x264 looks crap ...... why ?

[s8n]

hi team........i am using Gordian Knot to encode x264 ...... 2 pass @ 1000 kbps .... with multi different settings .... thing is tho it looks totally crap..... i use FFDshow to decode it

i dont know what im doing wrong

any help is sweet

s8n

[Doom9]

just a guess: most likely you're also using ffdshow to decode other content (XviD, DivX, etc) and thus have postprocessing turned on (it's on by default). However, while postprocessing of AVC content works, it ruins the picture, so you need to switch it off (in the postprocessing config you need to select the option that keeps postprocessing on for non AVC content, but only does AVC style deblocking for AVC content). I watched the first 10 minutes of my first full-length AVC encode with postprocessing turned on and I wasn't very happy either.. until I deactivated postprocessing.

[s8n]

i tried man.....still no go.......just so many artifacts when it moves

[bill_baroud]

i noticed the same things this morning at 1200Kbps (source : Led Zeppelin at Earl's Court). I'm redoing the encode with Xvid at the same bitrate to compare, because the source isn't that great.
Turning off postprocessing did help (but how works this new option in ffdshow about h264 pp then ?)

[bond]

screenshot?

[s8n]

see pic........when Johns step father moves.....theres alot of blocky artifacts around him on the wall.....and not only in that scene......it looks alot better paused.......but when it moves its horrid

[Elias]

I encoded with Nero Digital AVC a couple of months back... it was easily the worst results I've ever had. I don't know if I did it completely wrong, but I'd say that AVC is so far, either very immature in development, or it's just super-hyped.

[Teegedeck]

Hm, that kinda contradicts my impressions. Possibly the old 'use default settings' (in Nero AVC = profiles) solution might help?

[Sharktooth]

see pic........when Johns step father moves.....theres alot of blocky artifacts around him on the wall.....and not only in that scene......it looks alot better paused.......but when it moves its horrid
Seem you disabled the inloop filter or your decoder doesnt support it.
Ensure you have the very latests FFDSHOW version (celtic druid builds) or Nero Vision Express package installed and correctly registered.
Ensure you didnt disable inloop filter in the codec settings and that filter strenght and treshold are set to 0. You may also want to use the default settings for testing...
rerun the encode and watch if it still blocks. if it does rise the inloop filter strength (and maybe treshold) and re-encode the part that shows blocks until you find the right value.

[Elias]

Well, this was a while ago. I can't run Windows, since Linux has somehow messed up the boot sections, and as a result of it, I can't install Windows at all any more. I will give AVC more trial and error testings later though, when I've managed to fix this issue. Most likely, I'll try QTPro7 when it'll be released. I'm thinking about buying QTPro7, but first, I need to know if QTPro7 is supported by Wine? I've heard that the AVC quality wasn't that good either, with Apple's AVC. As for x264... I've never managed to encode anything with it in VirtualDub, because it simply doesn't want to start encoding when I save to *.avi for some reason (can't remember).

[Stacey Melissa]

There's a lot of temporal noise in the DVD source for the wall of the house in that T2 screenshot. x264 doesn't deal well with such noise on flat surfaces. That's about the only thing x264 doesn't handle well. Look closely at the source, and you'll see that the temporal noise on the wall is made up of relatively large, high frequency dots. I have yet to figure out what to do with those. Optimally, the wall, and only the wall, should be totally softened, and then single-pixel, lower frequency temporal noise should be added back in to avoid DCT blocking. But doing that without softening the whole frame is not really feasible, AFAIK.

Oh, and I think T2 is a relatively difficult movie to encode. IIRC, I had to use a rather high bitrate to get it to look good with XviD. I haven't gotten around to re-encoding it with x264, but I imagine the same would be true for x264.

[Backflip]

Hhmm, interesting. Is this true even now? 2 pass @ 1000 kbps for x264 I'd expect the picture quality of just about any movie to look fine. I'll have to encode T2 some time with x264 to see if it turns out the same.

[AnimeTheme]

Decoder does play a role, even though you may have never noticed, since that decoder (ffdshow for many people) may be the only thing you can use, and you may never know if you have all the settings right and whether it is really decoding with full features, since you have nothing else to compare.

I have some AVC content (encoded with x264) which looks excellent on my PSP (which decodes AVC in hardware), but totally crap on my PC with ffdshow (in some scenes the blocking are so bad that they look like some kind of very-low-bitrate streaming content).

[bond]

by definition each decoder has to output exactly the same picture if
- no postprocessing is used
- the decoder supports all the features used in the stream

[CiNcH]

Once again those blocking artefacts that occur on rare occasions? They are more visible if you watch the moving sequence resized to fullscreen, i know...

Picture (http://forum.doom9.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=4340&stc=1)

Thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=97536)

[Sharktooth]

lower the deblocking threshold.