monline

We've a desktop DVD recorder with a built-in TV tuner and a hard disk as a substitute for the old VCR technology. Sometimes I've to create a video from such TV rips, either in MPEG-4 or H.264 format. Since this recorder has no digital output (like an USB or Firewire connector), we used to copy the titles to a rewritable DVD disc and I recode the contents with HandBrake on my Mac. I'll put down now the parameters that I've found to produce a good result. These are by no means "the" optimal parameters, I'm just saving them for future reference and in case somebody else might profit from it.

Our DVD recorder does not use any CSS, thus I can run HandBrake directly on the DVD. But some might prefer ripping the DVD's contents to the hard disk first nonetheless. These source DVDs contain interlaced video (at least in my case), so I've to use a deinterlace filter. On the top of the HandBrake window there's a button named "Picture Settings". Click it, switch to the "Filters" tab, change the "Decomb / Deinterlace" selector to "Deinterlace" and select a deinterlace mode (I use always "Slower").

If you want to encode the video with MPEG-4 codec, then select "MPEG-4 (ffmpeg)" as "Video Codec" in the HandBrake window's "Video" tab. In case of a 720x430 input I set the "Quality" parameter on the "Video" tab to an average bitrate of 1900-2000 kbps.
In case I need a H.264 encoded output and the input has the same resolution as in the prev. example, I use a contant quality of RF=22.

With these settings the H.264 encoded version will be approx. half the size of the MPEG-4 encoded version, and the quality will be pretty good in both cases.