Does anyone else get blocking with Nero AVC?

Hey all, I'm trying to find a way to compress my DVD collection to something a little more space efficient than uncompressed VOB dumps. I'm looking at H.264. I tried x264 with meGUI, and although the results were fantastic, there was just too much user interaction required for one conversion. I'm looking at Nero Recode now, since it's GUI is much nicer and it is easier to que up lots of movies with minimal input. Unfortunately, I'm getting a lot of blocking around the edges of stuff with my converts. I'm compressing a DVD down to Standard AVC at 2mbps. I've got the deblocking strength set at -1, should I increase it to -2? I've seemed to notice all that does is fuzz up the film.

2 mbps is a relatively high bitrate, so you shouldn't get any visible artifacts. The fact that you do see artifacts let me think something is going wrong. Can you post a screen shot showing the issue ? Apart from that, the higher the deblocking strength, the stronger the inloop deblocking, so if you have blocking, increase the strength, don't reduce it.

What other settings you are using? 2pass best/extra decision? Changing deblock strength to -2 is not increasing the strength, on the contrary it decreases it.. Try setting it to 0. You could also try HDTV AVC and enable 8x8 transform.

What's your source material? Screenshots?

welcome to AVC, the codec that blocks in flat areas ;)

Here it is with 8x8: Yeah, all the problems gone. And the convert times shot up. And it won't work on my PSP. :(

If you can't use 8x8, have you tried if extra decision quality makes any difference? Also one thing you can try is disabling some/all psychovisual enhancements.

Try using x264 with the AQ patch; it helps avoid blocking in flat areas at the cost of increased bitrate. Use --aq-strength 0.5 or higher and see if that helps.