HomePage 3 of 5: QuEnc Encoding Options
Step 4a: QuEnc Encoding Options
Starting at the bottom, there are three preset buttons, Speed, Balance and Quality, you can use to quickly specify the encoder settings. Speed will sacrifice quality for encoding speed, balance is a balance between speed and quality, while quality will take longer, but might be worth the result.
Looking at the settings more close, from the top, "Method of Encoding" specifies variable or constant bitrate encoding. Variable gives you better quality at the same file size, but will increase encoding time. "Number of Video Passes" tells the encoder how many encoding passes should be used - one for average quality, two for the best quality (at double the encoding time). "Quality of Encoding" is pretty obvious - again, "Average" for speed, "High" for quality.
"Trellis Quant." is another option that, when enabled, will improve quality at the expense of encoding speed. "CPU Cores" allows you to set the number of CPU cores to use, if you have multi-core CPU. The "Extreme and Slow" option gives you extreme quality, which will also extremely slow down encoding speed.
"TV Overscan", when enabled, will enlarge the pictures slightly so that no border is shown on an older TV that suffers from overscan. This option is usually not needed, so don't check the box. "DC Precision" has an effect on quality - selecting "10" is recommended. The maximum "Birate" setting tells the encoder what is the maximum bitrate it should use - 8000 seems like a fair value, although you can go as high as 9800. "Video resolution" - "Full D1" is the full DVD resolution (720x480 for NTSC, 720x576 for PAL), "Half D1" halves the horizontal resolution (352x480/576 for NTSC/PAL) and VCD resolution is the lowest (352x240/288 for NTSC/PAL). Select Half D1 or VCD will allow you to fit more content per DVD, which is not so bad if your input is already at these lower resolutions.
You can skip the next page/step (Step 4b: HC Encoding Options) and move onto Step 5: Encoding, Testing and Burning the DVD.
