, or any 4K for that matter? Adobe stopped upgrading it quite some time ago. Or can you recommend an alternative?

[Jeff Pulera]

From the link you supplied:

● Video codecs: HEVC, H.265, MVC, AVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, XVID, DIVX, WMV9, FLV, VC-1, H.264/x.264, CVD 1.0/2.0, SVCD, AVS, Sorenson Spark L70, VP8 ; Very High Speed video bitrates supported up to 120Mbit/s.
● Video file formats: BD ISO, BDMV, MKV, MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS, M2TS, VOB, AVI, MOV, MP4, QT, WMV, DVD-ISO, VIDEO_TS, AVCHD 2.0 (AVCHD 3D, AVHD Progressive, and AVCHD 3D / Progressive).

Adobe Encore is for creating DISCS, either DVD or BLU-RAY. And in any case, Encore maxes out at HD and does not do anything with 4K video. You will want/need to use Adobe Media Encoder to create your files for playback.

H.264 should do the job, create some short samples and try them

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Vasco Daneva]

Thank you very much!
Vasco

[Vasco Daneva]

But how do you make chapters in Media Encoder? When a film is 2 hours long you want to have chapters in case you want to skip to certain points of the film.

[Michael Ryan]

Personally, I’m a fan of h.265/HEVC, as in case of a quality loss, the blurring effect is more pleasant than the blockiness that h.264/AVC gives you… I would do .mkv container with h.265 (at above 5mbps, above 10 preferred for higher quality), and AAC 6+ channel audio (at least 32kbps per channel). That is just me, and only if your media/devices support it. Most devices in the past 18months or so will support HEVC for 4K material. The codec was designed to yeild better results for a give bandwidth over avc/h.264. Main concerns are getting enough room on a Bluray disc as well as online streaming at a reasonable/practical rate.

Compared to h.264, you should be able to use half the bitrate for similar results, or equivalent bitrate for better results. On the higher end the trade off becomes less of an issue. As I said though, I prefer the blending to artifacting. If you go too low on the bitrate, one of the first things you will notice is that body hair tends to blend in, instead of being able to pick it out. At least that’s the thing that I tend to notice first in test cases. If you use a constant quality of <= 23, you should be okay. (larger number means more loss, smaller size, and it’s a progressive scale). I actually will go lower than that for a lot of my rips, as I don’t mind the lower quality, again relative to h.264, and it reduces the space on my nas… I use about 1200-2500kbps for 1080p content, it will vary based on CQP (constant quality) needs. I also use NVENC, which isn’t as good for size/quality trade off as say x265 is.

Just mt $.02, I tend to be more concerned with size… and as mentioned doing test encodes of more complex scenes will tell you what will work and what won’t, it’s very subjective.