I am here for all of you Ask Away

[Rated]

Its Great to Be a member of Doom9's moderators. Not to long ago I picked myself up a Terk-55 UHF Antena and a Hipix DTV-200. I haven't been this excited about encoding and the TV division of the scene in quite sometime. I can honestly say, its worth the money all be it expensive, but enough about my gear. I am here to help make this area of learning alot easier for everyone. Theres seriously no text at all on this topic anywhere, beleive me i have looked, just a few programs but no explaination at all as to how to use them or incorporate them into a method you would like to come up with on your own. Please Refer any and all Questions on the Topic to This forum for future reference. I will be checking multiple times through out the day and 1 or 2 times on the weekends due to my personal life and ammount of time spent working. Please Enjoy your Stay and Ask Away no question is silly or will be deleted without @ least an explaination :-)

Be Excellent to Each Other,

Rated

[RadicalEd]

whoa like, hdtv forum
coolness
alright here's a question, in the future for film and anime stuff do you think they'll just use 720p or do a telecine sort of thing in order to use 1080i?
I kind of hope they'll reuse telecine, I mean, 1920 x 1080 source material = teh cool :/

[Sgt_Strider]

Originally posted by RadicalEd
whoa like, hdtv forum
coolness
alright here's a question, in the future for film and anime stuff do you think they'll just use 720p or do a telecine sort of thing in order to use 1080i?
I kind of hope they'll reuse telecine, I mean, 1920 x 1080 source material = teh cool :/

Wouldn't it be even better if everyone uses 1080p? I mean, 1920 x 1080 p material would look pretty amazing right????

[RadicalEd]

yeah, but AFAIK there is no 1080p in the HDTV standard ;p
too much data for 19 mbps :\

[trbarry]

Cool, an HDTV forum. :)

On the 720/1080 issue I would mildly prefer they use telicined 1080i since we can IVTC it back to 1080p anyway. Though it is too bad HDTV rarely seems to have the flags set up so we can just use DVD2AVI force film.

Anyway, this new forum was quite a Xmas present.

- Tom

[Sgt_Strider]

Originally posted by RadicalEd
yeah, but AFAIK there is no 1080p in the HDTV standard ;p
too much data for 19 mbps :\

You sure? I remember reading a article mentioning the existence of that resolution in the HDTV standard...

[trbarry]

The following is the table of allowed formats from www.atsc.org document A54:

Table 5.1 Compression Formats
Vertical Aspect
lines Pixels ratio Picture rate
1080 1920 16:9 60I, 30P, 24P
720 1280 16:9 60P, 30P, 24P
480 704 16:9,4:3 60P, 60I, 30P, 24P
480 640 4:3 60P, 60I, 30P, 24P


They have 1080p but left out 1080p @ 60 fps because it was too demanding.

- Tom

[?¿öM¿?]

Hi, I think this is extremely exciting having this new forum open.

Sort of on the topic. I read somewhere (can't remember where:o ) that DVD as a media storage was not very usefull as far as HDTV was concerned due to the massive amount of space required to store lossless video data at the higher resolution HDTV is capable of.

Is this accurate?

[RadicalEd]

oh, even better then! I wonder why I had thought 1080p wasnt going to be supported.
As for the DVD issue, well, some of the companies had been pushing for the same 700nm red laser DVD discs to store HDTV content in mpeg4 or highly postprocessed mpeg2, but I believe those plans fell through (thankfully).

[trbarry]

With some of my own playing around with recorded ATSC streams I think Xvid can do a pretty decent 1280x720 @ 24 movie at around 1/4 bits/pixel.

But at that rate you could put almost a 2 hour movie on a DVD-R and almost 4 hours on a commercial dual layer DVD with regular old red laser.

But if you wanted 1920x1080 @ 24 then that might be pushing it a bit for red lasers.

- Tom

[bbq@KL]

Can DScaler and HiPix talk to each other under DirectShow? It would be really cool to scale 1080i internally.

Maybe we can also use a high quality capture card to grab external video. Then DScaler may transfer the video to HiPix without deinterlacing it. Apply some DScaler filters if you like. HiPix will scale the source to 1080i.

Right now 1080i overlay is pretty hard to create and the quality may vary. We need either Radeon + 9X/ME/7093 drivers or Matrox G400/G450/G550. HiPix seems to be a much better option for that particular purpose.

[trbarry]

bbq -

I think only the very fastest bus server machines can manipulate 1080i in software. There's still just too much data so it's still beyond anything we can touch in DScaler. Those machines are maybe still a year or 2 out there.

Remember that with the Hipix or other HTPC cards when you see them reading and writing the data to the disk it is only the compressed data they are handling. We can still swamp a 2 Ghz machine in DScaler with 720x480i and a few heavy duty filters running.

- Tom

[Mikename]

I believe I heard something about NASA adopting 1080p but that might've just been for in-house purposes not for actual broadcast.

[OUTPinged_]

Well it's my dream to have a collection of xvid rips at 720p/1080p resolution, so here are questions:

How much CPU power is required to play a high filedity divx/xvid stream at 720p resolution? and a 1080p?

Also, is there really a need for 1080p res for divx rips? For 1.5 hour long movie we would have 7mbit average. for 3hour movie - around 4.5mbit. Considering the amount of pixels is 2.25 times larger for 1080p, is it worth the effort?

Also, did anyone bother to check how much larger native 60fps streams get comparing to 24/30 fps? The motion estimation engines in later xvid seem to be quite good, bitrate shouldnt double.


found some hq hdtv samples already. Boy, they are big. BIG O_o

[RadicalEd]

hmm yeah, come to think of it until I get a 19 or 21 inch monitor 960 x 540 is gonna be pretty much the largest thing I can playback :O

[OUTPinged_]

@radicalEd

Well with 19" one there isnt any use for 1080p either.

PC upgrade is coming so I want to see what should I upgrade to. Will p4-2.4 be enough to playback 1080p? :/

[RadicalEd]

hey you're right.. what's the next up from 1600 x 1200?

What we really need are some good 16x9 monitors with a res of like.. 2048 x 1152
btw whats with all the HD computer monitors that are out being 16 x 10? :/

[OUTPinged_]

@ed

I am pretty sure we will see lots of 1080 lcd widescreens in the future. 1920x1080 isnt yet listed by any *XGA specs but it's not that hard to add it :-)

Anyway, all PCs that were released before this year won't be able to play hdtv divx (hdivx =) without serious hardware support.

I am pretty sure that for a start ripping scene would have to settle for 720p@24fps as it did for 640x divx. it is still 4 times bigger than a canonic 640x352 divx file and the output quality should be great.

[trbarry]

I think 720p is workable for Xvid encodes, but 1080p is not practical yet. And it seems I can play 720p on a 866 P3 in 960x544 (G400) resolution at mostly full speed, depending on the bit rate. Anything higher sort of falls off a performance cliff. Even on my 2.4 Ghz P4 I don't seem to be able to play 1920x1080p Xvid, though that might change if I was rendering in YV12 without any RGB conversions.

But I don't mind downscaling things to 720p anyway. If you capture 1080i and then deinterlace/IVTC it there will be a few artifacts and it's easier to think of it as an oversampled 720p.

And very few displays can really show the difference between 1080p and 720p yet.

Because of playback performance issues I haven't tried encoding any rate faster than 24 or 30 fps. While 60 fps probably wouldn't double the needed file size I think it would mostly double the needed memory bandwidth for display.

Anybody know what it would take to get Xvid display using Fast Write? Or even hardware IDCT?

- Tom

[OUTPinged_]

Even on my 2.4 Ghz P4 I don't seem to be able to play 1920x1080p Xvid

Well that is disappointing :-) What about 1280x720@24fps? Will it be enough for p4-2+ghz to decode very complex himo scenes from divx stream?

I have a p3-840 muself and I dont get anywhere near realtime for 720p playback :/

About deinterlacing: do you have to do it realtime or you can afford "king size" capture?

Also, "it's all here" clip looked like sh*t deinterlacing-wise. Are current means to realtime deinterlace/decimate producing better output? I will test decomb's speed as i will get actual clip :/

[trbarry]

The "Its all here" promo is interlaced video source. I've had good luck deinterlacing it with both TomsMoComp and GreedyHMA. Most remaining artifacts are hidden as it's downsized to 1280x720.

Since 1080i has so many lines you can also take almost anything and keep a perfectly deinterlaced 544 line downsized clip simply by throwing away the odd lines.

- Tom

[Stereodude]

Originally posted by trbarry
Since 1080i has so many lines you can also take almost anything and keep a perfectly deinterlaced 544 line downsized clip simply by throwing away the odd lines.

- Tom That's what I generally do. Toss the even fields and resize to 720x480 and make 6Mbit/sec DVD spec mpeg-2 files with CCE.

However, NBC wins some special awards for making my life extremely difficult with their HDTV Faith Hill special. Parts of the show were Telcined film and others were true 29.97FPS interlaced video. During one of the numbers they switched between the two nearly 15 times (in about 4 minutes). This wouldn't have been problem, but they kept switching the field order. If you picked the even fields at times you got repeated frames, if you picked the odd fields at times you got repeated frames. I ended up using decimate and telecide on the on the telcined parts, but I told decimate to create new frames rather than deleting the duplicates.

Stereodude

[holden]

Originally posted by RadicalEd
some of the companies had been pushing for the same 700nm red laser DVD discs to store HDTV content in mpeg4 or highly postprocessed mpeg2, but I believe those plans fell through (thankfully).
Could you say why you're thankful for that? Do you think it's a "one standard" issue to keep energies from dissipating? Do you like that only the big boys be able to control HDTV?
Thanks,
HF

[RadicalEd]

when it comes to the choice of having HD content at a bitrate of 5 mbps vs. 30 mbps which do you think I'd rather be watching and/or using as a source for backup or things like AMVs?
Maybe its just me but highly post processed mpeg-2 or low bitrate mpeg-4 just dont strike me as the best storage option.

[holden]

Interesting. A guy who apparently proselytizes for DVD-to-SVCD conversion complains about 5mbps. It's my experience that MPEG4 can deliver the same or better quality as MPEG2 at half the data rate. Generously, let's say it's 65% the data rate. As 480x480 is 1/4 the "real estate" of 1280x720, are your acceptable SCVD's averaging 1.9 mbps or better? Color me skeptical.

Since you're apparently well enough pleased in such an environment to get only about 48 minutes of video/audio on a CD, why wouldn't 2 hours 10 minutes worth of comparable video (pixel-for-pixel, mind you, not degrees field of view, in which case your side of the equation falls down a third to quarter of its previous strength) on a single DVD medium which could run in tens of millions of households around the world with not much effort be something that you would want to push back a one to three years, to await a "better" solution that will surely be under the control of $10B+ corporations and Hollywood?

There's a tremendous amount of non-first-run film-based assets which could find a highly cost-effective niche being distributed in a red laser HDTV world that will otherwise go begging for five years or more in the context of next generation blue-laser DVD.

pax,
HF

[RadicalEd]

well first of all I used SVCD then because I had no choice between that and DVD. Although I ordered a DVD-R drive about 2 weeks ago and its safe to say that I'll probably never make another SVCD. Secondly those SVCDs were never going to be used as source to make another SVCD or for ripped clips and source footage.
I can see where your point rests with compatibility, but how easy would it be to upgrade a dvd player to support mpeg-4? I also am as eager to use HD footage as you but with the conditions proposed I doubt it would really be worth it. Cleaner source takes priority, you know, quality over time? Would you spend more time doing 2 passes to get better quality? Its a good analogy to the scenario.

Reguardless of how good MPEG4 is, it isnt the best method for HD storage. 1920x1080 is exactly 6x 720x480, and the 30mbps rate needed for storing 2hrs of video on a single layer blue laser HDDVD is exactly 6x that of a single layer DVD. Even if mpeg-4 is twice as good, you're not going to see bitrates of 15mbps on a DVD. Not without something like 3 or 4 layers and wouldn't that break compatibility further? Not worth it. Let higher frequency lasers take their place in dealing with high definition material. Dragging out the DVD another 10-20 years would be stupid.

[trbarry]

t's my experience that MPEG4 can deliver the same or better quality as MPEG2 at half the data rate. Generously, let's say it's 65% the data rate.

Well, I've been telling people I'm guessing it's about 2/3 so I suppose I could settle for 65%. ;)

But even with high quality the savings may seem more when re-encoding HDTV because a (say) Xvid 2-pass may be only competing with a real time single pass stat-muxing HDTV encoder.

And as far as red laser DVD ... very few of us have displays that really show much more than 1280x720p anyway. And very few of our old multi-generation movies are really going to convert to much higher.

So I'm all for a 720p red laser DVD release, which would work just fine. I actually think it will put the fear of technology into the blurray folks and make both standards arrive sooner.

I'm surprised at the number of people that try to tell me it is somehow evil to allow red laser HD-DVD's as if they would somehow signal the end of video technology advancement or something by allowing a non-pure standard.

And besides, we can make them ourselves. Blank DVD-R's are about 60 cents apiece now.

- Tom

[holden]

Thanks for your supportive comments, TR. BTW, I've yet to be persuaded by the checkerboard stuff. Your 960x540 HDTV may not show the difference very well, but my 768p device surely does.

Ed, I wasn't advocating anything concerning a storage medium for the movie master. The "I Love Lucy Show" had it right. That lesson still hasn't been learned by lots of camcorder-with-cheap-capacitor holders. What I'm talking about is distribution media. George Lucas shot "Attack of the Clones" on 70mm film (you probably knew that). George isn't expecting BlurRay makers, Digital Cinema-hopeful theater owners, nor consumers to convert to IMAX projectors.

Of course, upgrading MPEG2 component DVD players to MPEG4 ain'tagonna happen.

To process the 30mbps rates, the hardware is going to get warm and take just that much longer to get here.

What's wrong with 15mbps MPEG4 DVD? I see that happening; no sweato.

Dragging out DVD 10-20 years? That's some blurry crystal ball you got there.

HF

[trbarry]

BTW, I've yet to be persuaded by the checkerboard stuff. Your 960x540 HDTV may not show the difference very well, but my 768p device surely does.

Wandering OT ... That's still sort of an ongoing experiment. I don't expect anyone to code that way. It holds up OK when played at the original resolution but has nothing left over for when you want to upscale it for a higher res display. But I'm still playing with it off and on.

What's wrong with 15mbps MPEG4 DVD? I see that happening; no sweato.

The DVD Consortium consists of a number of folks with rights to MPEG2. Also MPEG2 is now pretty much wired into 5C copy protection and the new digital cable ready TV's. They've maybe got it locked.

So while I'd love to see MPEG4/H264/AVC/whatever for HD-DVD's I'm not real optimistic unless the mavericks do it on red laser first where they would need it more.

Maybe M$ will have enough money to get someone manufacturing a HD- 720p Corona player. Though they might have trouble getting rights to much good content.

- Tom

[RadicalEd]

15 mbps wont happen simply because 2hr at dual layer could be 10mbps max :p

I never used the word master, source is anything you use to re-encode to something else, which for 99% of us is the distribution media. Higher quality source is always better.

Copying red-laser HDDVDs to DVD-R would be great, IF the DVDs are going to be single layer, which hopefully they won't be or the bitrate will be even lower (2hr 5mbps, no way mpeg-4 is 6 times better than mpeg-2). Otherwise we'll have to re-encode anyway, in which case again cleaner source is better. Even if the movie was compressed enough to fit on a DVD-R, it still isn't as good of a source to rip clips from (in my case with anime say intros and extros or clips for an amv)

[holden]

The "bikini destinations" demo for 1280x720 looks pretty good at 384kbps for the WMV video. Doom9 and others rightly say WMV is crap.

If I use 5Mbps for an HDTV-sized-to MPEG4 stream, I usually have bits to spare. Except in rare cases, 4-4.5Mbps does everything that is sufficiently appreciable for 95% of the audience (Remember how wildly successful 128kbps CBR MP3s have been?) from what a typical HDTV stream tried to do. (Two and a half hours of such video would be pretty stunning and attractive.) As often as not, more bits sprayed at it simply give more definition to the source's pixelations.

Let's not forget that, beside first-run Hollywood movies, there's a whole lot of valuable hires assets sitting gathering dust and for which the only other games in town are being thrown onto the late show and/or rented at Blockbuster as under-appreciated NTSC, or onto college campus auditorium screens at midnight.

There's not much reason to exist (other than lowered-quality backup) for Blue-Ray HDDVD-to-red-laser-DVD-R conversion. Piracy is not going to be any kind of business in the US for the foreseeable future, nor do enough people have enough bandwidth to feasibly download desirable HDTV-sized video. What is being handed over to the corporate big dogs with cable boxes, closed-system satellite PVRs, however, is lock and key tollboths for pay-again-for-every-viewing where joe consumer owns nothing. You'll pay as much as if you owned it, though. Just like Microsoft, but under 5c encryption.

I'm confused by your strawman suggestion that "no way mpeg-4 is 6 times better than mpeg-2." Just because some future technology's theory suggests that 6 times as many bits will be available, you're going to hold out for it? Why stop there? Why not hold out for the 4-layer version to get 110G per side? Why not everything in H264? Why cling to MPEG2 when MPEG4 is clearly superior? Holding out for maximum theoretical quality in products which need yet to become available to volume customers is rarely a good business strategy, especially when one expects consumers to pay the bills. Don't forget your admission that even you've held off buying a DVD-R until just a couple of weeks ago. Like the rest of us, I gather you were waiting for a good price point at which to dive in with your hard-earned shekels.

I say let authors/directors/editors determine their desired bit rate use, just as inventors and manufacturers in a freely competitive marketplace determine specifications and price, according to their own goals for their customer base. Such a situation wouldn't foster only Hollywood's first-run movies, however. It makes little to no business sense to hold out as if everyone should do nothing while awaiting 28.2Mbps DVDs from Hollywood and the Japanese/Dutch-dominated consortium gods. Then owners can all run out to buy U571, X-MEN and ICE AGE again in their $39.95 premium package.

/soap box

HF

[RadicalEd]

This is getting a bit more into business than I'm qualified to discuss. I'm under common working age (ha ha the discussion ends now that you realize you're talking to a teenager :P) the reason I just got a DVD-R is because I only have 2 chances a year to acquire large sums of money (birthday and xmas :p). Thats beside the point. Why wait for blue-laser discs when something better will be out by then? Thats a silly question. Why keep using DVD when 2 generations of better media will be out by then?
To be honest when I first read the info on the several proposed HDDVD formats and that one standard wanted MPEG-2 on a 25gb disc where the other wanted MPEG-4 on a 5gb disc I said to myself that's stupid, they should go for the best of both worlds and use MPEG-4 on a 25gb disc. You can't reasonably argue that quality-wise that (and even mpeg-2) would be a better format. That is my main concern and thus my main personal stance in the matter. Whether red-laser HDDVD would be more efficient and would come about sooner never really occupied much of my thoughts concerning the ordeal. Its a matter of efficiency and sooner availabliliy vs. better quality and a newer media format. Personally I'm just a sucker for new technology and bigger, better things. It boils down to personal ideals which arent going to be solved by back and forth arguing. Perhaps the fact that I don't worry so much about money or efficiency yet and am more ambitious towards newer and cooler looking stuff plays a part in it. Once more, all a matter of opinion in the end.

[OUTPinged_]

@radicalEd:

The reason behind switching to a new media and leaving video in mpeg2 (instead of keeping old media and switching to mpeg4) may be the amount of processing power required.

I mean, you can easy decode that 60fps 1920x1080 stream in software with proper speed with your fancy new 2.5ghz p4. But let's change that to mpeg4 stream. Decoding times would be 3x larger. I am really doubt that even 3ghz machine would be able to handle it. Now how are we supposed to stuff a 4ghz cpu into a videoplayer? Yea I know there would be a DSP, not actual pc, but that still is very expensive atm.

Also, all current HDTV sets have moeg2 decoders inside, so you dont need to have a decoder in your videoplayer, just feed that tv with mpeg2 stream and it will be happy.

About "it wont look good when encoded to 5mbit divx".

HDTV stuff uses max 30mbps average stream. They can show 1920x1080x30fps stream that way with great quality. Now let's assume we can have 33%reduction in filesize with mpeg4 and still have exceptional quality. Now we will resize stuff to 720p and 24fps, same reasons why all good rippers around dvdrip things at 640x and not 720x.

You will see that 1280x720x24*0.66 is 4.25 times smaller than 1920x1080x30, and that leads us to only 7mbit stream, which is 75 minutes per 4.7gb blank, 2 audiotracks included.

Sounds pretty familiar, ne? That is about as much as you would fit into a cdr blank while keeping the premium quialty (with ac3audio) for your 640x dvdrip.

Also there could be pretty much of additional compression gained from developing of psychocisual compression tricks for those rips, they will be expecially efficient for resolutions that high.

That means you can safely bet that you will fit that LOTR movie into 2 dvd-r blanks with exceptional quality and 1 disk rip of it will be a challenge.

[RadicalEd]

ahh :O I know that compressing HDTV source down to DVD-R quality is possible in the ways you speak of, but I'm saying 5mbps as a source format off a red laser HDDVD wouldn't compare to 30mbps mpeg2 off a blue laser HDDVD

[OUTPinged_]

@radicaled:

Then I don't know what you were getting to. It was clear from the very beginning that either they will have to use 720p mpeg4 on red laser disks or use mpeg2 at 1080i on blue laser disks. Because of the reasons i mentioned earlyer, mpeg4 HDVD disks are not going to happen.

[RadicalEd]

Oh, I misread your post. I thought you were talking about rippers resizing to 720p and compressing to mpeg4 to put on DVD-R themselves, not the studios going down to 720p for red laser DVD releases.
As for the mpeg4 blue laser thing, I hadn't thought about processing requirements, but that was just a fantasy anyway. Although perhaps by the time this stuff gets off the ground a 4ghz cpu in a player won't be so far fetched :O
Anyway I still think 1080i mpeg2 blue laser discs would be cooler >_<

[The Belgain]

Just thought I'd add that I agree that it would be best to hold out for blue-laser with MPEG2 at 1080i (or p...why not?). This is because the format will have a very hard time getting mass market acceptance anyway seeing as DVDs offer quality which most people will be very pleased with anyway, so anything competing with it needs absolutely flawless video quality which is noticeably better than current DVDs for it to have any chance of taking off.

Also, this technology won't take off if introduced straight away because most people have only recently upgraded to a DVD player (or are about to) and aren't ready to make another upgrade in the near future. Add to that the fact that most people don't have HD displays and that the difference in quality is far more subtle on normal displays, and all in all by the time the technology is brought in, blue-laser discs should be around.

In addition (though this obvioulsy isn't a concern for movie companies) it would be nice to have a not too highly compressed source to re-encode from :)

[morsa]

I really don´t understand why people are complaining.
I'm sure we are going to see HDTV compressed with Mpeg-4, at the same bitrate than DVD today.
There is no problem today for a Mpeg-4 hardware decoder to perform this task.And if you need it you can use more than one chip to decode the stream.Remember how Cinealta cameras work.They use 5 DV codecs in parallel to compress 1920x1080.
And of course it is cheaper for the Studios to use a cheap medium as actual DVDs are.

[RadicalEd]

Because of the reasons i mentioned earlyer, mpeg4 HDVD disks are not going to happen.

I guess it's too late to say I told you so (http://www.blu-raydisc.com/assets/downloadablefile/040901b-12817.pdf).

Ironically, this discussion was merely about ASP MPEG-4, not the processing mammoth that is AVC.

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