I tried syncing a particular movie to an iPad & got an error message that it wasn’t able to transcode it. It turns out there was an quality/integrity issue with the file (nothing to do with MCEBuddy). As well, I have some content with sections of bad resolution. At first I thought it was buffering/network related, but it turns out it’s an issue with the file.
Is there anyway MCEBuddy can do a quality/integrity check of the file & let me know if there are issues?
Taking it a step further, can MCEBuddy either fix/repair or even improve the quality of a file?
The answer to that depends on the profile you’re using.
If you’re using an unprocessed profile, the video and audio streams are copied as it without any alterations (only slight container issues may be corrected).
If you’re using a regular profile then then some errors are detected and corrected but it also depends on which encoder is being used in the profile. Some encoders are able to handle certain types of errors better than others. Example, handrake is able to correct timing errors better than ffmpeg for most mpeg4 streams, where as ffmpeg will do better with mpeg2 data.
We have a LOT of testing with bad files. To give you an idea, each build of MCEBuddy goes through about 10,000 hours of file containing corrupted audio/video/container/metadata and converts > 99.9% of them before we release it (this number used to be close to 80% once upon a time).
Having said that there will always be some artifact left behind even after error correction but it’s also upto the player to handle these errors. Error are extremely common in video files, especially if they are recorded OTA or over cable. Most video players are quite resilient in handling errors, some (like Apple) are very picky. VLC is a great example of a software that handles errors very well during playback (and it comes for iOS devices, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux).
Thanks for taking the time to share, as that was super interesting & insightful. It also explains some of the issues I’ve been having. I’ve been trying to achieve the highest quality rips from ISO files (created using DVDFab cloning profile), quality that matches the original bluray or dvd (I assume I can’t improve the quality?). Since my ambitions exceed my abilities, I’ve been using the unprocessed profiles figuring that no compression, means no quality loss. I tried taking the high quality profiles for a test drive a couple of times, but never saw it to completion as each movie I tried took 12+ hrs on my computer, so I aborted. I suspect my older laptop & graphics card are too blame. I’ll try to get my hands on a newer/better laptop & see if that makes a different. I’d happily invest in a new computer if it meant I could have an automated process with high quality files.
If you’re using unprocessed profiles (especially large files like in GB’s), because it’s moving large amounts of data (copying audio and video with no recoding), it’s the hard disk and I/O speed that matter rather than CPU. You may see bigger bang for your buck in getting a high speed SSD disk instead of a faster CPU. For regular profiles, the CPU does matter a lot especially if you aren’t using hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration has a trade off, it’s 5x to 50x faster than a CPU but you sacrifice some quality relative to the final file size (e.g. a converted file with hardware encoding using the High Quality MP4 profile vs the same using the CPU with handbrake will yield a smaller file for the CPU or for the same output file size will yield a high quality file for the CPU converted file). Hardware encoders are getting better with each generation, so it’s a trade off between price v/s quality.
If you have time to spare let the CPU do the work in the background (that’s what MCEBuddy is designed to do)
on the other hand if you have a LOT of files to process (we have folks processing over 1000 videos a day with MCEBuddy), then hardware acceleration is the way to go
nothing beats the quality of an Unprocessed profile, just keep a SSD disk ready