Quicktime 6.0 Quickie

[bullitB]

Just encoded the famous chapters 28, 29 and 30 of The Matrix with the MPEG-4 codec of QuickTime 6.0 Public Preview...some screenies:

http://thegoods.ath.cx/~hmason/qt6test/

The resulting stream was 82 kbytes/sec. Overall...it doesn't look like DivX/XviD is going to have any serious competition unless the final release is a crap load better than this. That said, it seems like a noble attempt for Apple...but yes, it is blurry.

Comments? Questions?

[atracus]

@bullitB,

how did you do that? I installed the full qt6 preview, but I couldn't find any working way to use the encoder, i.e. with VirtualDub.

platform: W2k

are any Apple tools needed to do that? my you please give me some hint?

tia

[atx]

[bullitB]

Originally posted by atracus
@bullitB,

how did you do that? I installed the full qt6 preview, but I couldn't find any working way to use the encoder, i.e. with VirtualDub.
[atx]

I had to use a Mac. 8)

If you do have a Mac, here's what I did:
1) Extract the 3 chapters using OSEx.
2) Load the .vob's into MacMPEG2Decoder (beta 8)
3) Make sure color expansion and high quality scaling are ON, and blurring is OFF.
4) Go into the Transform window, crop the movie 64 off the top, 72 off the bottom, 18 from the left, and 19 from the right. Then set scaling to 640x272.
5) In the Settings window, choose MPEG-4 video. There is no way to do automatic 2-pass encoding (that I know of) so I decided to do manual multi-pass. That is, I used VBR encoding at different quality setings to get to the bitrate I wanted. In this case, I found the settings of 61% quality and "More Accurate Compression" optimal. Also, make sure you set the "Key frame every" box to a very high number (like 999999); this will allow the MPEG-4 codec to use its own keyframer. Make the framerate 23.976, and start the transcoding!
6) For audio, I wanted to use AAC, so I used mAC3dec (a Mac MP3 decoder) to convert the sound track to a normalized 44.1KHz AIFF file.
7) Load the AIFF file into Quicktime Pro, then export it as an MP4 movie with AAC audio. I used 64 kbits/sec.
8) Finally, load both the audio and video into Quicktime Pro, select all of the audio, copy it, then "Add Scaled" it into the video, and save the video.

In the end you should have an (aprox.) 50 meg .mov with MPEG-4 audio and video. Unfortunatly, Quicktime 6 refuses to break with MPEG specifications at all, so you can't make MP4s bigger than 320x240 (but you really should do that anyway...).

If you're on a PC, you might be able to do this via VFAPI and Premiere, but I'm not sure. There is a DirectShow filter for QuickTime demuxing, but not muxing.

And before anyone bashes the .mov format...do a little research. It has built-in support for multiple audio tracks, subtitles, even DVD-style menus. Hopefully we'll be able to get a good codec for it soon. (I think the DXN people are working on one)


BTW, does anyone think I'm wrong and feel these shots of QT6 look really good?

[Neo Neko]

It looks alright. Far better than stock MSMPEG4. But as you said it will take quite a bit of work to get it up to the over all quality of other current MPEG4 codecs.

[atracus]

thanks bullitB - precious, even though I don't have a Mac but 2 humbler Win2K and WinXP boxes....

in any case, I'll try out the same method with the equivalent PC programs, and just in case I'll let you know the outcome and (if it'll be worthwhile, i.e. better quality results than RealVideo9), I'll post here a quick step-by-step guideline on "my way"!

regards

[atx]

[Latexxx]

Open your .avi's to quicktime itself. Select file/export. Select movie to mpeg4 and click options. You should know how to handle the rest of it. Unfortunately quicktime only likes uncompressed, cinepak and indeo 4.x files. Do cropping and resizing with virtualdub and save to indeo 4.x with quality 100, keyrames 24/25/30 and fast compress mode.

[atracus]

thanks Latexx,

I tried your method and the result was awful even at top quality, both exporting in MP4 or in Quicktime proprietary (.mov), when compared to the same frame encoded in RealVideo9 at 700Kbps: mosquito noise, vibrant backgrounds when in uniform colors, even the sharpness of color changes at the objects' borders was somehow scaled, particularly in mp4 which can't be encoded by Quicktime at resolutions higher than 320x (if I well remember: I just uninstalled :) ).

So: I'll stick with rv9 as long as something significantly better will comeout (Corona?).

bye

[atx]

[Latexxx]

I made a litle comparision between quicktime mpeg4, divx5 put on to quicktime stream and real 9. I used 56k modem bandwith in test. Quicktime drops frames and looks worse than divx 5 and real 9. divx 5 looks better. It doesn't drop frames and has less visible blocks. Divx 5 just produces bigger filesizes, no mather what quantizer settings you use. Real 9 looks smooth and it is that. All details are gone and decoding takes a lot processing power. So real video 9 just trust very heavy post-processing, which kills all details. That is why it is so god with anime and cartoons.

[maguirer]

You can export mp4's to any size you want. Just choose "Current Size" once you've set the size you want in the player. You just get a warning if you have compatibility set to ISMA (which I think showing warnings is all it does).