Help with Friday

[baddbill]

Hi all, I'm pretty new to this forum and need help with a rip. I recently encoded Friday using GKnot and Divx 5.02. I used B frames and Psychovisual Enh. set to normal. I cut off the credits and ended up with a 1295 bit rate (900meg CD). DVD2AVI showed the source DVD as progressive and interlaced. I followed the advice of doom9's IVTC Tutorial and looked at the .d2v files in Gordian Knot. Two of every five frames was interlaced. I encoded the movie once using "force film" and another time not forced and selected Inverse Telecine in field operations. Both encodes look the same.

The problem I'm having is that the Divx look choppy on playback. I'm not sure if it is the codec or that I did something wrong in the encoding. It especially looks choppy on panning scenes. For instance one minute and twenty seconds into the movie as the camera scans past the windows. This is the first movie I have encoded that wasn't completely progressive.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Bill

[jggimi]

I don't know the film. Given that disclaimer, here's what I would do:

I'd open the .avi files in Vdub, jump to 1:20 -- the panning scene -- and go through the scene frame-by-frame. If the frames looked OK in Vdub, I'd think the problem is related to playback (DivX post-processing settings, or choice of .avi player, for possible reasons).

More than likely, you'll see some sort of problem in the panning scene -- for example, you might see what look like duplicate frames.

If so, I'd build a variety of test .avs files with different IVTC parameters to see if I can make the problem go away. For me, that's mostly playing with Telecide parameters. I'd start with the DeComb documentation in my Gknot Docs folder, try out different parameters, and then examine the scene by opening the .avs in Vdub. I'd only encode once I've found a working solution.

Good luck!

[baddbill]

Thanks for your advice. I looked at the movie frame by frame in Vdub. Everything looks fine. No duplicate frames and no interlaced frames.

I use Windows Media player 8.0 for playback. Do you know of any setting I should try for playback? As for DivX post-processing settings I don't know what they are. Maybe that's my problem. Any advice?

Thanks,
Bill

[jggimi]

You'll find the post processing settings in:

Start...Programs...DivX...DivX (Pro) Codec...Decoder Configuration.

Start by turning all settings to "off" or "minimum" as the case may be. Add back in post processing only if needed. I don't have any specific settings to recommend.

Many forum members recommend the ffdshow (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/ffdshow-20020923.exe) filter for playback instead of the DivX decoder.

[baddbill]

Thanks for your advice. I changed the settings to minimum like you suggested but it didn't help. After that I tried the smooth playback option but it didn't help either. Most of the movie is fine. It's just this opening scene with the windows where the play back is jerky.

I'll try the filter that you recommended and see if it helps.

Bill

[jggimi]

You may be seeing the dreaded GMC bug. You didn't mention if GMC was enabled or not. If it was, you could always re-encode without it.

[baddbill]

I tried the ffdshow filter and it didn't help. I thought that maybe some how I encoded the movie at a low frame rate, but I checked in Vdub and there are 24 FPS. I think I did use GMC. I try encoding the intro scene again, with out GMC, and see if it helps.

Thanks,
Bill

[OvERaCiD23]

I just encoded this film as well, and you can't use DVD2AVI for "Force Film". the 3:2 pulldown flag isn't present in the video stream, meaning it won't be recognized as Film material (that's the switching between progressive/interlaced while making the project file). Use Decomb for IVTC, and you should be fine. It's still a bit jerky on playback, but I can live with it. (DivX5, b-frames)