CCE and HBO logo crashing

[J-Wo]

Hey guys, I know a lot of you have had problems with CCE crashing on the HBO "snow" logo on discs such as Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, etc. I think I may have narrowed down the problem... The problem seems to occur if I'm using the High-High (4000+) matrix, aka Fox Home Entertainment matrix. Doesn't seem to matter what version of CCE I'm using, either 2.67 or 2.70, trial version or not. But if I try the Quenc Low Bitrate matrix, it goes through fine! So perhaps it has something to do with that particular matrix. I'm going to do some testing with other matrices to see what else works and doesn't.... But in the meantime, does anyone have a suggested alternative to the Fox Home Entertainment matrix for encodes with an avg bitrate of 4000+?

[feedback]

does anyone have a suggested alternative to the Fox Home Entertainment matrix for encodes with an avg bitrate of 4000+?
Try 'Fox 2' or 'Sony 127 High' Matrix. Use for 4100+ avg. bitrate at a minimum...higher is better, use if you are not compressing too much.

[J-Wo]

I tried doing a search both for "fox 2" and "sony 127 high" but came up with nothing on doom9. I also don't see to find these matrices in the two zip files that seem to be floating around these forums. Could you possibly point me in the right direction, Feedback? Thanks!

[Fishman0919]

Hey guys, I know a lot of you have had problems with CCE crashing on the HBO "snow" logo on discs such as Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, etc. I think I may have narrowed down the problem... The problem seems to occur if I'm using the High-High (4000+) matrix, aka Fox Home Entertainment matrix. Doesn't seem to matter what version of CCE I'm using, either 2.67 or 2.70, trial version or not. But if I try the Quenc Low Bitrate matrix, it goes through fine! So perhaps it has something to do with that particular matrix. I'm going to do some testing with other matrices to see what else works and doesn't.... But in the meantime, does anyone have a suggested alternative to the Fox Home Entertainment matrix for encodes with an avg bitrate of 4000+?


CCE 2.66, 2.67 and early ver of 2.70 seem to have a problem with that part, raising the min bitrate for that segment to 2000 seemed to work for me....I tried a bunch of diff matrices but nothing worked except raising the min bitrate.... if I remember correctly cce sp 2.70.02.01 or 2.70.02.04 fixed the problem.

CCE SP 2.50 doesn't have the problem with the logo

PS found this link for some time back LINK (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=641181#post641181)

[feedback]

I tried doing a search both for "fox 2" and "sony 127 high" but came up with nothing on doom9. I also don't see to find these matrices in the two zip files that seem to be floating around these forums. Could you possibly point me in the right direction, Feedback? Thanks!
Fox 2 now comes in HC 018 encoder zip which you can get from doom9's download section...or just copy from below.

08 08 09 09 10 10 11 11
08 09 09 10 10 11 11 12
09 09 10 10 11 11 12 12
09 10 10 11 11 12 13 13
10 10 11 11 12 13 13 14
10 11 11 12 13 13 14 15
11 11 12 13 13 14 15 15
11 12 12 13 14 15 15 16

08 08 09 09 10 10 11 11
08 09 09 10 10 11 11 12
09 09 10 10 11 11 12 12
09 10 10 11 11 12 13 13
10 10 11 11 12 13 13 14
10 11 11 12 13 13 14 15
11 11 12 13 13 14 15 15
11 12 12 13 14 15 15 16

Here is the Sony 127 High matrix below.

08 08 08 09 11 13 14 17
08 08 08 11 13 14 17 18
08 09 10 11 14 17 17 19
09 10 13 13 14 17 18 127
10 13 13 14 16 17 127 127
13 13 14 16 17 20 127 127
13 13 14 17 19 23 127 127
13 14 17 19 127 127 127 127

08 08 08 09 10 10 11 11
08 08 09 10 10 11 11 12
08 09 10 10 11 11 12 12
09 10 10 11 11 12 13 127
10 10 11 11 12 13 127 127
10 11 11 12 13 13 127 127
11 11 12 13 13 14 127 127
11 12 12 13 127 127 127 127

I got these matrices from manono a while back.

[J-Wo]

right now I'm trying 2.70.02.06 and none of these matrices are working, nor is raising the min bitrate to 2000. I tried loading the item01.ecl file (dvd-rb creates it) directly into CCE, and got the following error message:

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/8643/clipboard01hh2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Any ideas what this means?

[J-Wo]

gasp... . I SOLVED IT!!!
Fooling around with various bitrates, I found that it was the max bitrate I had to raise. Here's the bitrate settings as found in rebuilder.ecl:

vbr_brate_avg=4119
vbr_brate_min=0
vbr_brate_max=7058

All I did was raise vbr_brate_max to 9000 and it worked perfectly. Hooraaaah! I also figured out I could use RB-Opt to set the global vbr max bitrate across all cells to 9000, which also worked.

[jdobbs]

That's probably ok for an occasional segment. But changing the max bitrate from the one set by DVD-RB could very probably cause stutter during playback. DVD-RB calculates it based upon the DVD Standard.

vbr_brate_avg=4119
vbr_brate_min=0
vbr_brate_max=7058

In this example it is very likely that this is a 29.97fps source that is being encoded at 23.976 (this is necessary in order to support hybrid sources). That means that 7058 will actually become 8822 during rebuild when the flags are reset. If you set it to 9000 -- you will be creating a video source that might peak up to 11250Kbs... add to that a 448 audio and you are at 11698... way over the DVD standard.

Note to all: Be very, very careful when you decide to "second guess" the settings of DVD-RB... you can end up with a coaster.

[Trahald]

I would think a softer matrix would help. (effectively makes compression easier.) Low or ultra low for the cell(s) with the snow in it. OR add softening filters to the .avs(s) for the cells with the snow in it.

the error from cce is saying that it cant fit the images in the max bitrate given (in refence to the vbv buffer). so raising the max will fix it. this isnt unknown. the reason noone suggested it to you is because it breaks compliancy (like jdobbs said)
If you are going to raise the max bitrate, see if there are any audio streams you can elliminate. Then the max bitrate can be raised safely. (although not always enough)

[J-Wo]

thanks for all your helpful input guys! I guess I spoke too soon when I declared success. The disc I was testing had 2 eps of six feet under in it. The first ep encoded fine but the second one had the same error, even though I inreased the max bitrate to 9000. So what I'll do now is leave the max bitrates at default, but change the matrix for the two troublesome cells from High_high_(4000+) to QLB, which I know works fine. I don't think there's an easy way to do it except for manually changing the matrix in rebuilder.ecl, is there?

[jdobbs]

What version of CCE are you using? I remember when this became an issue in early releases of v2.70 (if I recall correctly) and I had to raise the default minimum bitrate.

From the REBUILDER.TXT file (v0.83):

- Changed the default minimum bitrate (MIN_BITRATE) to
500Kbs. It was previously set to 100. This should
negate the possibility of getting CCE "MPVA VBF ovg
frame #" errors and DVD-RB's resulting "ERROR:
Encoder failed to create .M2V. Aborted."

From the REBUILDER.TXT file (v1.05.2):

- Lowered the default VBR minimum bitrate for CCE
to 300 (from 500). It was set to 500 in v0.83
in order to circumvent problems with CCE 2.70.
These seem to be no longer present, but as a
precaution code was added to dynamically increase
the to value to 500 in the event of problems.
Also added code that will automatically adjust it
back up to 500 if an encoding pass fails. The
lower value should result in slightly better
overall picture quality as fewer bits are wasted
on low demand scenes.

Try to manually raise the minimum bitrate to 500 and see if it corrects the problem. If not, try 750.

[writersblock29]

Strange... When I backed up my Band of Brothers DVDs (which have the HBO/static intro) I used only default settings in Rebuilder and everything came out just fine. They were full-disk copies, with nothing other than unused audio streams removed. I don't remember what version of Rebuilder was used when I backed them up (it was awhile ago), but they all play flawlessly. My encoder was CCE 2.5.

[jdobbs]

The problem doesn't exist in CCE v2.50... it was introduced in the early releases of v2.70 -- but I think it has been fixed.