Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

Yes, it increases the quality of the encoding because, in low bitrate scenarios, the second pass helps the encoder to allocate that bandwidth more efficiently.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

We are talking about an upload to Vimeo, there is no point to do a 2 pass encoding for that.

It would only make sense if the video has to be a given size, for instance when it is put on a optical disk.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

Ideally, you're not uploading H.264 to Vimeo at all. I don't unless it's UHD, because I don't have a Pro account so I get into size limitations with ProRes on a Plus account.

However, that's not true. 2-pass VBR will give you better quality, especially in low bitrate situations, and is for a wide variety of solutions, not just optical disc. I don't know where you're getting this idea, but it's not true.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

Why not, there is nothing inherently wrong about H.264.

Unless you want to provide a download function for the original upload H.264 or H.265 is just fine. And also it saves bandwidth because these codecs provide both intra- and inter-frame compression.

Feel free to do two-pass encoding sending your video to Vimeo and YouTue, I think you are wasting your time though.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

Lossy to lossy, like saving an MP3 file as a new MP3 file.

I get paid to deliver well-encoded content to clients, so my time is worth money.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

It depends on what bitrate you select, it not inherent to the codec.

H.264 and H.265 can be encoded all the way to lossless.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

The whole conversation on this thread is about taking an already compressed H.264 file and compressing it even more, has nothing to do with how much bitrate you can throw at H.264. In fact, the whole idea is to compress the file into a smaller file, hence where 2-pass VBR is probably a good idea if you at least want to see if you can avoid macroblocking from a (ultimately) third-generation compressed 8-bit 4:2:0 H.264.

It's also probably no more than visually lossless, and of course, you have to concur about generation loss. Taking an MP3 and saving it was a lossless WAV file doesn't make the audio lossless, even if you start at 320kps.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

What Noa said!!! I stayed on the fence for a while but my work was piling up and the MPEG-4 export was not only lower quality straight out of Edius, it was also very slow. Downloaded the TMPEG plugins - you have a month to test them - and immediately purchased them. In my line of work I process a ton of videos and this setup works very well even on yesterday's PCs.

Quality is much better, and it's crazy fast compared to Edius. So there, you have the best of both worlds, Edius convenience/ease/etc and x264 quality... it's really a no-brainer.

Re: alternatives to handbrake
 

If on Windows and want to use the x264 library as in Handbrake but you want a more configurable GUI with more options and presets try using VidCoder. You can throw almost any master at it. ProRes, AVI, DNxHD, MXF of various flavors. It does everything Handbrake does with more options.

https://vidcoder.net/

Chris Young
Sydney