Calculate Handbrake video encoding settings for Android

by Tyler Cunningham
tagged bitrate, dvd ripping, Handbrake, video encoding

Many of you may already be familiar with Handbrake, which is a video encoding tool useful for ripping DVDs and converting video files to various formats. It is an incredibly useful program, but figuring out which bitrate is ideal for your playback device can be a bit daunting. Thankfully, there is now a great little bitrate calculator which, after a bit of input from the user, will churn out the ideal settings. Here are a few things to be mindful of when using the calculator:

Quality definitely differs between low, medium and high but low isn’t going to make your video look like crap either. All your options are designed to be watch-able, but the bigger the screen the higher you’ll want to set the quality. When in doubt, Medium is always a good choice.

If you’re just encoding for your computer, just go for it. If you’re encoding for your mobile device, be sure to check its encoding specifications (for example, here are specs for the iPhone). While this calculator aims to stay within the bounds of mobile devices (at least at the “Low” quality setting), it’s possible it may exceed your device’s capabilities. It’s always best to double-check before putting in the time to encode a long movie.

The reason this calculator only handles video is because audio bitrate is going to be restricted by your device. For example, Apple devices should always encode stereo audio at 160kbps. A sampling rate of 48Khz is what you’re going to want to use in almost every case. If you don’t have any device restrictions, we recommend 256kbps for stereo audio. Feel free to choose whatever you’d like, but as a reference point you should know that most of the music you buy online is encoded at 192kbps.

Check out the source link below to use the calculator, and be sure to Google the video encoding specifications for your particular device for optimum results.

[via LifeHacker]

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Categorized as Android News

Comments

Eugenio

I’m sure the calculator would be great – if it worked. Tried with 3 different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Exploder), with security settings dialed all the way down to “Yes, please give me AIDS and chlamydia”, with no results. Pity.
Mach-X

It isn’t even that complex. Motorola Charm, android 2.1 or 2.2 I can’t remember. It’s real simple. Load up your source dvd, click the ‘ipod’ preset, the ‘width’ resolution will be set to 320, which is my phone’s QVGA horizontal res, the vertical res will set automatically depending on the aspect ratio of the movie. If your phone has a higher res, just set the horizontal to whatever your phone is and let the vertical set itself, with ‘keep aspect ratio’ checked. Click the ‘video’ tab, and hit the circle ‘target size’ and input ’500′. You can leave the rest if you like, but for better video quality balance, I hit ‘audio’ tab, set sample rate to 48, and bitrate to 128. Hit ‘start’. Drag and drop to your phone, android will play the file natively in the file browser. No other software necessary. And it will look and sound great in stereo headphones and be a mere 500 megs in size. I’ve tested file sizes from 150 to 700, anything 250 or less resulted in blockiness, 500 works perfectly.