Video Quality Issue

[MarkVS]

Hey - Keep in mind...I'm no expert, but I've encoded a lot of video and learned a lot over the years but there's still a lot I don't know.

I have a DVD series I ripped using MAKEMKV.....these are pal DVD's. The show was originally NTSC so there's the slight PAL speedup which I can't stand. I can't fix this with handbrake (that I know of), but I can with AVIDEMUX using the change FPS filters from pal to film in the audio/video filters....that's not my problem. That part works GREAT......but it's the video quality that's not nearly as good as Handbrake. Handbrake is more automatic with the settings. With avidemux, I add my filters for audio/video......then I choose my encoder which is either HEVC or x624. I uncheck use advanced settings in the video encoder and use the MAIN or HIGH profile, then I use a CRF of 16 or 17...This is a 480p older series but the DVD quality is nice and grainy and doesn't need deinterlacing...No matter what encoder settings I've tried, the video quality using avidemux looks like CRAP compared to handbrake. I can use HEVC with a CRF of 15 and it looks worse than if I use handbrake HEVC with a CRF of 20. The grain remains with handbrake but it's totally gone and smoothed out with AVIDEMUX....can someone help me with the encoder settings? I can't figure out what the He!! I'm doing wrong.

Thanks

[eumagga0x2a]

Very obvious questions: Have you checked that all the post-processing stuff in Avidemux Preferences and in the "Video" --> "PostProcessing" menu is turned off? (Post-processing is no-op with HW accelerated video decoding active anyway, but better safe than sorry.) If you want to retain grain then please make sure you enable the "grain" tune in x264 or x265 configuration.

In any case, please use the latest Avidemux nightly available (or build yourself from git master). It is better than the release cautiously estimated 99% of the time.

If the quality still remains substantially worse than with Handbrake, please provide samples (about 100 MiB of the original MPEG-PS, this source re-encoded to H.264 or HEVC using Handbrake, the Avidemux project script from re-encoding this sample the same way in Avidemux).

[MarkVS]

Very obvious questions: Have you checked that all the post-processing stuff in Avidemux Preferences and in the "Video" --> "PostProcessing" menu is turned off? (Post-processing is no-op with HW accelerated video decoding active anyway, but better safe than sorry.) If you want to retain grain then please make sure you enable the "grain" tune in x264 or x265 configuration.

In any case, please use the latest Avidemux nightly available (or build yourself from git master). It is better than the release cautiously estimated 99% of the time.

If the quality still remains substantially worse than with Handbrake, please provide samples (about 100 MiB of the original MPEG-PS, this source re-encoded to H.264 or HEVC using Handbrake, the Avidemux project script from re-encoding this sample the same way in Avidemux).

OH MY G........That was it!!! I just tested a small portion and unchecking everything in post-processing fixed the video quality issue....It looks exactly like handbrake now. Sorry that was a setting I didn't think to check.