handbreak and video pre-transcoding help

[Pandemic]

I'm looking into putting some videos onto veetle.com (live streaming website) and I'm running into issues.

First off, among my machines, my power house has dual radeon 5830's. This page (http://veetle.com/index.php/article/view/preTranscode) says there's software from AMD called Avivo that's meant to pretranscode video. Otherwise, there's handbreak.

I just downloaded handbreak and I'm thinking about using it (along with the 2.6ghz core 2 duo) to do this.

My laptop has an i5 but I'd rather take more time on a desktop with proper cooling.

So, what's your feedback? Has anyone used Avivo or handbreak?

[Leung]

what format does veetle require the video to be in?

[Pandemic]

Transcoding Suggestions

MP4 container: Veetle works great with the MP4 container format, so name your files "myFilename.mp4".
h264 video encoding: This is the only supported video encoding.
AAC or MP3 audio encoding: You should downsample 5.1 surround sound to stereo because 90% of viewers have stereo speakers. When 5.1 sound is played through stereo speakers, important channels will be missing. Most of the time, you can't even hear the actors speaking.
Resolution: The final resolution should always be equal or less than the source resolution. Setting the final resolution higher than the source is a waste of space. 720p videos are suggested to be downsampled to 960x544. Standard 720x576 DVD can be kept at the same the same resolution. In Handbrake's picture tab, check "keep aspect ratio" and set "anamorphic" to none so your video doesn't come out squashed.
Video bitrate: A good rule of thumb is to set your video kbps same as the final video pixel width. For example, if the final resolution is 960x544, set your video bitrate to 960 kbps. If you're using a higher x264 profile, you'll need less to acheive the same quality - somewhere around 800-900 kbps.
Audio bitrate: Set it to 96 kbps. That's the threshold for hearing any difference. At 64 kbps, you start hearing the hoarseness. 128 kbps is very clear, but only only people would a good set of speakers will appreciate it.
FPS: Some newer transcoding software will do variable framerate (VFR) if you don't specify a hard framerate. Veetle's player can sometimes run into issues playing back VFR smoothly. You should set the final framerate to be the same as the source framerate. To figure out the source framerate, play the original video in VLC and go to Tools > Codec Information. Handbrake's scan log can also tell you the source framerate.
2-pass: Turn it on. When 2-pass is turned on, transcoding time will nearly be doubled, but final quality should be much better. On the first pass, the software will analyze which scenes are fast moving and which are slow. Then on the second pass, it will assign more information to the slow moving scenes and less to the fast moving ones. That's because the human eye tends to not deeply analyze the quality of fast moving scenes, so it would be a waste of space to assign a lot of information to these scenes.
Pyramidal B-frames off: Pyramidal B-frames are not supported by the Veetle player and can cause the stream to stutter especially during camera pans.
Weighted P-frames off: Weighted P-frames are not supported by the Veetle player and can make the stream gray.
8x8 Transform off: Videos may have the wrong aspect ratio when this is turned on.