all the anomalies and erroros of CCE

[crespo80]

Hi, i have another question for you even if i didn't receive replyies to the colors/brightnes gain in CCE (I found another user who noticed the problem).

I found various errors in CCE and i want to share my doubts with you:

1) IT alters the video source adding a brightness gain

2) The first GOP is incorrect (IBPBBPBBPBBPBB) while the others are correct (IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB). This is annoying when comparing frame-to-frame the encodes it produces with thoose of, for example, TMPGenc.

3) It starts the encode cutting off the first two frames and the last 25!!!

4) yet another problem! See my last message!!!

Reports here other commond problems i didn't find and tell me if theese are only my problems or if are common problemns

[Video Dude]

Error 1) How are you determining the brightness gain? Did you compare two histograms or did you just eye it? Because software DVD players, such as WinDVD, set the brightness high by default and the results will be decieving if you compare two videos decoded by different codecs side by side.

Another reason you may be experiencing this is if you incorrecly did YUY2/YV12 to RGB or RGB to YUY2/YV12 colorspace conversions and you clipped your luminace levels.


Error 3) CCE does not normally do this. There is most likely a problem with your source file.

[crespo80]

1) for the brightness gain, look with your eyes and tell me (i know winDVD alters brighness, so i compare files with vdubMOD)

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82834



2) for the GOP question what can you say? It's disappointing.



3) If I encode the same source file with TMPGenc I haven't any problem at all. I tried three versions of CCE (2.50 and 2.62 and 2.66.00.72) and all have the same problems.
It isn't the source the problem.
I noticed this third error only after 2 weeks because it cuts just the final second of the video (25/26 frames) and it isn't noticeable except if you compare the encoded video with the source frame-to-frame.

[Video Dude]

1) - I do see a slight CCE brightness increase in your screenshots.

Since your source is HuffyUV YUY2, the color conversions would be:

CCE: YUY2 -> YV12
TMPGEnc 2.5: YUY2 -> RGB24 -> YV12

The luminance check box does not matter in CCE since your source is YUY2. It only has an effect with RGB conversions.

In TMPGEnc the luminance check box does have an effect since TMPGEnc 2.5 always does an internal RGB24 conversion.

MPEG-2 is YV12.

If you have AviSynth installed you might want to try the following script so you can determine the luminance level of your source.
AviSource("C:\video.avi")
ColorYUV(analyze=true)
If you see 16 as the min number, your luminance is 16-235
If you see less than 16 as the min number, your luminance is 0-255


Take a look at these threads so you can correct your luminance:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70589
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38440


2) - Someone else will have to answer. I don't what would be causing it. Perhaps the two dropped frames at the beginning? Closed GOP's? Auto detect scene change so it will insert an I frame?



3) - On my CCE encodes it has same number of frames. I don't know what else to suggest.

[crespo80]

i made another test.
I opened the files created with TMPGenc and CCE in virtualDUB and compressed them in XviD with same settings.

It's incredible:
The brightness of the CCE->XviD avi is different from the CCE m2v and now comparable to the original source avi (thought the same cannot be said for the overall video quality, because the compression is now noticeable).
The brightness of the TMPGenc->XviD avi is almost identical to the TMPGenc m2v and to the source avi

I get more confused. Maybe virtualDUB has a role in this?


The other interesting thing is that the CCE avi looks better than TMPGenc avi when played with winDVD:
it alters a lot the brightness of the TMPGenc m2v but seems to correct the brightness of the CCE m2v.

There are two weeks i make tests and i cannot choose which of the 2 programs I have to use. I'm not interested in speed, i just want the better quality (infact i use CQ based encodind with max bitrate of 9500)

[RB]

Originally posted by crespo80
2) The first GOP is incorrect (IBPBBPBBPBBPBB) while the others are correct (IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB).
I have never seen a first CCE GOP like this, CCE always makes the first GOP IPBB.... What do you use to view GOP structure?
Originally posted by crespo80
3) It starts the encode cutting off the first two frames and the last 25!!!
What do you encode and how do you know what the original framecount is? This very much sounds like the ancient "DVD2AVI drops frames" issue that has been fixed in DGIndex/DGDecode (see the DVD2AVI forum).

As for the brightness problem: I really think it is a problem with the YUY2 output of your video codec. When you play the AVI in Media Player you see RGB colors. When you encode in TMPGEnc, it requests RGB. It's only CCE that requests YUY2 by default. Try turning off "Try decoding in YUY2 format" in CCE settings and see if the result more closely matches the original. Or try to find a setting in your video codec that sets luminance range and play with it.

[crespo80]

have you read my previous thread?
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82834

I capture with my saa7130 pci card from VHS in huffyuv. I explained all the details in the previous thread.
I know winDVD and other players like mediaplayer alter the brighness/saturation but i think vdubMOD has not to do this thing!
I open twice vdubMOD, in the fisrt window i open the original source avi (or the file encoded by tmpgenc) and in the second one i open the file encoded in CCE (note i encode always like elementary streams).
Comparing the files frame-to-frame i notice the loss of frames, the gain in brightness and the incorrect first GOP of CCE.

I tried both versions 2.62.01.01 and 2.67.00.27 of CCE.
Make your own tests like i did and tell me!

[crespo80]

grrrr...
it's becoming very very disappointing!!! I found another terrible bug!
This error appears only if I frameserve the video from vdub.

I open the source.avi in virtualdubMOD (direct stream copy both for audio and video) and I only cut the scense i don't want, then I framserve to CCE:
the output video seems good (except for the classic errors of brightness/GOP/cut frames) but appears random a black rectangle of approx. 30X60pix in the top left of the video. This rectangle is visible for about 5 seconds but non in all the frames of theese 5 seconds, just in few of them; so, when you watch that part of video, you see this black rectangle flashing for few seconds and then it disappears.
This black rectangle can appear in the first seconds of the video or in the last ones, randomly.

Of course, no problems frameserving to TMPGenc...


So, you can ask me why I insist with CCE and don't use TMPGenc...
The answer is that CCE produces better videos (smaller blockiness, smaller quantization factor, smaller detail loss) with less bitrate!

But all theese errors and bugs are convincing me to use TMPGenc!