[QUOTE=Kerry56;2711119]Hey Lathe, I’ll try to help where I can with your questions.
The Auto bias should only come into play when you select Automatic in the encoding options. Putting it on 3 will make it go to a higher quality output. But as I’ve said, I don’t use the Automatic setting, so I’ve very little experience using it.
On a large movie, like [I]Almost Famous[/I], I’d use a two pass encode with quality on High. There is some disagreement on using CRF vs two pass regarding quality of output, with most saying that CRF can give just as high quality, but with BD Rebuilder’s default setting of 20 for CRF, the two pass will give better results. It is possible to go into the hidden options and use FIXED_CRF=n, and change the n to something like 18. This will do more to improve your output than most anything else you can do when using a CRF encode, but it also makes the output size less predictable. There is even a warning for this in the Hiddentxt file. So its not something I’d recommend when trying to hit the 25gb target. You can try it just for an experiment if you like.
And as you’ve found, using higher quality settings means longer encoding times.
Since you seem to keep extras, and use a faster encode on them, you might use SECONDARY_CRF=n if you use a CRF encode. This will reduce the quality of the encoding on the extras and save space for everything else. Default for BD25 is 20, so you could change this to 22 or 24.
B-Pyramid strict [B]is[/B] allowed in blu ray output. This lets the encoder use one b frame per minigop to be used as a reference. While this produces more efficient compression, this is not a major change. Probably adds a bit to encoding time, which is why jdobbs chose to use none as default.
ENCODE_QUALITY=n is something you can add to INI file in BD Rebuilder. Here is what jdobbs says about it: [I]I would recommend never going above ENCODE_QUALITY=2 for 99% of all encodes – but there is a “3” (available from the menu as “Highest (very slow)”) and an undocumented value of “4” (unbearably slow mode for those with anal tendencies).[/I]
You can do basically the same commands from the Encoder settings by choosing High or Highest, though the “4” option isn’t there.
As always, higher quality is a balancing act. The more you push the program towards higher quality output, the slower it will become. And after a certain point, the additional quality becomes harder and harder to discern. Which is why I normally use CRF 20 one pass, or occasionally a two pass High setting encode. These are the settings I’ve found that work for me, but I may not be as picky as some.[/QUOTE]
Thanks very kindly for your time mate! That is most helpful and I will think about the suggestions that you mentioned. So, basically what I am understanding is that putting the ‘Encode Quality=2’ in the ini file is exactly the same as setting the menu encode quality to ‘High’ and it merely just stays there, right?
The only other thing off hand that I can think of is setting the ‘Use x264’s internal LAVF for encoding’. A lot of the earlier discussion at Doom 9 was a little hazy on that; it SEEMED like a lot of experienced guys there do use it although they didn’t sound that definitive about how much better it is. Also, what do you think about that vs. using the default encoder but with Multiprocess set to ‘1’; I have read Dobbs explanation about that and again the comments about it have been kind of vague and not all that positive.
One thing that I am still a bit confused about is that when you DO use 2 pass for sure, is that ALWAYS ABR? And when you use CRF, is that ALWAYS then assumed that it is 1 pass? Like when BDRB encoded ‘ALMOST FAMOUS’ I noticed that it not only chose ‘Fast’, but also selected ABR which I felt was odd since it was only doing one pass, but was that because you pretty much NEED ABR to calculate the size more effectively? But, I THOUGHT that the documentation stated that when using CRF that it ‘sampled’ several segments and made a ‘guess’ about the size while STILL using the more ‘quality’ oriented CRF, is that right? So, when YOU set it for any 2 pass encode, do you ALWAYS have it set to ABR? Sorry, even though I think I understand the concept of what each encoder does, putting it into the context of what BDRB is doing or into the context of 1 pass or 2 kind of throws me off 
Thanks so much; I sure am GLAD that you are here!
Cheers!
