I have written this guide to hopefully help the population understand the new formats of videos that are in production right now. If you want to know something about High Definition video and what to look for to get the results you're after, i recommend having a read. I apologise if anything doesn't make sense or is complicated. All information and specifics given correspond to the H.264 codec ONLY, any others will almost definitely have different numbers to go with them. Criticism welcome!

Vocabulary:
HD - High Definition
SD - Standard Definition
Pixels - The smallest dot on a screen
Resolution - Amount of pixels on the screen
Bitrate - Bits per second for video/audio (typically in kilobits/s, written kbps)
BD - Blu-Ray Disc
p (e.g. 720p) - Progressive
i (e.g. 1080i) - Interlaced

Background
Times have changed. In previous years all TV shows and Movies were, as we now consider, "standard" quality. This has been given the global abbreviation 480p/i, reflecting the 720 vertical columns by the 480 horizontal rows. The "p" means progressive while the "i" means interlaced. You can find more information on that at www.100fps.com. TV, in the past, was typically broadcasted at 480i, DVDs *usually* released in 480p.

As i said, time has changed and so has the quality of the digital videos that we are now capable of watching. We are now capable of watching "High Definition" video (aka HD video) which is either known as 720p or 1080p. 720p has a typical resolution of 1280x720 or thereabouts (in reality it is typically 1366x768, but 720p is much easier to remember). 1080p is 1920x1080. You can get the total amount of pixels displayed on the screen by multiplying the two numbers together, and you'll see that 1080p is just about double 720p.

HD vs SD
As stated above HD videos basically have a larger resolution. It can mostly be seen as doubles between 720 and 1080p. 480p video has less than half the resolution (thus, the quality and amount of pixels - its about 2.5 times less than 720p) as 720p. 1080p would therefore have about 5 times the quality and pixels of 480p, and double that of 720p. That's because HD resolutions are widescreen. This works the same way as filesize and bitrate. A 1080p release should be twice the size of a 720p release, assuming it's the same video length. I believe this is the easiest way to look at things. Will go into filesizes in the "Things to Remember" section.

Because of the much greater amount of pixels visible in the same area, viewing a HD video on a HDTV will look much crisper with better matching colours and no jagged edges. Strands of hair will be much better defined and realistic, excessive blurring of such details as a result of low resolution can soon be seen as a thing of the past altogether. Watching HD videos is on a whole new level than that of watching SD videos and i suppose you need to have a look at a Blu-Ray Movie on a HDTV to really understand what the differences are, side by side to a regular DVD.

Downloading
This is where things can become complicated. How do YOU know if a video is really HD or not? What is there to look for and what will i be expecting? Why doesn't the resolution alone mean that it's HD and why are current so called "HD" videos not HD? These will be answered in this section.

There are two basic aspects of a video that really define the quality of it's contents. These two things are the RESOLUTION and the BITRATE. As a rule of thumb see these two things as conjoined and must be matching to get something true to its description.

Better definitions of the terms:
Resolution - The amount of horizontal lines multiplied by the amount of vertical lines gives you the resolution. For 1080p video, it is 1920 horizontal lines by 1080 vertical lines. The more dots there are, the more data there to feed the bitrate to.
Bitrate - The average amount of data an audio/video file uses every second. Understand this is usually described in kiloBITS/second (kbps). To find the kiloBYTES per second, divide the kbps by eight. To find the total filesize from here, multiply the kilobytes per second by how many seconds are in the video overall. Divide by 1024 to find the size in megabytes.

Okay, now for some specific info. There is great variation in bitrate for every version of a movie. Remember that the resolution is directly effected by the bitrate. A too low bitrate for the resolution will result in alot of lost quality and blurriness, the video would look much better with a lower resolution. A too high bitrate for a specific resolution results in mostly wasted disk space with minimal quality gain. Just keep that in mind. Here are the resolutions with their average bitrates that you would find. Any less or too much more and it probably won't really be worth it, but there are exceptions.



There it is, for the most part anyway. If the numbers don't match very similarly to that then you probably don't have a very knowledgable encoder and most likely isn't what you would want to be downloading for decent results for HD video. It does depend on the encoders personal opinion and the type of video, such as action or drama, but should definitely be within those guidelines. Both pieces of information will send off the corresponding answer, if you find a video that is 5500kbps then you shouldn't expect it to be anything other than 720p.

As long as the bitrate and resolution correspond, and of course the original source was a Blu-Ray Disc for HD videos, then you can be happy that you found yourself a good HD Quality movie.

Be aware of the real specs of titles and what BD-Rips exactly are. BD-Rip just means that the source was a Blu-Ray Disc, which have either a 720p or 1080p video on there. A good example is newartriot. His newer releases are all from a Blu-Ray Disc source but he has downscaled the video to 480p and has done so to the bitrate accordingly. Even though it was downscaled, there was more data initially to work with and so the result would usually be better than with the standard DVD without downscaling. Depending on the releaser you will have the type of video you are after, many have made good names for themselves and are trustworthy in their work.

Things to Remember
1. You cannot add detail that isn't there, so having a 480p DVD source and making it 720p and having it released with 6000kbps will definitely NOT be a HD release.

2. BR-Rips are known for releases who used an already encoded BD-Rip, usually that was 720p or 1080p. These are typically much smaller in size but greatly inferior in quality. Usually not very trustworthy as a download if you're after HD videos. Only a source that was directly from the BD can be considered HD really.

3. Anime and Cartoons usually need a lower bitrate to get similar results because of the much simpler colours and shades and typically slow movement between images. A 720p Anime could have a bitrate as low as 2000kbps and be of exceptional quality and referred to as HD.

4. ALL information gathered and researched by myself was about the H.264 codec in specific. I wouldn't advise taking any numbers and using them for other codecs.

5. Most real HD releases will be in the .MKV format. If it's not then theres a good chance it isn't a good release, so that is definitely something to keep in mind.

6. Expect extremely large files for HD content. 720p movies around 2 hours will easily exceed 4GB in most situations. 1080p Videos are usually over 10GB in size.

7. The numbers here don't include the audio bitrate. Remember that full surround sound audio streams can add an extra 1500kbps to the overall bitrate, and will be a large impact on the size.

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That ends the guide, hope this is useful information for some, enjoy your HD movies ;)

Feel free to PM me for anything regarding this guide as ill be happy to respond [size="3"][/size]

edit: Wow.. having a quick look over i messed up a crucial part - horizontal and vertical. Oops

Awesome guide mate! Clear and easy to understand, right to the point. Very, very informative. Thanks again Harb!

very nice guide m8 but number 5 is just how scene releases are and dont count to quality its just how they decided on for rules when releasing and dont apply to public releases



.MKV is just a container and has no effect on the quality of the encode but as it is versatile it was chosen to be the container for scene releases because it handles multiple audio and subtitle tracks , its an old container and i doubt support will ever pick up for hardware and media players so we use the .MP4 container for releases as it has more support and makes no difference. for example if we took one of our encodes and put it in the .mkv container it wont work on ps3 or xbox 360 but using .mp4 they play perfect and the encoded video hasnt been affected depending your settings you can also use .AVI as a container but it has lower limits than .mp4 or .mkv so i wouldnt bother trying to use it.

It looks like things will change in time, and although matroska has been around for a while it's only recently been adopted and well, needed overall. If you check out DivX 7 which isn't too far off you can see that they're now supporting the matroska container. HD videos are becoming more popular, and so are surround sound systems and large TVs. I don't think any other container can come close to supporting a HD H.264 video, DTS/Dolby Digital audio and subs.

The container just holds the data so the quality of an mkv is no different to an mp4, its just the capabilities and limitations of MP4 vs MKV that is the difference.

To directly respond to scene releases and so on, that's part of the point really. The guides about being able to distinguish a SD video from a HD one and theres a pretty low chance you'll find an MP4 1080p video. Most of your releases are SD with stereo audio and compatibility is the most important aspect there and i'm sure many people want a 1.5GB file than a 5GB one for a single movie. I also wouldn't call the current consoles "media centres" or "HD playback" either, they still have trouble with certain avi and mp4s and play games at 720p.

Thanks for the responses joker and paulx

the only people who use .MKV as a standard container is the scene and as thats associated with pirated copys and all the other legal aspects the larger companys wont rush through any support .... ive had a quick look about and the only hardware supporting .MKV is the LG BD370
LG Blu-Ray Player supporting Matroska http://www.matroska.org/node/43


look for .MP4 support and your spoilt for choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14

i do agree with you that matroska is a better container and has more features but for what we need and do .MP4 is far better

if a source only has stereo well only release stereo but if you look at the posts youll see our releases come with dual audio tracks so the peer has a choice of 2 channel stereo or 5.1 and yes we aim for our releases to be compatible to the world ... all encoders do the reason we include 2 ch stereo is for xbox 360 users because microsux still havnt sorted 5.1 support unless its AC3 and in the .AVI container or WMA but thats just down to the console and using .mp4 or .mkv wouldnt change that.
the ps3 also wont support .mkv but plays .mp4 with no problems

maybe in the future when or if .mkv support is more supported then well change our container but right now and a good example is Gran Torino 2009 BRRip we have 1 video track - 2 audio tracks and 2 subtitle tracks all muxed into 1 .mp4 file and works perfectly .... using .mkv would mean we'd loose hundreds of peers who use their consoles to view films or looking at recent sales xbox announced 2 weeks back that world wide sales have passed 30 million consoles and sonys ps3 21.30 million units sold ... thats quite a few peers to ignore just by using a different container

the only advantage i can see right now for .MKV Vs .MP4 is audio support but DTS is huge for the average peer using a home connection or AC3 but tbh and this is just my personal opinion i cant tell the difference between a AC3 audio track against a AAC audio track
video wouldnt be affected and i could very easy encode a rip @ 1080 and use .mp4

be intresting to see what others think though but thats my 2 cents worth

I couldn't agree with you more. As there are tons of users who use consoles, but there are the lot of us who can/would use the .mkv and a 5gb movie well over some of the other 1.5gb encodes. No disrespect, I love your ups and am impressed with the quality you get in there for the size. Only there are a lot of us picky folks who watch their movies on large displays and would love a 4000+kbs 1080p true HD/Blu Ray movie. I recently upgraded my bandwidth so on the big action movies I have been looking for these .mkv files. Though they are long in dl time, the quality is supurb. Thanks both of you for the awesome info!

edit: Hey paulx, I would love to see a 1080p .mp4 from you, I would def. download it! I just don't think the console guys will get that if its over 4gb, I would though lol.

Without a doubt mp4 has much more current support than matroska, but both are beaten by ASP encoded videos - namely xvid and divx. Currently they're still more popular than both mp4 and matroska release wise aswell, and are VERY widely supported now despite being the main target for pirates. With that it's debatable whether matroska will become more accepted soon or not though. Sony would be doing its best to make Blu-Ray discs the only way to watch HD movies, but at the same time both sony and microsoft need to be able to support the end user as much (or better than) the other. If MS integrates MKV playback, so will sony and vice versa. They need sales after all.

I am in no means trying to change anyones mind on how to encode videos or anything like that, your releases would be worthless to many people if they were in mkv and can't really be improved more than they already are. I have seen you include 5.1ch optional files for PS3 users since the 360 still has its own dramas with it. I too also can't really tell the difference between an encoded track, even as low as 128kbps stereo, but the extra channels and the untouched audio is generally included in many HD releases.

Just pointing out that if someone from the minority who would want to download a 1080p video from the net, it would most likely have DTS/DD audio (untouched) and be of a 10GB+ file in the mkv container. I've been seeing recently lots of m2ts and wmv files claiming 1080p at about 4GB to fit on a FAT32 drive but thats far too small and definitely doubt it'd turn out well as wmv. Yeah you could easily make a HD MP4 but releasers don't really do it too often and is more for the enthusiast anyway atm. That's all i was getting at really

As your an encoder and releaser paul, any criticism or false information out of what i have there? Any feedback would be great mate

without going to off topic we did think about it but public releases that size would die in a week ... private theyd be ok but i dont like private


nope great post and why i added my thoughts and your right if 1 changed the other would follow suit but releases that size are better quality but dont suit public trackers because of greedy peers who hit n run without ratios forcing them to seed and most isp now have limits and fair use policys so we spent the last few weeks redoing our encodes so their smaller but still the same quality only drawback is we never ever win the 1st post race but we dont care


and 99.999% of the time that release will be a scene release ... their isnt many public releasers doing them because of the work and size they are and the fact they die through lack of seeds

for speed and large files people will use private trackers so us public peers get slower and less quality and its a shame but far to many dupes and wrongly tagged releases and the swarms are split over to many torrents

I think you guys are right where we need you. There are plenty of those large files out there, I love the way yours and Cipry's releases are, and well seeded I might add. No need to waste your time and effort doing what someone else already does, and you guys do what you do best, IMO. Thanks for the info mate.

Great guide man but what is it when they say PDTV?

Havn't checked on this thread in a while, sorry for not answering sooner. PDTV stands for Pure Digital TV, basically a stream that has had no conversion from analog to digital. This usually needs a digital PC capture card to directly encode the mpeg stream being sent. It isn't really anything special, but the encoded result ends up with a better source. Difference is essentially minimal though.

PDTV Link

thanks for the guide ie

CODE
480p, AKA DVD-Rip (SD) -------------> 1000kbps - 2000kbps
720p, AKA 720p BD-Rip (Half HD) ----> 4000kbps - 7000kbps
1080p, AKA 1080p BD-Rip (Full HD) --> 8000kbps - 14000kbps

*Values are relational to each other and all relate to the H.264 codec ONLY*

What's the best software to burn HD .MKV files that keeps the high def video aka 1920x1080 and the DTS or at least 5.1 audio? Is it possible to burn these on standard DL disks?

Thanks for any help you can give!

For decent quality and the ability to play it, you'll need a blu-ray video burning program, a blu-ray player and blu-ray discs + burner. The best way to watch these videos would be to get a device such as the WDTV and hook it up to ur network or transfer data via usb / external hdd and watch it on your TV. Saves time, money, hassle and discs - and provides so much convenience

Very educating I must say...Thanks!

thx this was very informative looking fwd to see an updated version of this topic, still much appreciated you shared this info

Thanks for the compliments Kreator. Most of this info is still fairly up to date, nothing major has happened as of this writing besides 3D (which i'm not knowledgeable enough about to comment), though if there is something specific you think should be added or updated let me know, i'll be happy to update the guide, with the mods permission of course.

edit: spelling