why blue ray for h264 hd films??? [Archive]

Blue_MiSfit

6th December 2006, 16:03

SeeMoreDigital

6th December 2006, 16:37

Indeed,

There's no practical need for "blue laser" disc technology as current DVD-9 disc's provide more than adequate storage for high-def movies using high quality compression codecs such as MPEG-4 Part-10....

Sony of-course want to shove Blu-ray down out throats because they'll make both the high-def movies and new players to spin them in!

So in reality, it all about forcing us consumers to use new and more secure types of copy protection :devil:

foxyshadis

6th December 2006, 16:46

Actually, AACS can be combined with DVD-9 easily, the same way CSS-encrypted files can be stored on the hard drive. It's applied to the files, not a function of the medium. I'm sure the AACS keys could be put into the same unavailable area that current CSS keys are, if there was any desire to, but most likely the studios will drop DVD, and of course hardly anyone else wants to use DRM.

I'm quite certain that as soon as HD players become popular, there will be a thriving market for HD DVD-9, the same way VCDs and SVCDs have been popular on DVD players, even to the present.

As for quality, well, the quality of a 1080p film on a DVD-9 in the one-pass encoders studios usually use, is the HD version of one-cd backups autogk makes. It's watchable, but if you've spent $500+ on an HD player now, it's not going to impress you at all. The codecs we use are much slower but better. (Although I've yet to see a head-to-head of codecs configured for realtime or super-realtime encoding, it would be cool to see where x264 comes out.)

Jay Bee

6th December 2006, 16:47

Yeah, but how many of those are there? And they're full of DRM.

Look at it from the perspective of a content provider. You've got a choice

1) Do the technically elegant thing and use existing red laser media to deliver HD material at lower bitrates using new compression methods, with no additional DRM - and face people trading stuff online easily, as is done today with DVD

2) Use a new media, with new DRM and massive space, so that they can continue to utilize their MPEG-2 encoding systems, and prevent (at least temporarily) unauthorized copying.

Now, I would love it if #1 is what happened, because it's so much better for people who want to backup their material. This is the real downside to #2, but that's what really happened. Of course, there's a lot more to the DRM than simple copy protection, like HDCP grrrr...

Still, I don't see a way to differentiate between people like us who want to make legitimate copies for personal backup, and the script kiddies online who rip and trade. We're both technically doing the same thing, from the provider's perspective.

What a shame.

This may sound like a silly question but why is doing backups so important? If you buy a DVD you have it right there, on a medium that will last for about 100 years if you're careful. Making a "backup" usually means transfering it to a medium with a lifetime of only a handful of years while compromising the quality due to reencoding. :confused:

For the record, I do think the new protection systems are way over the top, I'm just wondering why "backups" are so important to a lot of people here. Personally I'm interested in video encoding as a means to archive PAL TV recordings (not movies) to harddisk instead of DVD-R's. Judging by the lack of interest in interlaced encoding and decoding I have come to the conclusion that most people here encode mainly Hollywood Movies and Animees. Why?

Again, this is a sincere question, not some kind of troll or flame.

SeeMoreDigital

6th December 2006, 17:06

As for quality, well, the quality of a 1080p film on a DVD-9 in the one-pass encoders studios usually use, is the HD version of one-cd backups autogk makes. It's watchable, but if you've spent $500+ on an HD player now, it's not going to impress you at all. I hear what you're saying... But there's really no excuss for HD disc's not to be encoded to the highest possible standard - technology permiting at the time.

They've got the money to buy and/or develop their own encoding equipment. And access to either the original film masters or uncompressed/lossless digital masters. And should have the know-how, to do the job right.

Sirber

6th December 2006, 17:08

Easier to share a 9GB disc than a 30GB disc :)

foxyshadis

6th December 2006, 17:43

I hear what you're saying... But there's really no excuss for HD disc's not to be encoded to the highest possible standard - technology permiting at the time.

They've got the money to buy and/or develop their own encoding equipment. And access to either the original film masters or uncompressed/lossless digital masters. And should have the know-how, to do the job right.

It would be nice. The extremely subpar initial bluray releases showed they weren't really ready (or just didn't care?) to deliver the HD "experience". I do fully agree with you that after all the weeks or months of filming and post-processing, they should think nothing of spending some money and time for the best encoder. Some do, but certainly not all. =\

Once tools like Scenarist really improve their codecs the problem will diminish, and studios will probably end up pushing a lot of HD discs filled with barely more than what a DVD can hold. =p

Sharktooth

6th December 2006, 21:58

This may sound like a silly question but why is doing backups so important? If you buy a DVD you have it right there, on a medium that will last for about 100 years if you're careful. Making a "backup" usually means transfering it to a medium with a lifetime of only a handful of years while compromising the quality due to reencoding. :confused:

For the record, I do think the new protection systems are way over the top, I'm just wondering why "backups" are so important to a lot of people here. Personally I'm interested in video encoding as a means to archive PAL TV recordings (not movies) to harddisk instead of DVD-R's. Judging by the lack of interest in interlaced encoding and decoding I have come to the conclusion that most people here encode mainly Hollywood Movies and Animees. Why?

Again, this is a sincere question, not some kind of troll or flame.
Are you kidding or what?
There are hundreds of reasons to backup what you legally obtained.
Starting from backing it up to ensure the "life" of the product (accidents happen... and you may scratch your disk) or just to remove all protections and convert the content into a particular format to make it play on your preferred devices (portable media players or cell phones for example)...
There are laws in every countries that give the end-user the right to do it while COMPANIES WANT YOU TO ACT LIKE A MARIONETTE and DO ONLY WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO with your regularly bought product.

Jay Bee

7th December 2006, 01:12

Are you kidding or what?
There are hundreds of reasons to backup what you legally obtained.
Starting from backing it up to ensure the "life" of the product (accidents happen... and you may scratch your disk)...

If I bought a DVD and it broke, a reencoded DVD-R version wouldn't really make me happy. I think I'd rather buy a new DVD off eBay. Mabe it's just me.

...or just to remove all protections and convert the content into a particular format to make it play on my preferred devices (portable media players or cell phones for example)...

I was thinking that maybe this is an important reason but I wouldn't have called this process "making a backup". Maybe I'm taking the term "Backup" too literally.

There are laws in every countries that give the end-user the right to do it while COMPANIES WANT YOU TO ACT LIKE A MARIONETTE and DO ONLY WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO with your regularly bought product.

I am aware that I have the right to make a Backup of a legally bought DVD but that doesn't automatically explain (to me) why it is important.

giandrea

7th December 2006, 02:04

I perfectly understand what you are saying, that the big companies want to enforce upon us a stricter DRM system, but let's have a look at the facts:
a DVD-9 holds 7.92 GiB
this, for a two hour movie, is an equivalent bitrate of 9448 kbps.
Now you tell me that I can compress a 1080p movie with multiple 7.1 channels audio tracks, and still have enough space for the DVD menu and eventually some special contents, at that bitrate?

Let's be sincere, the new disk supports (Blue Ray and HD DVD) were a natural evolution and were infact needed.
If the companies decided to keep the DVD-9 format, they would have included AACS anyway, and the disks would not be compatible with the actual stand alone players, so let's not blame everything on the supports... :rolleyes:

SeeMoreDigital

7th December 2006, 11:02

I perfectly understand what you are saying, that the big companies want to enforce upon us a stricter DRM system, but let's have a look at the facts:
a DVD-9 holds 7.92 GiB
this, for a two hour movie, is an equivalent bitrate of 9448 kbps.
Now you tell me that I can compress a 1080p movie with multiple 7.1 channels audio tracks, and still have enough space for the DVD menu and eventually some special contents, at that bitrate?Menu's should not create a "space" problem.... But as for special features, makings of, deleted scenes and other non "main movie" stuff. In my opinion, this kind of stuff should "always" be placed on a separate disc!

Sagittaire

7th December 2006, 23:43

I perfectly understand what you are saying, that the big companies want to enforce upon us a stricter DRM system, but let's have a look at the facts:
a DVD-9 holds 7.92 GiB
this, for a two hour movie, is an equivalent bitrate of 9448 kbps.
Now you tell me that I can compress a 1080p movie with multiple 7.1 channels audio tracks, and still have enough space for the DVD menu and eventually some special contents, at that bitrate?

1) Movie are really compressible source. 1080p with H264 at 6-8 Mbps done very high quality.

2) LC-AAC at 448 Kbps done extremely high quality for 7.1 audio. Very higher quality for each chanel than DD 5.1 448 Kbps.

It's easy to make HD (audio and video) with advanced audio and video codec on simple DVD9.

IgorC

7th December 2006, 23:47

fenomeno83

8th December 2006, 00:43

giandrea

8th December 2006, 04:00

1) Movie are really compressible source. 1080p with H264 at 6-8 Mbps done very high quality.

2) LC-AAC at 448 Kbps done extremely high quality for 7.1 audio. Very higher quality for each chanel than DD 5.1 448 Kbps.

It's easy to make HD (audio and video) with advanced audio and video codec on simple DVD9.

Yes, it may be possible (even tought that AAC is not an official audio codec for Blue Ray or HD DVD), but it is an extremely border line situation.

Would you prefer your 1080p movie to be encoded to 6Mbps, with some artefacts certainly showing up in some part of the movie, or would you prefer a transparent high quality encode at 10-12 Mbps (I'm talking about AVC in both cases).

I prefer the latter, and with all that space you can fit longer movies on a single DVD,... well Blue Ray, without sacrifying the quality; and you can have as many language track as you want, no problem with space; and lots of special contents, etc...

And off course, much more space for personal backup on Blue Ray disks :) And then think, if you trade a bit of quality, you will be able to fit multiple HD movies on a single Blue Ray disk... ;) ;)

Blue_MiSfit

8th December 2006, 07:54

Are you kidding or what?
There are hundreds of reasons to backup what you legally obtained.
Starting from backing it up to ensure the "life" of the product (accidents happen... and you may scratch your disk) or just to remove all protections and convert the content into a particular format to make it play on your preferred devices (portable media players or cell phones for example)...
There are laws in every countries that give the end-user the right to do it while COMPANIES WANT YOU TO ACT LIKE A MARIONETTE and DO ONLY WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO with your regularly bought product.

Seriously. Have any of you ever lived with kids, or college students?

Forget about holding on to original copies of ANYTHING. They will NOT survive. They simply will not. You will keep having to buy more and more copies.

I would never purchase the same content on more than one format.

Egladil

8th December 2006, 13:16

1) Movie are really compressible source. 1080p with H264 at 6-8 Mbps done very high quality.

i don't see how 8 Mbps could be enough for 1080p. maybe if the source is SDTV upscaled to 1080p, but if you have really good 1080p material with say, a little film grain, 8 Mbps will not be enough. not at all.

long movies like troy, lotr, alexander, gladiator won't fit on a dvd9. i had problems (picture quality degradation) getting gladiator to fit on a dvd9 in 720p. with real sharp 1080p... no way

EDIT: I mean you can compress 1080p with 8 Mbps, but then it will look compressed, and a trained eye will spot the atrifacts - you don't want that (at least I don't want)

Sharktooth

8th December 2006, 14:39

dont underestimate AVC...

SeeMoreDigital

8th December 2006, 15:11

EDIT: I mean you can compress 1080p with 8 Mbps, but then it will look compressed, and a trained eye will spot the atrifacts - you don't want that (at least I don't want)Indeed a "trained eye" can already spot artefacts in long movies (such as: Troy, Lord of the Rings, Alexander, Gladiator) when encoded to std-def MPEG-2 DVD... But the vast majority of viewers don't have trained eyes!

HyperDrive

8th December 2006, 17:16

This may be too much to ask, but is there any way to capture truly uncompressed (1920*1080 or higher resolution, 24 bits/pixel, wide gamut color space at 4:4:4 sampling, at at least 24 frames/second) digital video for encoder testing? As far as I have seen, everyone is using MPEG-2 source data for H.264 conversion. I would very much like to see a comparison between uncompressed -> MPEG-2 -> H.264 video and uncompressed -> H.264. :(

alanzeratul

8th December 2006, 17:38

Transcoding 20Mb/s MPEG-2 1080p to AVC, maybe 8Mb/s will be far enough for transparency.

But i don't even think 20Mb/s MPEG-2 is enough for 1080p meterials. That's why digital tv programs have been encoded with H.264/AVC codec at same bandwidth/bitrate instead of MPEG-2 recently.

foxyshadis

8th December 2006, 18:09

Hyperdrive: See http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=114928

The MPEG-2 HD signals are pretty widely regarded as being quite bad source quality, but if it's all you have you make do.

Trahald

9th December 2006, 19:25

If I bought a DVD and it broke, a reencoded DVD-R version wouldn't really make me happy. I think I'd rather buy a new DVD off eBay. Mabe it's just me.Thats probably the issue there. if you dont like the quality of dvd-r backups then backing up probably isnt for you. (although you can certainly split the movie or just use a dvd-r9) people that do do backups think the dvd-r backups are good enough. An old dvd player made a terrible scratch in my 'family man' dvd a few years ago, before i got a chance to back it up. so i bought another one (bought a previously viewed one at block buster) but it was still like $10 bux. id rather have broken the backup then i could just back up the original again. (i dont watch the originals.. i put the wear on the backup) some of my dvds have never been in my dvd player. just my pc. but as i stated. this only works for me because i think my backups look like or very close to the original. also i can kill logos and warning that make it take longer to get to the movie.

mrcorbo

9th December 2006, 20:56

I encodec an mpeg2 1920x1080 interlaced movie (audio stereo) of 803 mb (5min and 44 seconds).I use automkv and set audio aac nero mp4 to 0.35 (about 96-100 kbit/s) video encoder to x264,set width resolution to 1280(to get a 1280x720 progressive final movie),profile cq_asp_q2_eq_crf with crf set to 18.
Result:
my final movie size is 272 mb!!(vs. 803 mb of source movie!!).
on my eyes video quality and audio quality are the same of original movie(monitor lcd 19' and 7.1 speakers set).
to decode I use media player classic and codec coreavc(for h264) set prefer as external filetr in the player!!for audio aac internal filters are good!
ps:with others player or codec for h264 video is slow!with coreavc+media player classic perfect!!!

I think the fact that you are viewing these on a 19' monitor factors into your ability to perceive compression artifacts. Even given the close viewing distance.

Keep in mind the ideal of these new disc formats should be to be perceptually lossless and that there will be people that will be displaying these on 100'+ screens with digital projectors.

I think that perceptually lossless video that can stand up to this level of scrutiny would be a tough proposition on a DVD9. And that's not even considering that fact that even if it is possible, there's no way you get this and truly lossless audio, which to me is just as important of an addition to the new disc formats.

Since the DRM was happening either way (this has nothing to do with the disc format in the case of HD-DVD, at least) and you were also going to have to buy the movies again in the new format either way these are non-starters as to why a new disc format was deemed necessary.

The only thing I really accept as a plausible non-technical reason for moving away from the red-laser formats is the fact that they get to sell you a whole series of electronic devices to play/record them. Given how poor the margins are on DVD-related devices, this is, no doubt a contributing factor.

I just believe that there truly are tangible benefits to the consumer in the new disc formats, as well.

Edit:

Just to add, though, that I do think BR @ 50GB is pretty much overkill for a movie delivery medium. Nice for data backup, though. Might be nice for "collections" like multi-movie series or TV shows, too.

plonk420

10th December 2006, 01:37

i calculated 13 or 14 mbps for a movie the length of The Matrix on a DVD9... hrm...

edit: oh, oops, i get 7.8mbit. was misrecalling my argument with a friend that 13mbit (The Matrix on a Single Layer HDDVD) was insufficient let alone 25-26mbit for 720p or 1080p. i dared him to look for artifacts (altho all i had to check for artifacts with before posing the challenge was a 480p DLP projector...)

travisbell

10th December 2006, 02:14

Indeed a "trained eye" can already spot artefacts in long movies (such as: Troy, Lord of the Rings, Alexander, Gladiator) when encoded to std-def MPEG-2 DVD... But the vast majority of viewers don't have trained eyes!

That is true BUT let's face it... while the studios might not be using the best encoders around (x264 is arguably the best, even when compared to the studio encoders) a 22mbps 1080p does look a hell of a lot sharper than a 10mbps version. That's a a fact, you can't dispute that.

Sure, a lot of people wouldn't notice but I bet if you gave "the poeple without trained eyes" a side by side comparison they would.

Regardless though, with bigger and better 1080p displays arriving on the market every single day, the need for higher bitrate videos was a given. Could they have stretched DVD9 a bit farther? Sure, but probably only with 720p... I truly don't believe DVD9 has enough space to accomodate 1080p at a decent bitrate.

It was a case of salvage what we have or let go and start fresh with a medium that CAN support the higher resolution and bitrates we appreciate.

I truly don't know if I feel as though we, as consumers, are getting the shaft. At the end of the day, HD-DVD/Bluray arrived early in the game. We have to still realize there are still 10x the amount of SD TVs on the planet anyways. It will be years before these formats are truly appreicated.

Sagittaire

10th December 2006, 14:42

That is true BUT let's face it... while the studios might not be using the best encoders around (x264 is arguably the best, even when compared to the studio encoders) a 22mbps 1080p does look a hell of a lot sharper than a 10mbps version. That's a a fact, you can't dispute that.

No, No and No. You don't understand how work really video compression for HDDVD or BD.

1) HDDVD and BD must use vbv because there are physical limitation for the optical disk support. For exemple HDDVD use 29.4 Mbps for the all muxed stream (principal video stream, secondary video stream, multiple audio stream). In the most case at this time the max peak bitrate for principal HD stream is 20 Mbps for HDDVD movie.

2) In the most cases artefact are in the difficult part and use 18 Mbps for average bitrate is simply useless with max bitrate at 20 Mbps. In these difficult part the Rate Control will use same local bitrate for 18 mbps encoding or for 12 Mbps encoding (just a particular example here)

3) Actually in the most cases 20 Mbps for 1080p movie mean certainely something like less than average quantizer 10 (with x264 and unconstrained RC). It's completely useless. You can see H264 trailers at ~10 Mbps on apple web site. Apple H264 is not a really powerfull H264 codec. Trailer are always really uncompressible source if you compare with the complete movie. With good H264 codec and with complete movie you can certainely reach the same quality with 5-6 Mbps.

SeeMoreDigital

10th December 2006, 15:04

Sure, a lot of people wouldn't notice but I bet if you gave "the poeple without trained eyes" a side by side comparison they would. Agreed, if you compared a 1920x1080 10Mbps MPEG-4 AVC encode against 1920x1080 20Mbps MPEG-4 AVC encode you would see a difference in certain scenes.... But at the end of the day, the very nature of "lossly" encoding is... what you can get away with.

Personally I would be interested to see side-by-side comparisons of high-def MPEG-4 AVC encoded at an average bit-rate of say 10Mbps against, high-def MPEG-2 encoded at an average bit-rate of 25Mbps - Both having been generated from the same (lossless or nead lossless) digital master...

Cheers

travisbell

10th December 2006, 17:32

3) Actually in the most cases 20 Mbps for 1080p movie mean certainely something like less than average quantizer 10 (with x264 and unconstrained RC). It's completely useless. You can see H264 trailers at ~10 Mbps on apple web site. Apple H264 is not a really powerfull H264 codec. Trailer are always really uncompressible source if you compare with the complete movie. With good H264 codec and with complete movie you can certainely reach the same quality with 5-6 Mbps.

Right, but I think we're getting our lines crossed. Let's use the Apple trailers as an example. Yeah, most of the 1080p trailers are in the ~10mbps range. Are we saying that's the average, or peak?

Let's say average for a 120min movie... that's still ~9000MB for just the video stream and would not fit on a DVD9... So, really what we're saying here is a new medium for storage was certainly welcome, but the studios are in essence wasting the space right now.

Bottom line, AVC still has some ways to go... I mean, I am not doubting it has that much potential but so far, no one is really taking advantage of it. Atleast, I haven't seen any good, full 2 hour movies done @ 1080p.

Here's a question for ya, I have some D-Theater tapes that are usually an average bitrate of ~22mbps and they look spectacular. Arguably better than HD-DVD. I, Robot especially. At the end of the day though, given the size of HD-DVD/Bluray discs, MPEG2 can still do a mean job of encoding.

Although, I guess that's the point of this thread. If no one is using AVC to it's potential, why use it at all?

kappa

10th December 2006, 18:29

N
3) Actually in the most cases 20 Mbps for 1080p movie mean certainely something like less than average quantizer 10 (with x264 and unconstrained RC). It's completely useless. You can see H264 trailers at ~10 Mbps on apple web site. Apple H264 is not a really powerfull H264 codec. Trailer are always really uncompressible source if you compare with the complete movie. With good H264 codec and with complete movie you can certainely reach the same quality with 5-6 Mbps.

I am trying to transcode a 1080p stream of Gladiator, in order to fit it in a DVD-9 @ 7200Mbps. First I tried with Nero, then x264, then added decomb and undot to the equation. Still, even after three passes with x264, settings set to slow (four days of encoding on a Athlon X2 5000+), one can still see clear and very disturbing artifacts in the very first scene where the hand passes through the hay and clear degradation between keyframes. I was hoping to fit this movie on a DVD-9, but it is not feasible, it is no where near the quality of the original MPEG2 stream.

Sagittaire

10th December 2006, 20:16

Right, but I think we're getting our lines crossed. Let's use the Apple trailers as an example. Yeah, most of the 1080p trailers are in the ~10mbps range. Are we saying that's the average, or peak?

Average bitrate. I don't know the RC limitation for QT AVC.

Let's say average for a 120min movie... that's still ~9000MB for just the video stream and would not fit on a DVD9... So, really what we're saying here is a new medium for storage was certainly welcome, but the studios are in essence wasting the space right now.

Well it's simple:

8500 MB HDDVD structure on DVD9 for 120 min movie
simple authoring with menu, chapters, subtitles, languages : ~500 MB
Multiple (3 for exemple) DD+ audio stream at 640 Kbps (7.1 and 48 Khz) : ~1750 MB
1080p Video stream : ~6250 MB

You must use 7 Mbps for the 1080p video stream. Good H264 codec for complete movie will done higher quality than apple trailers.

At this time extra storage HDDVD capacity is really usefull simply for complexe authoring:
- DD TrueHD lossless encoding for audio stream mean average ~3 Mbps for each audio stream
- Secondary video stream for "picture in picture" bonus mean ~3 Mbps for this secondary video stream
- Principal video stream with VC1 (not the best codec at "low bitrate") and extra high quality encoding mean actualy ~15 Mbps for the principal video stream

Here's a question for ya, I have some D-Theater tapes that are usually an average bitrate of ~22mbps and they look spectacular. Arguably better than HD-DVD. I, Robot especially. At the end of the day though, given the size of HD-DVD/Bluray discs, MPEG2 can still do a mean job of encoding.

Actually the best quality for HDDVD encoding is "Batman Begin" transfert. MS use 12 Mbps with VC1 for this movie. Recent improved VC1 codec done impressive result for 9 Mbps and in practice "transparent result".

I am trying to transcode a 1080p stream of Gladiator, in order to fit it in a DVD-9 @ 7200Mbps

Crappy source done always crappy enconding. HDTV MPEG2 source are always crappy source:

- Low average bitrate for MPEG2
- Very agressive vbv specification done in most case very bad IFrame (with short GOP)
- Real Time hardware encoding with ~CBR in practice

In most case users see the artefacts for the encoding but not for the source. Make screenshoot and see the result if you want.

fenomeno83

10th December 2006, 20:50

I am trying to transcode a 1080p stream of Gladiator, in order to fit it in a DVD-9 @ 7200Mbps. First I tried with Nero, then x264, then added decomb and undot to the equation. Still, even after three passes with x264, settings set to slow (four days of encoding on a Athlon X2 5000+), one can still see clear and very disturbing artifacts in the very first scene where the hand passes through the hay and clear degradation between keyframes. I was hoping to fit this movie on a DVD-9, but it is not feasible, it is no where near the quality of the original MPEG2 stream.

try to use media player classic + coreavc decoder to see your movie!

Mug Funky

11th December 2006, 08:02

If you buy a DVD you have it right there, on a medium that will last for about 100 years if you're careful.

bwahaha! not even close, i'm afraid. back in the day when they used gold (instead of aluminium) and decent adhesives, better tolerances, etc then you were probably looking at that long. but today you're not going to get 100 years out of a DVD and actually get to watch it.

those things scratch so easily, and scratch-resistant coatings may protect it from scratches, but tend to actually decrease readability in standalones a little.

also, if the disc came in one of those cases that require you to bend the disc to get it out, then you're going to damage the disc every time you watch it.

i know of one replication house that doesn't check the calibration/alignments on their stampers unless there's (lots of) complaints from authoring houses. hell, they probably haven't properly serviced their machines since the early days of DVD. i wont name names though... that'd be poor form :) the problem is the replicators don't cop the returned discs, so they often don't have any idea what crap they're stamping.

there's a lot of cut corners in DVD (and CD) replication these days. all in the name of getting the per-unit price down while still paying all those MPEG-LA fees :)

DarkZell666

11th December 2006, 10:15

Just to give myself an idea, I went on to encode some HD material (DVD source upscaled to 1920x1088) at crf18 with x264: this gave me 8900kbps.
I didn't check any settings, I just used this bogus cmdline: x264 "whatever.avs" --crf 18 -o "whatever.avi"

I didn't even denoise the source, so the noise from the DVD had a very fat grain once upscaled. I'm pretty sure that at that resolution, crf 20 would be just as watchable, and give a rather 7500-ish bitrate. (tweaking reference frames, bframes, and the like would also help a lot).

I'll try encoding more material to give myself an idea (an upscaled DVD isn't ideal of course ;)), but I think 1080p material will need such high bitrates to achieve transparence in high-motion scenes (dunno if BluRay or HDDVD releases will be CBR or VBR..., this can change a lot of things).

giandrea

11th December 2006, 15:57

reepa

11th December 2006, 16:13

For me the answer is really simple. Would you rather watch a 36mbps or 9mbps AVC stream?

Hopefully by the time combo HD-DVD / Blu-Ray drives cost $30 a piece better display technology is available. That's when I'll make the jump.

As for discs getting scratched... I really hoped Blu-Ray would retain those caddies they used before they developed the coating. Handling cartridges, cassettes, and diskettes is much more comfortable than handling discs.

akupenguin

11th December 2006, 18:57

I didn't check any settings, I just used this bogus cmdline: x264 "whatever.avs" --crf 18 -o "whatever.avi"
Does "bogus" refer to the lack of hq settings, or to the fact that whatever.avi won't be an avi?

DarkZell666

11th December 2006, 21:23

@aku: Huhu, I was indeed mentionning the lack of hq settings, but I knew mplayer would decode the resulting file, so wether it was really avi or not (raw h.264) wasn't too much of a concern for what I was doing (thx for pointing it out though, I'll be more careful next time :p).

I'll run the hq version tonite (the previous version ran at 1.5fps, so not doubt this one might not even be finished tomorrow morning ;)) btw, I didn't encode the full movie, I added ".SelectRangeEvery(1000,50)" at the end, which I believe represents nicely the rest of the movie :)

Here's what I'm planning on using : x264 "garfield.avs" -o garfield.mkv -8 -A all -t 2 --crf 18 -b 2 -r 4 -w -m 7 --b-rdo --mixed-refs

I might denoise and sharpen the source a bit to get closer to what a real HD source looks like (won't be perfect but ...).

akupenguin

11th December 2006, 21:47

missing an argument for -A (I should make that check stricter; it currently accepts any old garbage, such as "-t")

DarkZell666

11th December 2006, 22:04

Oops, I mistaken -A for a shortcut for "--analyse all" :o (post edited)

Jay Bee

11th December 2006, 22:47

Mug Funky:
Woah, that sounds bad. So how long would you estimate the life of a stamped DVD? Does poor calibration shorten all disks' life in general or does it just make specific batches produce a lot of non-working DVD's?

Sharktooth

12th December 2006, 02:50

humidity, temperature and laser light cant be avoided... those factors will shorten the media life by A LOT.
A frequently used disc (like for games that require the disc to be inserted to play) even with all precautions will live 2 or 3 years...

DarkZell666

12th December 2006, 07:58

Here goes:

---- AVS Script -----
import("LimitedSharpenFaster.avsi")
loadplugin("DGDecode.dll")
loadplugin("hqdn3d.dll")
loadplugin("Undot.dll")

video = mpeg2source("garfield.d2v").KillAudio().SelectRangeEvery(1000,50)
video = video.BicubicResize(1920,1088).hqdn3d(2,2,2).LimitedSharpenFaster().Undot()

return video

----- x264 log ---------
D:\garfield>x264 "garfield.avs" -o garfield.mkv -8 -A all -t 2 --crf 18 -b 2 -r 4 -w -m 7 --b-rdo --mixed-refs --progress
avis [info]: 1920x1088 @ 25.00 fps (7950 frames)
x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities MMX MMXEXT SSE SSE2 3DNow!
x264 [info]: slice I:244 Avg QP:16.77 size:107712 PSNR Mean Y:50.23 U:53.54 V:53.90 Avg:50.77 Global:50.25
x264 [info]: slice P:3384 Avg QP:18.52 size: 51165 PSNR Mean Y:48.47 U:52.61 V:53.05 Avg:49.45 Global:48.66
x264 [info]: slice B:4322 Avg QP:20.72 size: 18675 PSNR Mean Y:47.51 U:51.94 V:52.45 Avg:48.50 Global:47.57
x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 21.6% 64.0% 14.4%
x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 9.9% 22.8% 2.3% P16..4: 35.4% 11.6% 1.8% 0.0% 0.0% skip:16.0%
x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 0.8% 2.0% 0.2% B16..8: 27.8% 1.1% 2.5% direct: 8.2% skip:57.4%
x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:65.1% inter:87.8%
x264 [info]: ref P 74.0% 13.7% 7.8% 4.4%
x264 [info]: ref B 85.4% 8.9% 3.6% 2.1%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9882346
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:48.001 U:52.274 V:52.748 Avg:48.975 Global:48.071 kb/s:7047.48

encoded 7950 frames, 0.40 fps, 7047.71 kb/s

I say: not bad at all ;)

foxyshadis

12th December 2006, 10:49

In my opinion, that applies only to exactly what you did - resizing up. You pay a huge speed and size penalty for almost no extra detail (in fact, probably less overall, with the two denoisers), whereas real HD has real detail improvements. (Most satelite broadcast doesn't count, they have less or only marginally more detail than DVDs, even if they have sharper diagonals.) Admittedly studios will probably try to pawn such junk off on people eventually.

Just watch both the test you made (if your system can handle it) and the original; can you tell which looks more detailed? (Without mistaking oversharpening for real detail.) I guarantee you would be able to if you had access to a master of the movie, but I doubt you will here.

If you were to use one of the EEDI2 methods, you'd probably get enough detail out to fake your way up to a good 720p estimation, but not 1080p. And remember, the whole idea is to not denoise too hard, or all you get is DVD-res with better diagonals.

lexor

12th December 2006, 15:53

foxy, I don't think he was testing quality, he just upsized (to make it HD-like pixel cost) and did filtering to simulate real world use (of filters). His point was that something he believes a decent bitrate can in fact be reached on a decently longish movie. He wasn't attempting to gain quality by wasting cycles so he doesn't need all that eedi and such.

as for backup, I only compress with mpeg4 (asp/avc) for tv shows, I moved away from encoding movies, simply because even DVD5 of x264 and hq-slow + best filtering I could come up after quite some time of experimentation, just doesn't preserve enough of orignal DVD (non HD here). Now for a movie, I just make a copy to DVD-DL (i.e. DVD9 -> DVD9) and call it quits, which is actually a good thing in itself, since my aging DVD players started to skip a bit, but aparently removing the CSS removes enough of strain to prevent skipping :) funky.

DarkZell666

12th December 2006, 17:00

lol sorry for not being clear concerning "why" I was doing this, I'll clarify a bit more:

This thread is about an apparently useless utilisation of BluRay for encoding h264 hd material (since apparently many people argue that a DVD9 is well enough, considering AVC's efficiency).
When I mean useless, I mean "studios ain't gonna do anything this stupid right ?" (at least this is what I've read several times on the net).

All I wanted to do, is "recreate" some HD content (and foxyshadis pointed out why my method wasn't as accurate as I thought), and see what bitrate the content really needs (thus proving or disapproving the statement about studios being stupid xD). My test shows that upscaled DVD content only needs around 8mbps, but true HD content contains much more detail to begin with, so it'll need more bitrate than an upscaled DVD (it's all about artificially recreating visual information that wasn't there VS. true detail that can't be recreated no matter what we try). That's why I sharpened the picture a bit to compensate, but hqdn3d probably destroyed more detail than LimitedSharpenFaster could "simulate".

I'll have another try later on, doing something like: .UpsizeAbit().LSF().Undot().UpsizeAbit().LSF().Undot().UpsizeAbit().LSF().Undot() ... and see what that looks like :)

Edit: I'll come back on what reepa said: For me the answer is really simple. Would you rather watch a 36mbps or 9mbps AVC stream?In either case, would one of them really look better than the other ? This is what I'm desperately trying to find out :p

Sagittaire

12th December 2006, 17:33

If you want real comparison then quality for 1080p 120 min movie on DVD9 will be better than QT AVC trailers.

inurenegade

12th December 2006, 19:05

Sagittaire

12th December 2006, 20:56

what about the factor of the new high def audio?
arent they doing like 192khz now and 7.1 and isnt there like uncompressed audio for the highest fidelity?
imagine the space that must take up on a DVD9

Actualy HDDVD use Dolby Digital Plus at 640 Kbps for multiple audio stream 7.1 48 Khz ...

8500 MB HDDVD structure on DVD9 for 120 min movie
simple authoring with menu, chapters, subtitles, languages : ~500 MB
Multiple (3 for exemple) DD+ audio stream at 640 Kbps (7.1 and 48 Khz) : ~1750 MB
1080p Video stream at 7 Mbps : ~6250 MB

Like I say extra storage from HDDVD optical support is only for complexe authoring with extra high quality:
- PIP video stream bonus
- LossLess audio stream
- extra high quality for video stream

22500 MB HDDVD structure on HDDVD30 for 120 min movie
complexe authoring with menu, chapters, subtitles, languages : ~1000 MB
Unique principal audio stream DD trueHD at 3 Mbps: ~ 2750 MB
Multiple secondary (3 for exemple) DD+ audio stream at 640 Kbps (7.1 and 48 Khz) : ~1750 MB
Principal Video stream 1080p at 15 Mbps : ~13500 MB
Secondary Video stream 480p at 4 Mbps : ~3500 MB

Morte66

12th December 2006, 21:59

If you want real comparison then quality for 1080p 120 min movie on DVD9 will be better than QT AVC trailers.

I agree. I've done some encodes from uncompressed 1080p with fairly difficult material. At around 4500kbps they look better than the QT trailers and radically better than a 25000kbps MPEG2 encode. They're excellent at 8000kbps with x264. Maybe 12000kbps to top out under critical examination on my fairly brutal monitor.

Settings for x264 were slow but not silly:

--crf 22 [or whatever] --ref 3 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 3 --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --direct none --filter -2,-2 --subme 6 --trellis 1 --analyse all --8x8dct --threads 2 --thread-input --cqmfile "C:\Program Files\MeGUI\extra\M4G-V3.cfg"

It seems that the cleanliness of the source has a heck of a lot to do with it. Re-encoding 1080 MPEG2 transport streams in constant quality mode after some avisynth work, I typically come out about 10GB for a movie. On a really excellent clean broadcast of "Million Dollar Baby", I got 4.2GB. A crappy, noisy stream of "Serenity" was heading for 16GB, before I realised that the fractal denoiser was just revealing the blocking and killed it. So studios, working from masters, could make very good encodes at DVD9 bitrates if they wanted to. But bigger discs would allow better quality for people with high-end displays.

There is perhaps a catch: I can't play these encodes on my A64 X2 3800+ unless I'm using CoreAVC Pro. No other decoder is fast enough. The VC1 encodes they're putting on HD DVD are probably a bit easier.

In the final analysis, I think skill and care in the capture/encoding process make more difference than 6kbps vs 12kbps for x264.

travisbell

12th December 2006, 22:21

At around 4500kbps they look better than the QT trailers and radically better than a 25kbps MPEG2 encode.

I am guessing you mean 25mbps...

I would love to see some of the examples... any chance you could post them? I would especially really like to see the 1080p encode from your uncompressed source... sounds like it should tickle my eyes pretty good!

Morte66

12th December 2006, 22:29

I am guessing you mean 25mbps...

I would love to see some of the examples... any chance you could post them? I would especially really like to see the 1080p encode from your uncompressed source... sounds like it should tickle my eyes pretty good!

Yep, 25mbps, edited.

I'll see if I can dig them out tomorrow.

reepa

13th December 2006, 03:55

If you need a "film master" for testing different codecs, you can get SVT test sequences (thank you Swedes!) from:
ftp://vqeg.its.bldrdoc.gov/HDTV/SVT_MultiFormat/

They're meant for testing television broadcasts, which is why they are 50fps. Each frame is 3840 by 2160 (four times 1080p!) and 48 bits per color (16-bit per channel vs 8-bit per channel!). The sequences were captured on 65mm film for the absolute best quality.

These sequences are ideal for testing since they have real film grain (compared to the Elephants Dream sequences). I haven't done any testing because I don't have the hard drive space required (a single frame is almost 50 megabytes!) nor the expertise in video compression.

Morte66

13th December 2006, 17:13

I would love to see some of the examples... any chance you could post them? I would especially really like to see the 1080p encode from your uncompressed source...

http://rapidshare.com/files/7325856/Taurus.x264.7314kbps.deblock-2-2.cqm-M4GV3.mp4.html

99MB encode from 8.24GB of uncompressed digital camera footage, 113 seconds at 25fps, 7314kbps, x264 reports final ratefactor=23.36.

Here are the notes on the source footage:

Sequence #Frames Short description
--------------------------------------------------
Blue sky 250 Top of two trees against blue sky. High contrast, small color differences in the sky, many details. Camera rotation.
Pedestrian Area 375 Shot of a pedestrian area. Low camera position, people pass by very close to the camera. High depth of field. Static camera.
Rush-hour 500 Rush-hour in Munich city. Many cars moving slowly, high depth of focus. Fixed camera.
Riverbed 250 Riverbed seen through the water. Very hard to code.
Station 313 View from a bridge to munich station. Evening shot. Long zoom out. Many details, regular structures (tracks)
Sunflower 500 Sunflower, very detailed shot. One bee at the sunflower, small color differences and very bright yellow. Fixed camera, small global motion.
Tractor 761 A tractor in a field. Whole sequence contains parts that are very zoomed in and a total view. Camera is following the tractor, chaotic object movement, structure of a harvested field. Very red wheels of the tractor

Camera: Sony HDW-F900
Recorded on (Tape): HDCam
Stored on: DVS
Frame rate: 25 fps (progressive)
Resolution: 1920x1080
Color subsampling: 4:2:0
Filter Tabs for Subsampling: -0.0063 / 0 / 0.0299 / 0 / -0.0831 / 0 / 0.3098 / 0.4994 / 0.3098 / 0 / -0.0831 / 0 / 0.0299 / 0 / -0.0063
Color conversion: ITU Rec BT 709 (SMPTE 274M)
Original files contact: oelbaum@ei.tum.de
Restrictions of use: No restrictions
Copyright: No Copyright
Date of Recording: Summer 2001
Source: Taurus Media Technik, Dr. Karl Mauthe
Producer: Martin Kreitl martin.kreitl@KirchGruppe.de
Camera Operator: Jürgen Würzinger
Camera Assistent: Yean Ives Diss

All material was recorded in summer 2001 by Taurus Media Technik.

The x264 command line for pass 2 was: --pass 2 --bitrate 7295 --stats "D:\MeGUI\Samples\samples.stats" --ref 3 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 3 --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --direct none --filter -2,-2 --subme 6 --trellis 1 --analyse all --8x8dct --threads 2 --thread-input --cqmfile "C:\Program Files\MeGUI\extra\M4G-V3.cfg"

sounds like it should tickle my eyes pretty good!

My first thought on seeing the original was "that's really soft", maybe because it's devoid of all the grain/noise/sharpening we're used to on DVD... If you look carefully and find the point of focus (e.g. the bee not the sunflower) it's actually pretty sharp.

The encode looks close to the original in general quality. No mp4 encoder I used gets the clouds in the first section completely free of banding; Xvid at q=2 (about 25mbps) comes closest to avoiding banding but it has other faults.

As for HD DVD vs DVD9... At about 14 seconds there's a guy who walks into the frame from the right wearing red dungarees. If you look at his back on a good display you see a little blocking. Add 50% to the bitrate and that goes away. I suspect you'd need to bump it again to cover film grain and sharpening.

giandrea

14th December 2006, 02:13

I'm downloading, will have a look at the results, even if at that ratefactor they should be more than good for the casual observer.
But the question here is if this encode is compatible with BlueRay or HD DVD specs. If it is not, the whole point of your post is, well, pointless... :P

SeeMoreDigital

14th December 2006, 11:03

Thanks for the sample Morte66.

It looks beautiful when viewed (at the correct distance) on my 42" high-def screen...

A very nice example of what can be achieved at below 8Mbps ;)

Cheers

drmpeg

14th December 2006, 11:28

Same content in MPEG-2, 18 Mbps average, 30 Mbps peak in a 35 Mbps TS.

http://www.w6rz.net/1080p25.zip

259 MB.

Ron

Egladil

14th December 2006, 11:29

Morte66

14th December 2006, 12:34

But the question here is if this encode is compatible with BlueRay or HD DVD specs. If it is not, the whole point of your post is, well, pointless... :P

Um, *shrug*. If there's anything compatible about it, it's accidental.

I thought the issue here was "would we really need larger discs if we used the best current encoders and techniques on DVD9?". And I think the answer is "not for most people, though serious enthusiasts would see improvements on a bigger disc".

Morte66

14th December 2006, 12:34

I don't get it. Somebody here using crf 18, another crf 22 -I consider that LQ (well 18 is not LQ maybe, but not HQ), they'll be eating details. The point is that with HDDVD there's enough space to store the video in nearly transparent quality (I did some tests and for me crf 15 looks good - and crf15 needs a lot of bitrate) - I'd never buy a DVD9 with overcompressed (and possibly denoised, ...) movie. I mean thats fine for somebody or maybe for personal backups, but the whole point of hddvd is not compression, but quality. If i'd buy that I want to be sure that the movie looks exactly like in cinema - if it's grainy (james ryan for example) - then it has to be grainy on a hddvd, and not denoised so that it can be compressed better.

Well, OK. That's pretty much what I've been driving at -- DVD9 is fine for many/most people provided you use the best encoding available, but not for everybody. You're the "not everybody" part of the test group. ;)

A semi-tangent: we've discussed HD DVD and Blu-Ray almost interchangeably in this thread, but they're different. Blu-Ray a bigger but is a lot more expensive to manufacture, the plants are a bigger investment, and the drives are costlier. And it's superfluous, because HD DVD is enough for everybody if you use a good encoder. Blu-Ray only has a use of sorts with MPEG2, and MPEG2 on Blu-Ray looks way worse than h264 on DVD9.

DarkZell666

14th December 2006, 13:06

Actually, crf18 is near-transparent already on SD, and it's even more transparent on HD material. What you seem to call details is pixel-precise information, which you won't have by the simple fact of using something else than a lossless codec.

On my PC screen, the 1920x1080 picture get's downsized to 1024x576, which is nearly half the resolution (and nearly 4x less pixels). Considering that AVC offers a minimum block size of 4x4, this block once resized is only represented by 2x2 block (4x less pixels). So any pixel-level information becomes subpixel information: visually negligible.

This spawns another interesting question (at least I don't have a clue about the info, maybe someone else has): do HD screens REALLY have 1920x1080 dots on them ? At least computer screens aren't really there yet (which is probably why I can't spot a difference right now).

But visually, the difference between crf15 and crf18, is (imho) not obvious at all (unless you substract the 2 encodes with each other and look at the difference). It's just like comparing 320kbps CBR mp3 and 256kbps VBR mp3. You can't hear the difference but you "know" it's different. Sort of a placebo effect if you want my opinion :p

As for the grain stuff, x264 (by default) doesn't keep much grain, but you can tweak CQM and deblocking stuff to keep it. Nero manages not too bad on grain because it has relatively good psy-enhancements. Also note that in HD content, the grain will be much fatter (one "grain" will occupy more pixels to look the same), and won't be processed as hard as in SD material. Grain will look much more like spatial information (instead of noise) to the codec.

Well, this is just my four cents. There's another crystal-clear source we could try: http://orange.blender.org/ (Elephant Dream). The unprocessed video and audio is downloadable here: http://media.xiph.org/ED/ (the info is from another thread in the General discussion forum).

SeeMoreDigital

14th December 2006, 13:14

This spawns another interesting question (at least I don't have a clue about the info, maybe someone else has): do HD screens REALLY have 1920x1080 dots on them ? At least computer screens aren't really there yet (which is probably why I can't spot a difference right now). Full high-def "progressive" LCD screens offering a native resolution of 1920x1080 (2,073,600 total) pixels actually have 3 times this amount of pixels - one for each primary colour.

Cheers

Morte66

14th December 2006, 13:26

transparent

...is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on how fussy you are, how hard you're looking, what equipment you've got, and your viewing conditions. An encode that was just transparent on my 8 year old CRT monitor wouldn't be on my new 1920x1200 LCD.

It's just like comparing 320kbps CBR mp3 and 256kbps VBR mp3. You can't hear the difference but you "know" it's different. Sort of a placebo effect if you want my opinion :p

Well, I can tell that difference, but then I'm a hi-fi nut with a seventy thousand pound audio system. My brother can't tell 192k MP3 from the WAV file. The interesting thing for me is that I don't really care about 256vs320 MP3. They both convey the musically important elements equally well, the difference is sonic rather than musical. But I do prefer AAC/OGG 192 to any MP3 -- MP3 just can't do cymbals right.

I'm less fussy about video than audio: I see the difference between crf22/18/16 if I want to, but I'm not really bothered about it.

SeeMoreDigital

14th December 2006, 13:59

But I do prefer AAC/OGG 192 to any MP3 -- MP3 just can't do cymbals right. Most probably due to MPEG-1 Layer-3 audio not being able to offer a wide enough dynamic range over the mid-to-high frequency bands....

Morte66

14th December 2006, 15:18

If you need a "film master" for testing different codecs, you can get SVT test sequences (thank you Swedes!) from:
ftp://vqeg.its.bldrdoc.gov/HDTV/SVT_MultiFormat/

They're meant for testing television broadcasts, which is why they are 50fps. Each frame is 3840 by 2160 (four times 1080p!) and 48 bits per color (16-bit per channel vs 8-bit per channel!). The sequences were captured on 65mm film for the absolute best quality.

Gulp. That's going to be some download.

And you really need the 2160p versions, to get realistic grain aliasing in the scans. [A 2160p film scan resized to 1080p looks smoother than a 1080p scan. Something I learned the hard way scanning still photos.] Oh well, here goes...

Morte66

14th December 2006, 15:32

Same content in MPEG-2, 18 Mbps average, 30 Mbps peak in a 35 Mbps TS.

http://www.w6rz.net/1080p25.zip

259 MB.

Nice encode, better than I managed with MPEG2. How did you encode it?

smok3

14th December 2006, 16:00

This spawns another interesting question (at least I don't have a clue about the info, maybe someone else has): do HD screens REALLY have 1920x1080 dots on them ? At least computer screens aren't really there yet (which is probably why I can't spot a difference right now).

my samsung runs at 1920x1200 right now, so what do you mean? (or should i count the pixels manually? :))

DarkZell666

14th December 2006, 16:04

...is in the eye of the beholder.Agreed, lol. But I'm really having a hard time understanding how people can possibly see such differences ... o_O I'll have to reconsider my way of (litterally speaking) "seeing" things ;)

Edit for smok3: grrr XD, the max I've ever seen is the 1600*1200 LCD I have at work, and "average joe" buying his computer at the local supermarket will be given a 1280*x CRT most of the time. Some of you guys really have uncommon or expensive hardware :p

SeeMoreDigital

14th December 2006, 16:30

Same content in MPEG-2, 18 Mbps average, 30 Mbps peak in a 35 Mbps TS.Looks good Ron.... I can play these 1920x1080 MPEG-2 samples in hardware ;)

akupenguin

14th December 2006, 23:36

And you really need the 2160p versions, to get realistic grain aliasing in the scans. [A 2160p film scan resized to 1080p looks smoother than a 1080p scan. Something I learned the hard way scanning still photos.]
True. But do you know whether most HD movies are scanned at only 1080p, rather than downscaled?

Morte66

15th December 2006, 00:41

True. But do you know whether most HD movies are scanned at only 1080p, rather than downscaled?

Come to think of it, I have absolutely no idea.

Damn.

I wonder if I can find out...

reepa

15th December 2006, 04:57

Gulp. That's going to be some download.

And you really need the 2160p versions, to get realistic grain aliasing in the scans. [A 2160p film scan resized to 1080p looks smoother than a 1080p scan. Something I learned the hard way scanning still photos.] Oh well, here goes...

The lower resolution versions have been downsampled from the master 2160p scans so in theory you'll lose nothing by downloading the 1080p versions (unless you want to use a different resampling algorithm, SVT used Lanczos).

DarkZell666

15th December 2006, 08:06

my samsung runs at 1920x1200 right now, so what do you mean? (or should i count the pixels manually? )After re-reading this a couple of times, I just understood what you meant :o In fact, I believe some screens don't have physically the number of pixels available on the screen to display the chosen resolution. Instead, the screen does some resizing/interpolating/downsampling or whatever to get all the video info on the screen. So my answer to your question is in fact indeed: yes, count them manually xD (or go read the manual :p)

I say this because on LCD's, there's always a particular resolution where the pixels fall correctly into place, and all the others resolutions look wierd and pixelated (just like if you were watching super-nintendo graphics). That resolution where the pixels fall into place is physically the number of dots on the screen (at least that's what I concluded from what I've seen). (read here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#Current_standards_in_resolution)

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 11:28

Looks good Ron.... I can play these 1920x1080 MPEG-2 samples in hardware ;)Actually, after closer inspection, it seems as though the people walking about in the second scene are suffering from something akin to a field blending effect :scared:

smok3

15th December 2006, 12:13

True. But do you know whether most HD movies are scanned at only 1080p, rather than downscaled?

i would say that new movies are probably simply digital intermediates downscaled, older movies are probably scanned at exact resolution. (at least that could be a good guess)

Morte66

15th December 2006, 12:36

Actually, after closer inspection, it seems as though the people walking about in the second scene are suffering from something akin to a field blending effect :scared:
If you're thinking of what I'm thinking of, that's a combination of 24fps video, a shutter shorter than 1/24 second, motion, and image persistence in your retina/brain creating an "echo". If you play the material at 5fps it vanishes. At 25fps, it's there in the original too.

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 12:47

If you're thinking of what I'm thinking of, that's a combination of 24fps video, a shutter shorter than 1/24 second, motion, and image persistence in your retina/brain creating an "echo". If you play the material at 5fps it vanishes. At 25fps, it's there in the original too.Hmmm!

I've seen this effect loads of times, when people try to generate progressive encodes from pure interlaced sources!

I think we need to know more about the primary source ;)

Morte66

15th December 2006, 12:48

The lower resolution versions have been downsampled from the master 2160p scans so in theory you'll lose nothing by downloading the 1080p versions (unless you want to use a different resampling algorithm, SVT used Lanczos).

It's not quite so simple, for two reasons...

1. When you scan film with grain (silver-based) or dye clumps (chromogenic), you get sample aliasing. It's especially noticable when the pixel size in your scanner is somewhat similar to the grain/clump size on the film. A 2160p scan could create far more or far less of this noise than a 1080p scan, depending on the exact dimensions involved. It's not especially predictable or intuitive. [Practical example: Fuji NPH400 looks fine scanned at 1800dpi or 2900dpi, but noisy as hell at 2400dpi.]

2. When you resize a bitmap containing random noise down, you lose some of the noise through signal averaging. If it's perfectly random you'll get the sqaure root of your data reduction (so reducing pixels by a factor of four would reduce your noise by a factor of two), but it's never that simple in practice.

Morte66

15th December 2006, 12:50

i would say that new movies are probably simply digital intermediates downscaled, older movies are probably scanned at exact resolution. (at least that could be a good guess)

That's consistent with what a couple of people have told me this morning.

On a more practical level, the 2160p files add up to about 90GB and I've only got 70GB free...

Morte66

15th December 2006, 13:03

Hmmm!

I've seen this effect loads of times, when people try to generate progressive encodes from pure interlaced sources!

That's exactly what I thought when I first saw it. Then I thought maybe it was some sort of ringing/echoes in the encoder. Eventually I discovered that it was echoes in my brain.

I think we need to know more about the primary source ;)

ftp://ftp.ldv.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de/pub/test_sequences/

Took me about 3 days to download. You need the RawSource filter for AviSynth and something like:
v1=RawSource("blue_sky.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v2=RawSource("pedestrian_area.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v3=RawSource("riverbed.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v4=RawSource("rush_hour.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v5=RawSource("station2.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v6=RawSource("sunflower.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")
v7=RawSource("tractor.yuv",1920,1080,"I420")

v1+v2+v3+v4+v5+v6+v7

AssumeFPS(25)

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 13:15

That's exactly what I thought when I first saw it. Then I thought maybe it was some sort of ringing/echoes in the encoder. Eventually I discovered that it was echoes in my brain. When you capture a single frame (from either the x264 or MPEG-2 encode) there's motion missing and blurring evident

x264 encode: -
http://img431.imageshack.us/img431/1869/x264jo1.th.jpg (http://img431.imageshack.us/my.php?image=x264jo1.jpg)

MPEG-2 encode: -
http://img281.imageshack.us/img281/5294/mpeg2re8.th.jpg (http://img281.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mpeg2re8.jpg)

The poor old guy with the ruck-sack has lost his leg below his knee.... I wonder if he knows!

Morte66

15th December 2006, 13:20

When you capture a single frame (from either the x264 or MPEG-2 encode) there's motion missing and blurring evident

Sure, the shutter is like 1/50 or 1/100 second or something. Read any primer for still photography, and it'll tell you that you need 1/500 for "reasonable sharpness" with people walking across the frame. That's advice aimed at people who mostly make 6x4 inch prints.

And there are gaps between frames, where the shutter was closed and nothing was captured.

Welcome to digital video standards designed for compatibility with hundred year old cinema technology...

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 13:25

If you still have the "pedestrian_area.YUV" source... What does the original frame look like?

Morte66

15th December 2006, 13:37

If you still have the "pedestrian_area.YUV" source... What does the original frame look like?

http://www.joel-benford.co.uk/posts/snapshot20061215122515.jpg

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 13:54

Poor bloke :(

Morte66

15th December 2006, 14:21

@SeeMoreDigital...

Here's a partial quote that may interest you, by a poster called RTFM on the AVS forums:
Sometimes watching a film a cinema does a serious number on me with motion judder at certain camera panning speeds.

When I was working as a camera operator I payed close attention to my "Bible" which was the American Cinematographer Manual which has a section titled "35mm Camera Panning Speed Recommendations" which is all about avoiding the "skipping" effect as they described it.

It goes into great detail as to why we perceive this side effect and I quote: "During the panning of the camera in a static setting, a certain displacement of objects takes place on the film from frame to frame. When the film is viewed in projection, this displacement, as it appears on the screen, also constitutes a displacement on the retina of the observer's eye. The viewing cells of the retina, however, are not directly adjacent to each other-- they are spaced at approximately 7.14 minutes of the arc. If therefore, an object viewed on the screen is displaced more than can be sensed within the above angle on the retina, it causes skipping of the viewing cells, which in turn disrupts or chops the continuity of the panning motion"

This would also apply to an object moving across the frame at certain speeds in a static camera setup.

Here's an example from the tables in the ACM: 24frames per second,180 degree shutter, 50 mm lens. A 90 degree pan should take 23 seconds to avoid judder.

Early wide-screen movies shot in 65/70mm such as Oklahoma and Around The World In 80 Days were shot at 30fps rather than 24 to smooth panning shots and cross-screen action.

I presume that when they shoot a Hollywood movie, they're careful to avoid/limit this sort of thing. But the Taurus Media footage, which is specifically meant to be difficult samples for encoder testing, let it happen.

SeeMoreDigital

15th December 2006, 15:08

I actually have a few friends dotted around the world, who are professional film camera-men (DOP's). All are having to "re-learn" their craft as the art of capturing images moves away from film and into the digital domain!

That said, having a camera "locked down" and capturing people moving across a frame at "walking speed" should be a minimum requirement for any digital camera...

Blue_MiSfit

17th December 2006, 09:19

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?family=AppleDisplays

Very high resolution display.

Almost native 4k.

Still, it's a solid 4 megapixels + :D

Sagittaire

17th December 2006, 11:14

Make comparison between MPEG2 and H264 for HDDVD is difficult. H264 can use HP@L4.1 with specific vbv limitation and MPEG2 can use MP@HL with compliant vbv limitation.

Actualy in most case principal HD video stream for HDDVD use these setting:
- Max GOP length at 0.6006 sec
- 2 adaptative bframe
- max bitrate at ~20 Mbps and buffer at 9781, 14745 and 30000 Kbits for MPEG2, VC1 and H264
- Max Vertical Motion Vector length at 128, 256 and 512 pixels for MPEG2, VC1 and H264

Make comparison between unconstrained crf 15 or crf 20 is completely useless without vbv limitation and GOP restriction. IMO with same vbv crf 15 and crf 20 will done the same local bitrate in difficult part and exactly the same artefacts.

oddball

17th December 2006, 16:31

The movies that get away with compression most are of course CG or all digital transfers. I have a couple of CG videos on DVD5 with full 1080P res and they look great. Also certain well known movies that were shot all digital that looks great too. However I also have some rather grainy movies that even if given the best bitrate possible would still look rather dicey. Even recent flicks can have inherent amounts of film grain in them that causes compression of any sort a problem. The odd thing is that even in movies that are shot all digital they deliberately introduce artificial film grain the make a movie more 'cinematic' and to avoid looing somewhat unnatural when shown on a cinema size screen.

giandrea

17th December 2006, 17:13

Make comparison between unconstrained crf 15 or crf 20 is completely useless without vbv limitation and GOP restriction. IMO with same vbv crf 15 and crf 20 will done the same local bitrate in difficult part and exactly the same artefacts.

It would be interesting to try again the test with these constrains. Do you know what command line options are required to compress an HD DVD or Blue Ray compliant H264 stream with x264?

If the quality is acceptable it would be possible to make full resolution backups of an HD DVD or BD on a DVD9. :thanks:

Sharktooth

17th December 2006, 20:46

Specs are not publically available.

Sagittaire

17th December 2006, 21:06

It would be interesting to try again the test with these constrains. Do you know what command line options are required to compress an HD DVD or Blue Ray compliant H264 stream with x264?

For best possible quality with x264:
x264.exe --keyint 15 --min-keyint 1 --vbv-maxrate 28000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --mvrange 512 --level 4.1 --bframe 2 --b-rdo --bime --weightb --ref 3 --mixed-refs --direct auto --deblock -1:-1 --crf 20 --qcomp 0.75 --ipratio 1.10 --pbratio 1.30 --partitions "all" --8x8dct --me "umh" --subme 7 --no-fast-pskip --no-dct-decimate --trellis 2 --progress -o H264_6Mbps.mp4 HDDVD.avs

and here IMO the best possible quality/speed setting:
x264.exe --keyint 15 --min-keyint 1 --vbv-maxrate 28000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --mvrange 512 --level 4.1 --bframe 2 --b-rdo --bime --weightb --ref 3 --mixed-refs --direct auto --deblock -1:-1 --crf 20 --qcomp 0.75 --ipratio 1.10 --pbratio 1.30 --partitions "all" --8x8dct --me "hex" --subme 6 --no-fast-pskip --no-dct-decimate --trellis 1 --progress -o H264_6Mbps.mp4 HDDVD.avs

If the quality is acceptable it would be possible to make full resolution backups of an HD DVD or BD on a DVD9. :thanks:

No doubt for that. H264 is able to obtain very high quality in 6-8 Mbps bitrate range for 1080p source and particulary for 2.35 movie.

For same source use 7.0 Mbps for H264 encoding in 1080p25 will done the same quality by pixel than 4.0 Mbps for MPEG2 encoding in 576p25.

giandrea

17th December 2006, 22:34

For best possible quality with x264:
x264.exe --keyint 15 --min-keyint 1 --vbv-maxrate 28000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --mvrange 512 --level 4.1 --bframe 2 --b-rdo --bime --weightb --ref 3 --mixed-refs --direct auto --deblock -1:-1 --crf 20 --qcomp 0.75 --ipratio 1.10 --pbratio 1.30 --partitions "all" --8x8dct --me "umh" --subme 7 --no-fast-pskip --no-dct-decimate --trellis 2 --progress -o H264_6Mbps.mp4 HDDVD.avs

and here IMO the best possible quality/speed setting:
x264.exe --keyint 15 --min-keyint 1 --vbv-maxrate 28000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --mvrange 512 --level 4.1 --bframe 2 --b-rdo --bime --weightb --ref 3 --mixed-refs --direct auto --deblock -1:-1 --crf 20 --qcomp 0.75 --ipratio 1.10 --pbratio 1.30 --partitions "all" --8x8dct --me "hex" --subme 6 --no-fast-pskip --no-dct-decimate --trellis 1 --progress -o H264_6Mbps.mp4 HDDVD.avs

No doubt for that. H264 is able to obtain very high quality in 6-8 Mbps bitrate range for 1080p source and particulary for 2.35 movie.

For same source use 7.0 Mbps for H264 encoding in 1080p25 will done the same quality by pixel than 4.0 Mbps for MPEG2 encoding in 576p25.

Very interesting, thanks. :goodpost:

So, a bit off topic... would I be able to play a video encoded to be HD DVD or BD compatible, muxed the MP4 container on a PlayStation 3? And anyway I should be able to play it back if burned on a DVD with the BD file structure... right?
Thanks again! :)

smok3

18th December 2006, 09:26

The odd thing is that even in movies that are shot all digital they deliberately introduce artificial film grain the make a movie more 'cinematic' and to avoid looing somewhat unnatural when shown on a cinema size screen. yes, 'magic bullet' and packages like that are really popular as it seems.

Morte66

18th December 2006, 11:49

If the quality is acceptable it would be possible to make full resolution backups of an HD DVD or BD on a DVD9. :thanks:

I'm sure you could do that and get satisfying quality, but two-pass 1080p encodes at that sort of quality would take several days on a dual core PC. That's an awful lot of encoding for one backup. If possible (tools, DRM) I'd be more inclined to just split the thing over a few DVDs.

I sometimes do 1080p encodes from MPEG2 HDTV so I can use avisynth on the lousy video, that lets me get a backup that's better than the original. But I don't see much point with HD DVD.

smok3

18th December 2006, 11:56

giandrea

18th December 2006, 15:37

from a 'small' user point of view the new formats are especially interesting for data backups imho (especially if you deal with your own production video) - as soon as the price drops..., uhmm, hopefully meantime we can expect a drop price for dual DVDs? :)

Yes, I hope so... :)
Anyway the problem of the time it takes to encode a 1080p movie with those settings is a problem for now, but a non-problem for the future.
First of all we are talking about backups of HD DVD or BD, so we would need to crack the encoding scheme of these formats, and it will take time (DVD John already reserver www.DeAACS.com ;) ).
Second of all, the formats are not widespread, and it will take time for them to be in the average user house (if ever...).
After all this time, I hope that CPUs will be powerfull enough (multiple cores at higher frequencies combined with more optimizations, parallelization, vectorization, etc...) to encode at those settings in realtime or close.

Morte66

19th December 2006, 17:24

If you need a "film master" for testing different codecs, you can get SVT test sequences (thank you Swedes!) from:
ftp://vqeg.its.bldrdoc.gov/HDTV/SVT_MultiFormat/

Here we go...
http://rapidshare.com/files/8149678/SVT.zip.html (50.7MB)

It's 2160p50 scans from 65mm film, with Lanczos resize to 1080p50 by SVT, which I converted to yuv 4:2:0 using sgi2yuv (28.9GB -> 7.24GB), then brought into AviSynth VY12 using the RawSource() filter and encoded with x264. This is 50fps so you might have to play it slow to to avoid stuttering.

It's the same bitrate (~7300kbps) and encoder settings I used for the digital camera footage from Taurus Media back on page 3, but this time with the joys of film grain. x264 reports a final ratefactor of 30.1, compared to 23.6 on the digital video.

Last time there was little visible difference between source and encode, this time the encode looks obviously denoised and the genuine detail (rather than false impression of detail created by noise) may also be a little softer. I included frame grabs from the avs feed and the final encode for comparison. I prefer the encode to the original -- I don't like grain -- but this is obviously a very personal thing. I would probably like it better if it were degrained before encoding and sharpened on playback.

Getting back to the original question, i.e. would good h264 encodes on DVD9 suffice or do we really need bigger discs... I'd be happy to buy this encode, but people who have to have film grain probably wouldn't. Fake grain might close the gap...

hvatum

13th January 2007, 02:47

Here we go...
http://rapidshare.com/files/8149678/SVT.zip.html (50.7MB)

It's 2160p50 scans from 65mm film, with Lanczos resize to 1080p50 by SVT, which I converted to yuv 4:2:0 using sgi2yuv (28.9GB -> 7.24GB), then brought into AviSynth VY12 using the RawSource() filter and encoded with x264. This is 50fps so you might have to play it slow to to avoid stuttering.

It's the same bitrate (~7300kbps) and encoder settings I used for the digital camera footage from Taurus Media back on page 3, but this time with the joys of film grain. x264 reports a final ratefactor of 30.1, compared to 23.6 on the digital video.

Last time there was little visible difference between source and encode, this time the encode looks obviously denoised and the genuine detail (rather than false impression of detail created by noise) may also be a little softer. I included frame grabs from the avs feed and the final encode for comparison. I prefer the encode to the original -- I don't like grain -- but this is obviously a very personal thing. I would probably like it better if it were degrained before encoding and sharpened on playback.

Getting back to the original question, i.e. would good h264 encodes on DVD9 suffice or do we really need bigger discs... I'd be happy to buy this encode, but people who have to have film grain probably wouldn't. Fake grain might close the gap...

Yes, but nothing will close the gap between the ability of Blu-Ray to carry all possible language tracks, special features altrenate endings, extended edition, entire seasons of TV shows. Someone here did post that such things should always go on a seperate disc, but that just seems crazy to me. I can't think of a single advantage to dividing things up into multiple discs - outside of perhaps giving you the feeling of getting "more for your money." But if that's what you're going for, why not just get movies encoded into ten video CDs with a really high MPEG-2 bitrate?

No matter how you slice it, Blu-Ray has more capacity. And for anyone who has money, this is a good thing. If you're really poor, I can see the DVD-9 argument, but I'd rather spend some extra money and have the convienence of having everything possible on one disc. Anyway, I already have a PS3.

DarkZell666

13th January 2007, 08:37

Yes, but nothing will close the gap between the ability of Blu-Ray to carry all possible language tracks, special features altrenate endings, extended edition, entire seasons of TV shows. Someone here did post that such things should always go on a seperate disc, but that just seems crazy to me. I can't think of a single advantage to dividing things up into multiple discs - outside of perhaps giving you the feeling of getting "more for your money." But if that's what you're going for, why not just get movies encoded into ten video CDs with a really high MPEG-2 bitrate?

No matter how you slice it, Blu-Ray has more capacity. And for anyone who has money, this is a good thing. If you're really poor, I can see the DVD-9 argument, but I'd rather spend some extra money and have the convienence of having everything possible on one disc. Anyway, I already have a PS3.

Except that you seem to have missed the point that:
h.264 rocks MPEG2's ass, and not many people are as rich as you seem to be :) There's nothing psychological about it, but it seems not everyone has the same logic :rolleyes:

Sharktooth

13th January 2007, 16:31

hvatum

13th January 2007, 20:31

Except that you seem to have missed the point that:
h.264 rocks MPEG2's ass, and not many people are as rich as you seem to be :) There's nothing psychological about it, but it seems not everyone has the same logic :rolleyes:

Except that you seem to have missed the point that:
h.264 rocks MPEG2's ass

Well, no one is stopping you from encoding your movies onto DVD-9. I don't see what you're complaining about, where's the problem? To make discs that support H.264 and players which support them the movie industry would need to make a new standard anyway. So either way you're buying a new DVD Player.

Secondly, why the hell is MPEG2 and H264 even being compared, you do realize that Blu-Ray su0pports H264, don't you? Using H264 on a Blu-Ray disc you can fit entire seasons of TV shows, and completely get rid of extra discs. You simply can not do that with your Amish DVD9 plan, there's just no way. Perhaps you can fit a two hour movie with comperable quality, but that's about all you can do with DVD9. No one is forcing you to you upgrade to Blu-Ray, by all means wait until you can get a Blu-Ray drive for $30, but don't complain because other people have more money then you and actually like vastly improved technology and like taking advatage of it's better capabilities.

hvatum

13th January 2007, 20:42

Ah yeah, why dont we kill flies shooting them with cannons?
Blu-Ray capacity is only usefull for data. With modern codecs even DVD-5s are enough for hi-def video...
I cant see the reason to use Blu-Ray for video when there's the HD-DVD format that's cheaper, safer and already affirmed (due to the fact it's the natural DVD evolution). Blu-Ray has more capacity but the production costs of both discs and drives is very very much higher, the price increase ratio is higher than the extra space you will get (comparing BD with HD-DVD).
My POV is Blu-Ray is an "overshoot"...

I hate to burst your bubble, but Blu-Ray does not have "vastly" greater costs for the manufacturing of either the disc or player. That's just FUD. And if it does, then it does not bare out in price. The cheapest stand alone next generation player is currently the PS3 20GB (No, an add on HD-DVD drive for the X-Box 360 is not a player, it is an add on drive...). And on e-product wars Blu-Ray discs are all priced within 10% of their HD-DVD breathern, in some cases cheaper. Hardly "vastly" or "very very" much higher - you really need to keep up to date, because your POV seems to be from about summer 2006.

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/index.cfm

My POV is HD-DVD is an "undershoot," why pay almost the same amount of money for an inferior technology?

PS. I'm short on freetime, so I don't plan to check this forum again. If you still disagree then I guess we can agree to disagree, because after two posts the HD-DVD vrs. Blu-Ray argument just turns into a back and forth - nothing new. Even if you can get 6 hours of HD on a DVD-9, that still means you could get 6x that amount on a 50GB Blu-Ray disc, since they both support H264, no encoding standard is going to erase that difference.

Morte66

13th January 2007, 21:54

Even if you can get 6 hours of HD on a DVD-9, that still means you could get 6x that amount on a 50GB Blu-Ray disc, since they both support H264, no encoding standard is going to erase that difference.

This is pretty much true. But if I encoded a movie to h264 high profile unrestricted on DVD9, then:

a) It would look great. I would be satisfied.
b) I wouldn't have to spend 500 pounds on a Blu-Ray drive to play it.

Sharktooth

14th January 2007, 03:53

@hvatum: the prices you linked are about movie titles on BD-ROM and HD-DVD-ROM.
The price is very different for (re)writeable supports and costs of the Blu-Ray discs is much higher due to materials (expecially zirconium) and required technology (much lower components tolerance on the players/recorders, etc).
However, you can use any PC to read contents on HD-DVDs (including movies) thanks to the xbox360 addon drive and they're very cheap while you cant do the same with Blu-Ray.
That said my POV is still very valid.

Taxidermista

14th January 2007, 06:21

Actualy HDDVD use Dolby Digital Plus at 640 Kbps for multiple audio stream 7.1 48 Khz ...

8500 MB HDDVD structure on DVD9 for 120 min movie

8130 MB

Jay Bee

14th January 2007, 09:49

8130 MB

based on 8 547 993 600 bytes:

8.548 GB
7.961 GiB
8548 MB
8152 MiB

Silly, people confusing, misnamed, binary prefix. :)

iwod

14th January 2007, 18:38

I hate to burst your bubble, but Blu-Ray does not have "vastly" greater costs for the manufacturing of either the disc or player. That's just FUD. And if it does, then it does not bare out in price. The cheapest stand alone next generation player is currently the PS3 20GB (No, an add on HD-DVD drive for the X-Box 360 is not a player, it is an add on drive...). And on e-product wars Blu-Ray discs are all priced within 10% of their HD-DVD breathern, in some cases cheaper. Hardly "vastly" or "very very" much higher - you really need to keep up to date, because your POV seems to be from about summer 2006.

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/index.cfm

My POV is HD-DVD is an "undershoot," why pay almost the same amount of money for an inferior technology?

PS. I'm short on freetime, so I don't plan to check this forum again. If you still disagree then I guess we can agree to disagree, because after two posts the HD-DVD vrs. Blu-Ray argument just turns into a back and forth - nothing new. Even if you can get 6 hours of HD on a DVD-9, that still means you could get 6x that amount on a 50GB Blu-Ray disc, since they both support H264, no encoding standard is going to erase that difference.

True. In terms o of tech. BD is better. In terms of Cost it aint so much of a difference. They are both expensive but if you can afford one then you will be able afford the other anyway.

So what is the problem with BD? Simple enough.... it is Sony. Only if Sony didn't make so much bad press and BD should have won by now.

Back to topic. Is BD is really too much for Hi-Def. Why not just put more in like 60 / 50 Frames per sec and 10bit per Channel ( High 10 Profile ) ? Or would that be overkill?

chilledoutuk

15th January 2007, 01:06

reepa

15th January 2007, 04:49

Here we go...
http://rapidshare.com/files/8149678/SVT.zip.html (50.7MB)

Thanks a bunch for that encode! If you'd like to, could you also do an AVC encode at 40Mbps CBR (Blu-ray video maximum) and another at 28Mbps CBR (HD-DVD video maximum) to put the bitrate difference discussion to rest? There'd then be good hard evidence to point to when arguing whether the extra bitrate of Blu-Ray is of any benefit with modern codecs.

Just selecteven() and assumefps(24), and please also include the CrowdRun sequence for some high motion (OldTownCross was twice in your encode, but no CrowdRun). The reason for CBR: the bitrate values are maximum values, so the VBR-encoded movies on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will always have less bitrate anyway.

Morte66

15th January 2007, 13:15

Thanks a bunch for that encode! If you'd like to, could you also do an AVC encode at 40Mbps CBR (Blu-ray video maximum) and another at 28Mbps CBR (HD-DVD video maximum) to put the bitrate difference discussion to rest?

I'll have a go in a day or two. I've got a humungous spatial-temporal deblocking thing running (or crawling) at the moment.

Sagittaire

15th January 2007, 14:00

The reason for CBR: the bitrate values are maximum values, so the VBR-encoded movies on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will always have less bitrate anyway.

No ... it's false. Rate Control for HDDVD and BD doesn't work like that.

For HDDVD you can use 29.4 Mbps with 30 Mbits for buffer. RC can use higher local bitrate than max Bitrate for difficult part. IMO 20 Mbps VBR encoding with good RC strategy will done really more constant quality than 30 Mbps CBR encoding for HDDVD. Make CBR encoding at the max bitrate limit is not a good RC strategy. It's strange but in practice it's always like that.

Manao

15th January 2007, 14:17

IMO 20 Mbps VBR encoding with good RC strategy will done really more constant quality than 30 Mbps CBR encoding for HDDVDThe quality will be more constant, but it will be lower than the 30 mbps CBR. By that, I mean that at any point in the video, the quality will be as most equal, but most probably less than the CBR video.

So if you have bitrate to spend, 30 mbps CBR is worth it.

Morte66

15th January 2007, 15:39

In fact a poorly encoded video with bad rate control and post processing will in my opinion have a much larger effect to the end user.

I agree. Like I said earlier, skill and care in the transfer/encode count for more than a pretty susbstantial bitrate difference. The important question for HD is "who made this encode", not "what size did they encode to".

Morte66

19th January 2007, 15:12

If you'd like to, could you also do an AVC encode at 40Mbps CBR (Blu-ray video maximum) and another at 28Mbps CBR (HD-DVD video maximum) to put the bitrate difference discussion to rest? There'd then be good hard evidence to point to when arguing whether the extra bitrate of Blu-Ray is of any benefit with modern codecs.

Just selecteven() and assumefps(24), and please also include the CrowdRun sequence for some high motion [...]

OK, back to the coalface. Per Reepa's requests, I encoded a couple of segments from the SVT samples using x264 at 28mbps and 40mbps (max rates for HD DVD and Blu-Ray). I just used the "Crowd Run" and "Old Town Cross" sections to keep the file sizes slightly sane.

I used Saggittaire's HD DVD compliant settings and tweaked the bitrate stuff. x264 doesn't really do CBR but I sort of faked it with qcomp 0; it should be near enough for the purposes of this comparison. Sample settings... --pass 2 --stats ".stats" --bitrate 28000 --vbv-maxrate 28000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --qcomp 0 --threads auto --thread-input --keyint 15 --min-keyint 1 --mvrange 512 --level 4.1 --bframe 2 --b-rdo --bime --weightb --ref 3 --mixed-refs --deblock -1:-1 --ipratio 1.10 --pbratio 1.30 --partitions "all" --8x8dct --me "hex" --subme 6 --no-fast-pskip --no-dct-decimate --trellis 1 --progress -o CrowdCross.28000.mp4 CrowdCross.avs

Here are the 40mbps results:
http://rapidshare.com/files/12401767/CrowdCross.40000.mp4.html

x264 [info]: slice I:34 Avg QP:22.47 size:450058 PSNR Mean Y:40.26 U:40.63 V:41.46 Avg:40.50 Global:40.32
x264 [info]: slice P:234 Avg QP:23.14 size:272390 PSNR Mean Y:38.96 U:39.71 V:40.71 Avg:39.32 Global:39.13
x264 [info]: slice B:232 Avg QP:25.20 size:107483 PSNR Mean Y:37.08 U:38.61 V:39.97 Avg:37.67 Global:37.56
x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 19.2% 53.0% 27.9%
x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 9.0% 16.9% 5.2% P16..4: 25.2% 21.7% 15.5% 3.0% 2.5% skip: 1.0%
x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 4.7% 5.8% 1.1% B16..8: 27.2% 5.2% 13.6% direct:11.8% skip:30.6%
x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:53.1% inter:42.6%
x264 [info]: ref P 80.8% 13.3% 6.0%
x264 [info]: ref B 89.0% 7.9% 3.1%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9430235
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:38.176 U:39.263 V:40.418 Avg:38.636 Global:38.391 kb/s:39927.27

encoded 500 frames, 1.12 fps, 39928.02 kb/s

And the 28mbps results
http://rapidshare.com/files/12396676/CrowdCross.28000.mp4.html

x264 [info]: slice I:34 Avg QP:24.26 size:360524 PSNR Mean Y:38.78 U:39.54 V:40.53 Avg:39.15 Global:38.95
x264 [info]: slice P:234 Avg QP:24.95 size:201108 PSNR Mean Y:37.52 U:38.77 V:39.91 Avg:38.03 Global:37.77
x264 [info]: slice B:232 Avg QP:27.08 size: 61029 PSNR Mean Y:35.74 U:37.97 V:39.37 Avg:36.50 Global:36.36
x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 18.1% 56.3% 25.5%
x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 7.6% 16.3% 4.6% P16..4: 28.0% 20.9% 15.4% 2.3% 1.5% skip: 3.4%
x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 2.7% 2.8% 0.7% B16..8: 30.1% 4.8% 11.3% direct: 6.9% skip:40.6%
x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:55.5% inter:43.2%
x264 [info]: ref P 81.1% 13.0% 5.9%
x264 [info]: ref B 85.8% 9.6% 4.6%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9287368
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:36.780 U:38.448 V:39.699 Avg:37.395 Global:37.119 kb/s:28214.75

encoded 500 frames, 1.27 fps, 28215.50 kb/s

The most obvious difference is that on my PC with ZoomPlayer/CoreAVC the 28mbps version skips 10% of the time and the 40mbps version skips 90% of the time. Too much data...

Apart from that they both look pretty darned good, which is impressive given the murderous nature of the material and the amount of grain. No way could I guess which was the raw/40mbps/28mbps just by looking at them. If I overlay frame grabs and cycle through them, there are differences are in the grain but not the content (I still can't guess which is which).

It would be interesting to see how this comparison turned out with vc1, particularly the grain (which isn't h264's thing).

Seb.26

19th January 2007, 15:28

Here we go...
http://rapidshare.com/files/8149678/SVT.zip.html (50.7MB)

Thanks for that.

... but why source.tga and encode.tga haven't same size ...
( with same pixel size )

Targa file are compressed ?! ( a lossless one ? )

reepa

20th January 2007, 15:13

http://img334.imageshack.us/img334/1520/40vs287ko.th.png (http://img334.imageshack.us/my.php?image=40vs287ko.png)

I can't really tell which one's which. I was expecting at least some kind of a quality gap, but there really isn't one. The only difference is between the amount of grain in areas with little detail. Thanks for spending your time Morte66!

edit: the screencaptures are lossless so no jpeg artifacts.

Audionut

20th January 2007, 16:06

http://img334.imageshack.us/img334/1520/40vs287ko.th.png (http://img334.imageshack.us/my.php?image=40vs287ko.png)

On the screenshot alone, the top one looks like it has been compressed more with jpeg.

Sharktooth

20th January 2007, 16:45

the differencies are so small you wont notice them during playback.
it is even hard to spot them on still pictures...

Jay Bee

20th January 2007, 17:19

The original topic question was whether bitrates possible on HD-DVD/BR would achieve visibly better image quality than lower bitrates on DVD-9.

Comparing the files
http://rapidshare.com/files/8149678/SVT.zip.html (7300 kbps)
http://rapidshare.com/files/12396676/CrowdCross.28000.mp4.html (28000 kbps)
http://rapidshare.com/files/12401767/CrowdCross.40000.mp4.html (40000 kbps)
I would say the answer is clearly yes. One example: look at the tiles on this roof. I can't tell any difference between the two high bitrate clips but the low bitrate clip clearly blurrs away the detail.
hi (28000 kbps):
http://img6.picsplace.to/img6/25/28000_000.png
low (7300 kbps):
http://img6.picsplace.to/img6/25/7300_000.png

And that scene isn't what I would call fast motion. So basically I think people should keep bashing the DRM but not the increased size of new media.

Sharktooth

20th January 2007, 17:24

did you use the same settings for the DVD-size encoding?

Jay Bee

20th January 2007, 17:29

No, the clips were all made by Morte66 in this thread. If the settings are different then my above statements could be wrong of course.

Morte66

20th January 2007, 18:01

did you use the same settings for the DVD-size encoding?

No, the lower bitrate film encode was 50fps and it made no attempt at HD DVD compliance (longer GOP, more b-frames etc). I did that one because I was curious about x264 and film grain. It wasn't especially relevant to the thread.

The 28mbps/40mbps encodes were about HD DVD vs Blu-Ray.

I'd have to do 24fps ~7mbps from film to make a DVD9 vs HD DVD comparison, but everything I've seen suggests that x264 isn't quite up to 1080p on DVD9 for people who like to reproduce grain. It's "backup grade" but not "reference grade". If there were some effective external grain retention system (characterise and regenerate), I suspect x264 would be fine.

The very first encode I posted in this thread, from the clean Taurus Media digital samples, was about DVD9 backup. x264 looked very good there, I'd be quite happy to pay HD DVD prices for that.

Sagittaire

20th January 2007, 18:15

x264 [info]: slice I:34 Avg QP:22.47 size:450058 PSNR Mean Y:40.26 U:40.63 V:41.46 Avg:40.50 Global:40.32
x264 [info]: slice P:234 Avg QP:23.14 size:272390 PSNR Mean Y:38.96 U:39.71 V:40.71 Avg:39.32 Global:39.13
x264 [info]: slice B:232 Avg QP:25.20 size:107483 PSNR Mean Y:37.08 U:38.61 V:39.97 Avg:37.67 Global:37.56
x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 19.2% 53.0% 27.9%
x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 9.0% 16.9% 5.2% P16..4: 25.2% 21.7% 15.5% 3.0% 2.5% skip: 1.0%
x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 4.7% 5.8% 1.1% B16..8: 27.2% 5.2% 13.6% direct:11.8% skip:30.6%
x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:53.1% inter:42.6%
x264 [info]: ref P 80.8% 13.3% 6.0%
x264 [info]: ref B 89.0% 7.9% 3.1%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9430235
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:38.176 U:39.263 V:40.418 Avg:38.636 Global:38.391 kb/s:39927.27

encoded 500 frames, 1.12 fps, 39928.02 kb/s

This source is not classical source like movie:
- 40 Mbps
- more than 20 for average quant
- Less than 38.636 dB for OPSNR

It's certainely a very high textured source with high noise level. Movie are never like that. It's simply useless to make comparison with this source ...

Jay Bee

20th January 2007, 18:17

Ah, thx for clearing that up. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.
You say that DVD-9 isn't quite enough for people who like grain. How do you think it would deal with detail like the roof tiles? Maybe we would need a new clip to see that? *hint *hint :)

Morte66

20th January 2007, 18:19

This source is not classical source like movie:
- 40 Mbps
- more than 20 for average quant
- Less than 38.636 dB for OPSNR

It's certainely a very high textured source with high noise level. Movie are never like that. It's simply useless to make comparison with this source ...

I agree as a practical encoding test of typical material, but Reepa was asking about absolute limits of the two HD media (i.e. will BD's extra bitrate ever be useful over HD DVD).

Morte66

20th January 2007, 18:20

*hint *hint :)

*tomorrow *tomorrow :)

It's dark now, and time I was watching video instead of encoding it.

hvatum

20th January 2007, 21:12

People have to understand that while the inherent complexity in blueray disc technology makes it seem superior to the untrained eye, however in reality the technological leap that blueray

Technology is from DVD means that reliably producing these discs in vast quantity's is not cheap and unless subsidised will end in a higher cost to the consumer.

That's a fine opinion, but it's not congruent with reality. Check the actual prices of Blu-ray vrs. HD-DVD in the store, they are not much different. You can argue in theory all you want about the production costs of Blu-Ray vrs HD-DVD, but the proof is in the pudding.

In reality the extra space on a bluray disc is useful but however if you were to compare a badly produced bluray disc to that of a well implemented HD-DVD, HD-DVD would win easily.

And? A well encoded video on a CD (using H264) would beat a badly encoded DVD? So why are we even using DVDs, sounds like a big waste of money. I know this isn't exactly your point, but it's still true.

HD DVD 15Gb is more than enough for 1080 HD content even on long films when using AVC (H.264)

I have encoded a lot of HDTV films and in reality the difference the extra space makes when using a codec such as AVC (H.264) would be negligible.

In fact a poorly encoded video with bad rate control and post processing will in my opinion have a much larger effect to the end user.

I completely agree, don't see why you're even saying this. My only point is that whatever HD-DVD can do, Blu-ray can do better. If HD-DVD can do hold long movie in full quality, then Blu-Ray can hold a longer film. If HD-DVD can store a TV season, then Blu-Ray can store more episodes of a TV season at higher quality. No encoding method is going to erase the fact that Blu-ray can simply store more data.

@ hvatum
I think its very immature to make a post stating your opinion and then say "so I don't plan to check this forum again" because your loosing this argument to people that know more about video technology than you could dream of. Its just a little pathetic and ignorant.

Sorry that you find my lack of freetime offensive, not really much I can do for you :(

PS. I like your elitist attitude, I'm sure it has gotten a lot of people sitting on the fence into your camp (NOT). Secondly, doom9 forums (for me at least) has some major slowness problems, keeps giving me "server is busy, please try again later" message :confused:

hvatum

20th January 2007, 21:35

@hvatum: the prices you linked are about movie titles on BD-ROM and HD-DVD-ROM.

Yeah. It's hard to link to things which don't exist :P

The price is very different for (re)writeable supports and costs of the Blu-Ray discs is much higher due to materials (expecially zirconium) and required technology (much lower components tolerance on the players/recorders, etc).
However, you can use any PC to read contents on HD-DVDs (including movies) thanks to the xbox360 addon drive and they're very cheap while you cant do the same with Blu-Ray.
That said my POV is still very valid.

Are we talking about what's available now, or are we comparing vaporware? If you're going to tout the lower (re)writeable currently non-existant HD-DVD discs and burners then I'll be a chearleader for the possible future X-BOX 360 Blu-ray drive. Microsoft afterall did not discount the possibility of moving to Blu-Ray in the future.

In my opinion it's best to stick to comparing things that actually exist. Things which can actually be purchased at a quoted price in a store. I more readily trust the marketplace as the arbiter of price then a bunch of people on Doom-9 forums deciding what "will" or "should" cost more.

Trahald

20th January 2007, 21:43

That's a fine opinion, but it's not congruent with reality. Check the actual prices of Blu-ray vrs. HD-DVD in the store, they are not much different. You can argue in theory all you want about the production costs of Blu-Ray vrs HD-DVD, but the proof is in the pudding.

the end user cost does not always have anything to do with the actual cost. the price of the disks are based on being competitive with hddvd and being relative to the cost of dvd's. ps3's cost way more than the $700 they sell for (sonys most profitable unit 'was' there gaming division. ) but these things are done because in the long run they are hoping to make the money back. right now both hddvd and bluray camps are giving out there versions of first tastes. selling the disks for what they really costs will hurt the formats during a time where they are trying to build a base of users. im not sure why you are saying bluray costs are more than hddvd is FUD. unless you havent looked and are purely going by the end cost. reputable sources indicate that the newer bluray process is more costly than hddvd (which is just a modified version of the existing dvd process). sony insists that EVENTUALLY things will even out or be better for blu ray as there are some savings inherent in manufactur of bluray disks that will bear fruit once demand goes up.. but that is for the future to tell.

Sharktooth

21st January 2007, 15:28

Exactly. Thanks Trahald.
Another reason is store prices on movies cant be compared since the Content price is higher than the Media price, once re/writeable discs will hit the stores you can compare prices AND only then there will be the real "war"... the price war.

@Morte66: can you provide the same DVD9 size encode at 24fps?

Morte66

21st January 2007, 15:49

@Morte66: can you provide the same DVD9 size encode at 24fps?

Working on it.

As Saggittaire pointed out, the SVT material is not a realistic test of a movie encode -- if a movie contained anything like that, it would be the hardest part. If you encoded an entire movie at DVD9 bitrate (say 7mbps), the SVT-syle data would get more than the average bitrate and the other scenes would get less.

The only way to really test movie encoding is to encode whole movies from raw source. I can't do that because (a) I haven't got a whole movie as raw source and (b) if I had, I couldn't post it because of copyright.

So, here's what I propose to do...

1. Go through my various crf HD movie encodes from relatively good source (h264 TS at 15-20mbps), and pick one that looks about average and came out at average bitrate. Call that "typical movie material".

2. Re-encode the SVT samples spliced onto about 20 minutes from that source, at an overall 7445kbps VBR (the rate I've been using for DVD9).

3. Split the non-copyright SVT stuff off the front of the encode using a muxer, and post it.

I figure that should give a somewhat valid idea of how a very difficult section would come out in a DVD9 HD movie encode.

It's running. ETA about 8 hours...

Trahald

21st January 2007, 17:40

Just going to clarify my last statement (had to run out so i submitted it as-is rather than lose all of that typing). Hddvds are fabricated in a similar process to dvd. so old equipment only needs to be modified to produce hddvds. big up front savings. Bluray creation requires new equipment so there is a large upfront cost . if this cost were put into the price of the discs it would scare people away from bluray so wisely they price competitive to hddvd. since bluray creation process is newer and made with efficiency in mind, the bluray disc association is saying that eventually it will cost less to make a bd disc than a hddvd (or sddvd). that only will come when/if demand goes up. its a gamble since, as we know... better formats have failed before (ex. sony betamax)

reepa

21st January 2007, 20:16

This source is not classical source like movie:
- 40 Mbps
- more than 20 for average quant
- Less than 38.636 dB for OPSNR

It's certainely a very high textured source with high noise level. Movie are never like that. It's simply useless to make comparison with this source ...

This is certainly the best real-life test sequence available. It should actually have better fidelity than most movies, since these sequences were filmed on 65mm instead of 35mm. Elephants Dream lacks real film grain, which is present on all but the few films produced with a 100% digital workflow. If I'm wrong, I'd like to see what a "real" digital film master looks like.

Sagittaire

21st January 2007, 20:42

This is certainly the best real-life test sequence available.

No, real movie are never like that. This source is just like dv or hdv source, really uncompressible in most case. It's generaly really difficult to compress amateur dv source on DVD, for same reason it will be generaly really difficult to compress amateur hdv source on HDDVD/BD.

Elephants Dream lacks real film grain

Well ED use more realistic quantizer interval, certainly really near to those which will use the real movie encodings in most case for HDDVD/BD scenario.

chilledoutuk

22nd January 2007, 01:06

Secondly, doom9 forums (for me at least) has some major slowness problems, keeps giving me "server is busy, please try again later"

Perhaps it does not suffer fools gladly!!

That's a fine opinion, but it's not congruent with reality. Check the actual prices of Blu-ray vrs. HD-DVD in the store, they are not much different. You can argue in theory all you want about the production costs of Blu-Ray vrs HD-DVD, but the proof is in the pudding.

Either you are taking the piss or you have been sniffing the toilet duck as the good man Trahald has explained bluray is being subsidised to make it attractive to customers but in the long run i find it hard to believe that will ever get anywhere near as cheap as hd-dvd.

The sad truth is with new technology's like bluray it normally takes a couple of years before the manufactures have made back the investment on new machinery before the cost of the media starts getting useful for consumers as a medium.

Due to the cheapness of the upgrade and more manufacturers taking on the technology, in comparison to bluray the HD-DVD prices should be able to drop to a price level where it could become a mainstream recordable medium much faster than that of bluray.

R3Z

22nd January 2007, 01:32

With the compression power of these avc codecs (yeah vc1 included), there is no reason why online distribution cant be a serious practicality.

Whether thats streaming (likely) or just download to own.

DarkZell666

22nd January 2007, 09:50

online distribution massave streaming HD content over ADSL ? At a reasonable quality ? No way, and FTTH (or FTTB for that matter -Fiber to the Home & Fiber to the building) has started deployment less than a couple of weeks ago (in France that is ;)). And this is only supposing any webhost is able to stream 10mbps continuously to around 2000 visitors (much more actually, it's just an example figure, which gives a continuous 2GBytes/s ...). No one has this ability right now I believe. When downloading files on typical downloading sites (download.com for example), I rarely go over 300 or 400kB/s ... Internet simply isn't ready for massive HD distribution ... (and I'll add a big fat IMHO to make this my personnal opinion ;)).

Morte66

22nd January 2007, 12:13

As Saggittaire pointed out, the SVT material is not a realistic test of a movie encode -- if a movie contained anything like that, it would be the hardest part. If you encoded an entire
movie at DVD9 bitrate (say 7mbps), the SVT-syle data would get more than the average bitrate and the other scenes would get less.

The only way to really test movie encoding is to encode whole movies from raw source. I can't do that because (a) I haven't got a whole movie as raw source and (b) if I had, I couldn't post it because of copyright.

So, here's what I propose to do...

1. Go through my various crf HD movie encodes from relatively good source (h264 TS at 15-20mbps), and pick one that looks about average and came out at average bitrate. Call that "typical movie material".

2. Re-encode the SVT samples spliced onto about 20 minutes from that source, at an overall 7445kbps VBR (the rate I've been using for DVD9).

3. Split the non-copyright SVT stuff off the front of the encode using a muxer, and post it.

I figure that should give a somewhat valid idea of how a very difficult section would come out in a DVD9 HD movie encode.

And here it is... the five SVT samples inserted as a difficult section in a longer 7445kbps HD DVD encode, then cut out:

http://rapidshare.com/files/12824043/CompositeSVT-001.mkv.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/12825245/CompositeSVT-002.mkv.html

Stats for the whole encode:
x264 [info]: final ratefactor: 20.48
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:45.529 U:54.260 V:55.727 Avg:46.991 Global:44.438 kb/s:7445.96

encoded 26251 frames, 2.28 fps, 7446.73 kb/s

Looks pretty good, but somewhat degrained. And this is still a very tough test, not a lot of real movies would be this hard.

--

Since somebody is bound to ask, here is a 7445kbps HD DVD encode of just the SVT stuff (wholly unrealistic example of normal movie encoding):

http://rapidshare.com/files/12856652/SVT.7445.mp4.html

And here's a high profile unrestricted (not HD DVD compliant) version:

http://rapidshare.com/files/12865489/SVT.7445.unrestricted.mp4.html

--

Right, I think that's enough encoding/uploading for me in this thread.

Jay Bee

22nd January 2007, 15:57

Thx. I'll wait for the only SVT clip since I think it's a better comparision to your other clips. And I don't really understand the whole "not typical film" discussion. Hollywood films aren't the only things that are encoded and released on DVD. Any high motion football or racing footage will already be a lot harder to encode than a typical film so I don't think there is anything wrong with using the SVT sources.

Morte66

22nd January 2007, 17:00

Any high motion football or racing footage will already be a lot harder to encode than a typical film so I don't think there is anything wrong with using the SVT sources.

Well, the thread title does say "HD films"... ;)

But yeah, 1080p sports might be hurting on DVD9.

Jay Bee

22nd January 2007, 18:49

Well, the thread title does say "HD films"... ;)

Point taken. :)

A quick comparision of those roof tiles between 28000kbps, 7445kbps "realistic film" and 7445kbps unrestricted:

http://img6.picsplace.to/img6/25/28000_000.png

http://img6.picsplace.to/img6/25/7445_kbps_realistic.png

http://img6.picsplace.to/img6/25/7445_kbps_unrestricted.png

Again the high bitrate encode has clearly the best detail although CompositeSVT-002.mkv is a lot better than the clip from the last comparision.

So I think we can now quit the "HD-DVD/BR is just for DRM" claims. As can be seen here, disk space can be used very effectively. Anyone agree, disagree?

DarkZell666

22nd January 2007, 19:20

In fact, I believe there's a part of misunderstanding (at least I didn't get the point straight away) :

DVD9 (DVD-/+R DL), HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray are 3 (not 2) different things :) So wether HD-DVD is useful over DVD-9 is obvious: of course (at least for 1080p, since 720p could get away with DVD9, imho), but wether Blu-Ray is very useful over HD-DVD isn't that obvious at all.

I do gather something important here: We've been used to viewing SD content for too long, and HD is relatively (read: completely) a different matter. We now say that it's *ok* to have HD-DVD's for HD content, but maybe in a couple of years we'll think "oh my Blu-Ray wasn't such a bad idea after all". Only future will tell ^^ But it's been pointed out earlier : the thing that matters most is the quality of the encoders the studios will be using. The current Blu-Ray releases (apparently) look like complete crap, even at crazy bitrates ... so I bet those "crappy" encoders will be one of the major reasons pretexts for using Blu-Ray over HD-DVD (for movie releases).

I'd be most interested if some of the people here who actually own a Full HD TV (not an HD-ready one), could comment on the quality of the encodes Morte66 has given here (I mean, playing them on their TV of course ;)). Doing comparisons on 1280*1024 computer screens doesn't make much sense IMHO (I know some of you freaks have kick-ass LCD's but I doubt 1% of them have a native 1080p monitor :/).

Morte66

22nd January 2007, 20:01

Point taken. :)

So I think we can now quit the "HD-DVD/BR is just for DRM" claims. As can be seen here, disk space can be used very effectively. Anyone agree, disagree?

Well, my views have not really changed:

- The noise in the film original creates a false impression of detail. The encodes mostly lose noise, not real detail. But they do lose some real detail.

- x264 is not ideal if you want to retain grain. I don't like grain, if I were encoding this stuff for myself I'd denoise and sharpen it. But some people like grain, and x264+DVD9 will not serve them so well.

- It would be interesting to see what VC-1 does with grain on this material. Ditto grain retention tools for h264.

- Absent grain, the DVD9 movie encodes are very good. You have to take still frames and do direct A/B to find fault. They're good enough for the vast majority of the market, but people who own ten thousand dollar projectors with thousand dollar lamps would get some advantage from bigger files.

- I would rather have DVD9 encodes than pay 500 pounds for a Blu-Ray drive. My DVD-RW drive cost less than the average Blu-Ray disc. If the drives come down to fifty pounds, maybe the quality gain is worth the money.

- Sports are different. High motion 720p/60 is a solid justification for big discs. But I don't buy any sports stuff.

In other words... it depends what you're after.

Morte66

22nd January 2007, 20:20

kick-ass LCD's but I doubt 1% of them have a native 1080p monitor :/).

Apart from the 120 black lines, what's the difference between my 1920x1200 LCD (hardware calibrated for photo proofing) and a "native 1080p monitor"? I can't see why you're drawing a distinction.

DarkZell666

22nd January 2007, 20:55

Apart from the 120 black lines, what's the difference between my 1920x1200 LCD (hardware calibrated for photo proofing) and a "native 1080p monitor"? I can't see why you're drawing a distinction.

There isn't in your case, it's just that most people I know of (which aren't computer g33ks :p) don't have much better than a 1280*1024 CRT, which means that anything that can be displayed on a computer screen gets downsized (and looses detail). The 1080p was misleading indeed, but at least on your screen any true HD content isn't resized, which is where the comparison is the most precise. At work I have a 1600x1200 LCD, which means the picture will get downsized to fit in the 1600px width (and that the whole purpose of HD is rendered useless in my case).

And yet again, does your screen have a physical 1920x1200 dot matrix ? Or is it a 1024x640 dot matrix that fakes a 1920x1200px resolution ? That's what I meant by "native 1080p": a screen that has at least 1920x1080 physical dots. The whole point I'm trying to make is rather concerning the physical display, not the virtual resolution the drivers allow you to chose.

Morte66

22nd January 2007, 21:22

And yet again, does your screen have a physical 1920x1200 dot matrix ?

I see. Yes, it does have 1920x1200 actual dots.

22nd January 2007, 21:46

At work I have a 1600x1200 LCD, which means the picture will get downsized to fit in the 1600px width (and that the whole purpose of HD is rendered useless in my case).
You could also play the video without resizing so that 160 pixels get cropped from left and right sides. Probably not the best option for the cinematic experience, but good enough for quality comparisons. At least when used that way, I wouldn't say the display renders HD useless.

Jay Bee

22nd January 2007, 23:30

Well, my views have not really changed:

- The noise in the film original creates a false impression of detail. The encodes mostly lose noise, not real detail. But they do lose some real detail.

- x264 is not ideal if you want to retain grain. I don't like grain, if I were encoding this stuff for myself I'd denoise and sharpen it. But some people like grain, and x264+DVD9 will not serve them so well.

- It would be interesting to see what VC-1 does with grain on this material. Ditto grain retention tools for h264.

- Absent grain, the DVD9 movie encodes are very good. You have to take still frames and do direct A/B to find fault. They're good enough for the vast majority of the market, but people who own ten thousand dollar projectors with thousand dollar lamps would get some advantage from bigger files.

- I would rather have DVD9 encodes than pay 500 pounds for a Blu-Ray drive. My DVD-RW drive cost less than the average Blu-Ray disc. If the drives come down to fifty pounds, maybe the quality gain is worth the money.

- Sports are different. High motion 720p/60 is a solid justification for big discs. But I don't buy any sports stuff.

In other words... it depends what you're after.

Yeah, good summary. It really depends on which factors you take into account. When comparing the price difference between DVD and DVD-HD/BR hardware then of course the above seen differences in quality aren't worth it. We'll just have to wait and see how long it takes for prices to drop.

Sharktooth

23rd January 2007, 05:11

The most important fact is probably a triple layer HD-DVD (51Gb) would be still cheaper than a dual layer Blu-Ray (50Gb) offering almost the same space...
However the quality difference (using modern standards) between actual Blu-Ray and HD-DVD at those bitrates is negligible.

Soulhunter

23rd January 2007, 13:22

Why? Hmm... Recording HDTV? Must be realtime [no 2pass, probably not so complex coding... So you need much higher bitrate to get artifact-free results]. Storing Data? Nice alternative to tapes which have a higher capacity but no direct data access like you have on a disc... And its much easier to make the ppl buy BluRay burners and blanks if its a format which is used anyway as it replaces the DVD, no? So corps can sell new stuff? Nah, for h.264 on DVD9s youd need a new player as well... To flood us with DRM shit? Nah, they could do the same with h.264 on DVD9s!

Ps: Imo -> You need much more space than a DVD9 offers to get transparent results for 2h of average compressible 1080p content... And if the runtime is longer and/or the content is very incompressible you probably need the reserves BluRay/HD-DVD offer... Tho the bitrate-limits of the video standards render this useless what I read, no!?

Bye