sebazvideo
7th May 2010, 05:33
I think that given the quality and maturity of the x264 project, it's very important that it gets adopted by as many people as possible (duh!). There's one stone on the road for a huge number of people that would find very viable to use x264 for their projects, but currently it's not as easy as it can be, and if there are any developers here that would like to help on an extra open source project, that would help to make x264 much more popular.
There are probably many people that only use x264 as part of BD Rebuilder to backup movies, but some others like me use it to encode their own videos with the purpose of Blu-Ray authoring or just to upload to Vimeo, Facebook or YouTube. Many videographers use Vegas Pro as their editing software, and the h.264 encoder bundled with it is very primitive. It's not too bad, but it only has a few choices and it can't give more than 16 Mbps.
That's where an open source project that many here probably know comes to the rescue as a link between Vegas and x264: DebugMode Frameserver. This little program installs as a Vegas plugin, and it allows to send the timeline from Vegas to MeGUI or whatever frontend you may prefer, without having to render the timeline to an intermediate avi file first, which depending on the length of the project, can take up several gigabytes that the user may not always have available.
The problem is that currently this software doesn't work with Vegas Pro 9. It works great with Vegas Pro 8, but most Vegas users already made the switch to 9, and when trying to output from Vegas 9 to DFS, 9 times out of 10 it doesn't work. It crashes Vegas right away, and the few times it works, when the encoding is finished, then it's impossible to close the render dialog in Vegas and the user has to kill the process.
Unfortunately the head of the project, Satish, seems to be busy with some other things at the time, and doesn't have the proper time to work on this project as necessary to make it work well in Vegas Pro 9.
So I think that if there's anyone reading this that may want to work on that project, it would be a great service not only for the project itself, but also as a way to bring thousands of Vegas Pro editors into the x264 world, since there's not many ways to output HD to a Blu-Ray disc for videographers, it's either MPEG-2 at very high bitrates or h.264, for which x264 offers the best quality.
Now, many Vegas users may be put off by having to export a two hour long timeline to an AVI file with Lagarith, HuffYuv or some other lossless codec that will take quite some time and then take up a huge amount of hard drive space, to only then start encoding to x264. But all those users would be far more willing to use x264 if they could start encoding directly after a few steps that take a minute or two.
I'm not involved with the DFS project, I'm talking from the point of view of an editor that would like to use x264 always. Currently I use Vegas and Edius Neo Booster, especially the latter, but unfortunately there is no frameserver for it. So currently I have to export to a lossless AVI file anyway to encode to x264, but if DFS worked for Vegas Pro 9 as flawlessly as it did for version 8, I would consider doing all my editing in Vegas so I could have that possibility. I hope that somebody thinks this is as important as it is for me.
You can find the details and source for the project at http://code.google.com/p/frame-server/
Thanks
There are probably many people that only use x264 as part of BD Rebuilder to backup movies, but some others like me use it to encode their own videos with the purpose of Blu-Ray authoring or just to upload to Vimeo, Facebook or YouTube. Many videographers use Vegas Pro as their editing software, and the h.264 encoder bundled with it is very primitive. It's not too bad, but it only has a few choices and it can't give more than 16 Mbps.
That's where an open source project that many here probably know comes to the rescue as a link between Vegas and x264: DebugMode Frameserver. This little program installs as a Vegas plugin, and it allows to send the timeline from Vegas to MeGUI or whatever frontend you may prefer, without having to render the timeline to an intermediate avi file first, which depending on the length of the project, can take up several gigabytes that the user may not always have available.
The problem is that currently this software doesn't work with Vegas Pro 9. It works great with Vegas Pro 8, but most Vegas users already made the switch to 9, and when trying to output from Vegas 9 to DFS, 9 times out of 10 it doesn't work. It crashes Vegas right away, and the few times it works, when the encoding is finished, then it's impossible to close the render dialog in Vegas and the user has to kill the process.
Unfortunately the head of the project, Satish, seems to be busy with some other things at the time, and doesn't have the proper time to work on this project as necessary to make it work well in Vegas Pro 9.
So I think that if there's anyone reading this that may want to work on that project, it would be a great service not only for the project itself, but also as a way to bring thousands of Vegas Pro editors into the x264 world, since there's not many ways to output HD to a Blu-Ray disc for videographers, it's either MPEG-2 at very high bitrates or h.264, for which x264 offers the best quality.
Now, many Vegas users may be put off by having to export a two hour long timeline to an AVI file with Lagarith, HuffYuv or some other lossless codec that will take quite some time and then take up a huge amount of hard drive space, to only then start encoding to x264. But all those users would be far more willing to use x264 if they could start encoding directly after a few steps that take a minute or two.
I'm not involved with the DFS project, I'm talking from the point of view of an editor that would like to use x264 always. Currently I use Vegas and Edius Neo Booster, especially the latter, but unfortunately there is no frameserver for it. So currently I have to export to a lossless AVI file anyway to encode to x264, but if DFS worked for Vegas Pro 9 as flawlessly as it did for version 8, I would consider doing all my editing in Vegas so I could have that possibility. I hope that somebody thinks this is as important as it is for me.
You can find the details and source for the project at http://code.google.com/p/frame-server/
Thanks