TMpgEnc bug (Noisy video)

[phi]

Hi all!

I'm very desperate now.
I used to encode DV avi files to MPEG2 (SVCD) format, but I'v found a very ugly bug, that I can't work around.

I loaded my DV avi into VirtualDub and used temporal smoother to remove noise from picture. I like this filter becase it eliminates the high freqency noise from non-moving areas (eg. background), makes them almost static, so MPEG2 has enough bitrate to encode the "interesting" parts.
So I've got a color-gradient like background (the wall behind the people in a room), than I encoded it with TMpgEnc using SVCD template CBR 2000.
And the wall began to move!!! Ugly blocky noise stated to flow around. It seems to me, that random solid blocks bacame darker and darker, but only in the GOP. When a new I frame arrives the picture becomes clear, and the whole things starts again with another random blocks, and the result is big dark blocks pulsating in the background, which was almost totaly clear in the source.
I tried all combinations of Floating point DCT, Soften block noise and No Half Per Pixel search settings, but always the same. I tried an earlier version, same.
I tried another encoders ligos, and CCE demo - no similar noise.

Please help, what to do.

(Later I will put up some sample pics or videos if somebody interested.)

Thanks,
/phi

PS.: Sorry, about my poor english, I hope I was clear enough.

[Erik_Osterholm]

I've actually seen this exact problem in many videos downloaded as well as on some of my own encodes. Usually I see the problem only when playing in standalone devices rather than on the computer itself. Does your problem sound like this?

I found that typically it occurs when there's too much of a gradient. That seems to be fairly difficult for TMPGEnc to encode, resulting (frequently) in a higher bitrate for that section. High bitrates can give some players problems. Usually I try to force I frames for scenes like this, which generally works ok, or if you can blur the offending wall using virtualdub or avisynth filters, that can help too.

[phi]

Unfortunately I can see it on my PC also, but I maybe we are talking about the same problem and I don't know why 2000bps is too high.
I tried to use Smart Smoother HQ VD filter, but it didn't help.

Could you recommend some MPEG2 encoder with VBR support to use. Please don't say CCE cause its $2K price is a joke. I have ligos encoder also (came with my Pyro card, but it's CBR only, fast, but low quality, and I can't set it slower to produce higher quality.)

Thanks,
/phi

[Erik_Osterholm]

There aren't many mpeg2 encoders out there because of the license fees and the difficulty in creating them. I would play around with TMPGEnc until you get the results you want.
You may also try going to an earlier version, such as 2.0 or even 1.2, if you can find it.

Erik

[phi]

Hi all!

I've downloaded last version of bbmpeg again. I've tried this encoder previously, (approx. two years ago). I'm testing this now, but my first experiences are good, no "tmpeg like" artifacts (see above) with affordable speed. My only pain is (now) that I don't know how to set whether the target MPEG2 stream is interlaced or not, and I don't know if it can encode video in two fields mode.

TMpegEnc is out now, because I'v tried all variations of settings and tried old versions also, and I couldn't remove the above described "noise".

Unfortunately bbMpeg's official homepage is not available, and the last version is almost a year old. I hope there are somebody, who takes care about this project, since the source code is also available.

/phi