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Old 4th October 2013, 13:48   #20221  |  Link
madshi
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Both LAV Video Decoder and ffdshow can handle CRAM files on my PC. In LAV Video Decoder the format is called "msvideo1".
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Old 4th October 2013, 14:13   #20222  |  Link
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thanks madshi it worked
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Old 4th October 2013, 14:42   #20223  |  Link
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When switching any settings, madVR resets the whole rendering setup which can take a tiny bit of time. Rendering times may spike. But changing debanding settings shouldn't take more time than e.g. changing scaling algorithms.
Thank you for the confirmation. I guess I simply didn't notice so far because I don't usually switch scaling algorithms...
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Old 4th October 2013, 15:15   #20224  |  Link
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Not sure: Is that irony, or did you really expect better?
I was being sarcastic; it's very impressive!



I will say that after having done quite a bit of testing last night, I'm not sure that it's something I would leave enabled by default, but for specific sources it can work very well.

It works surprisingly well for macroblocking in addition to banding, but I suppose that's really just another type of banding.

I was somewhat disappointed to see that it did not take care of the banding at the beginning of The Fountain Blu-ray, but when I actually brightened that up to look at it, it's clear why - it's a terrible encode; an old MPEG-2 disc.




When you look at what the debanding option actually does for the image, it's still impressive:



That said, especially on high, it does seem to act like "noise reduction" some of the time, obscuring fine details. If you look at the images above, you will see that the fingernail disappears.
With some content it may eliminate a lot of the banding/macroblocking, but actually look worse, because what's left now stands out against an otherwise clean image, and is a distraction.

And there are some cases where I thought it would work well, but it hardly does anything:




But overall, very impressive and a good addition to madVR.
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Old 4th October 2013, 15:27   #20225  |  Link
madshi
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I was being sarcastic; it's very impressive!
Thought you meant that, but wasn't sure.

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I will say that after having done quite a bit of testing last night, I'm not sure that it's something I would leave enabled by default, but for specific sources it can work very well.
I definitely wouldn't leave "high" on by default, except maybe for Anime content. But did you find "low" to eat away details, too? I would like to have a setting which is low enough to never harm, but to sometimes help. Is the current "low" setting still too agressive for that? I guess I could rename the current "low" setting to "medium" and add a "low" setting which is even more careful. Such a "low" setting probably wouldn't really remove ugly banding artifacts, but it could at least smooth the rough edges away from clean non-dithered 8bit encodes.

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That said, especially on high, it does seem to act like "noise reduction" some of the time, obscuring fine details. If you look at the images above, you will see that the fingernail disappears.
With some content it may eliminate a lot of the banding/macroblocking, but actually look worse, because what's left now stands out against an otherwise clean image, and is a distraction.
Yeah. We humans have such a big advantage because we know what a fingernail is supposed to look like. So we know which part of the image is real detail and which is an artifact. A simple debanding algorithm has no way of knowing that. So at least in "high" mode it's always a balance act between debanding and detail removal. I do think in "low" mode usually details are left well enough alive.

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And there are some cases where I thought it would work well, but it hardly does anything
Hmmmm... Yes, that one is a bit surprising. I'll have a look at that later when I find some time.
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Old 4th October 2013, 15:41   #20226  |  Link
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CUVID doesn't use the GPU to decode video. It uses the VPU which is a different chip on the card and another sensor in GPU-Z or Nvidia Inspector (I believe it defaults to not displayed in Nvidia Inspector). CUVID will also use memory bandwidth on the video card.
I still dont understand why the load on the nvidia is less when using CUVID and not at least as high as when not using it. the workload of the GPU needed for madvr, this shouldnt change when using CUVID, should it? so in that case the load should be at least be the same as when not using CUVID? or does CUVID indeed influence madvr performance?

aside from that, there are two things Id like to achieve: have my system be as silent as possible when watching movies, but also trying to maximize the length of life of my GPU (because that one of my former laptop died after ~3 years of itensive usage).

so Id say if my CPU and GPU load is lower when using CUVID, then this should mean less heat and less fan noise.

but what about endurance? I guess its a bit of speculation, but would the constant use of CUVID rather lead to an increase or decrease of my nvidia card?
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Old 4th October 2013, 16:17   #20227  |  Link
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I definitely wouldn't leave "high" on by default, except maybe for Anime content. But did you find "low" to eat away details, too? I would like to have a setting which is low enough to never harm, but to sometimes help. Is the current "low" setting still too agressive for that? I guess I could rename the current "low" setting to "medium" and add a "low" setting which is even more careful. Such a "low" setting probably wouldn't really remove ugly banding artifacts, but it could at least smooth the rough edges away from clean non-dithered 8bit encodes.
I would have to do more testing with good sources before I made a decision on that. On principle alone, I would be inclined to leave it disabled with a good source, but maybe Low would not have any negative effects.

Low seemed to help with banding, but not so much with macroblocking. I was mostly just going through all my bad sources where I remembered banding/macroblocking being a problem than testing with higher quality sources.
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Old 4th October 2013, 16:34   #20228  |  Link
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Well, the debanding algorithm was not meant for macroblocking, although at really high levels it fixes some of them, too.

One thing with current Blu-Ray sources is that as clean as they might be, they are still 8bit encodes. That means on a really big screen, there should be some banding in some scenes. Of course the studio can dither the source down before encoding it, but usually the encoder swallows some of that dithering, or even all of it (depending on the bitrate etc). So a very mild debanding might even help with rather clean Blu-Ray sources. This might change when we get to 4K Blu-Ray which will hopefully introduce 10bit or even 12bit encoding. So one thing worth investigating is to find a clean Blu-Ray which shows very mild banding which is caused by nothing else but the limitation of 8bit encoding. Then when we have such samples to test with, we could look for debanding parameters which are low enough to fix just that kind of banding, without changing anything else. I'm pretty sure that at such levels the debanding should almost never harm and could stay active all the time.
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Old 4th October 2013, 17:33   #20229  |  Link
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madshi, you are awesome. That is all.
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Old 4th October 2013, 17:39   #20230  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by madshi View Post
Well, the debanding algorithm was not meant for macroblocking, although at really high levels it fixes some of them, too.

One thing with current Blu-Ray sources is that as clean as they might be, they are still 8bit encodes. That means on a really big screen, there should be some banding in some scenes. Of course the studio can dither the source down before encoding it, but usually the encoder swallows some of that dithering, or even all of it (depending on the bitrate etc). So a very mild debanding might even help with rather clean Blu-Ray sources. This might change when we get to 4K Blu-Ray which will hopefully introduce 10bit or even 12bit encoding. So one thing worth investigating is to find a clean Blu-Ray which shows very mild banding which is caused by nothing else but the limitation of 8bit encoding. Then when we have such samples to test with, we could look for debanding parameters which are low enough to fix just that kind of banding, without changing anything else. I'm pretty sure that at such levels the debanding should almost never harm and could stay active all the time.
This sounds awesome.

What should we look for in providing samples of banding due to 8bit encoding?
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Old 4th October 2013, 20:44   #20231  |  Link
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Well, the debanding algorithm was not meant for macroblocking, although at really high levels it fixes some of them, too.

One thing with current Blu-Ray sources is that as clean as they might be, they are still 8bit encodes. That means on a really big screen, there should be some banding in some scenes. Of course the studio can dither the source down before encoding it, but usually the encoder swallows some of that dithering, or even all of it (depending on the bitrate etc). So a very mild debanding might even help with rather clean Blu-Ray sources. This might change when we get to 4K Blu-Ray which will hopefully introduce 10bit or even 12bit encoding. So one thing worth investigating is to find a clean Blu-Ray which shows very mild banding which is caused by nothing else but the limitation of 8bit encoding. Then when we have such samples to test with, we could look for debanding parameters which are low enough to fix just that kind of banding, without changing anything else. I'm pretty sure that at such levels the debanding should almost never harm and could stay active all the time.
the eva 3 bd has 40 mbit vbr and a sceen like this

http://picload.org/image/olpdcil/00002.m2ts_snaps.png

on my very cheap iiyama (~150€) i can see some branding. on an good ips there should be a lot. on my asus vg 248there is no branding to see but tons of dithering noise. so don't judge this with an normal tn panel. on my tv is was huge but no time for this now.
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Old 4th October 2013, 22:16   #20232  |  Link
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Madshi, you're the man!
Did some rapid testing with the deband test version and the result is amazing! Really looking forward to the next release
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Old 4th October 2013, 22:21   #20233  |  Link
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madshi, have you considered running post-processing algorithms such as Deband in software using the CPU before copying the data to the GPU?

GPU resources are very scarce, while most here will have plenty of CPU resources to spare. Playing a 1080p video uses less than 10% on a decent CPU.
I know it wouldn't work with DXVA native, but that is hardly a necessity on modern systems. Plus you could offer a Shader implementation as well.
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Old 4th October 2013, 22:28   #20234  |  Link
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Hi, this is my first post here. I've tested the new deband function and I think that even at its low setting, it blows away too many details in dark areas.

Here some examples :

deband off http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/5824/jyf5.png

deband low http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/1378/kgsi.png

deband high http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/7330/qf2q.png

Look at the jackets and on the sleeves of the characters, it smooths a little too much details so I would like a very low setting that doesn't blow away any (or almost any) details even if the debanding is a little less effective. I'm using the deband on Ffdshow for many years and I think this function needs many levels of tweaking because it depends a lot of the quality of the video. 4 or 5 levels would be a good choice .

Sorry if I make some mistakes, I'm not used to write in English.

Last edited by Werewolfy; 4th October 2013 at 23:43.
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Old 4th October 2013, 23:20   #20235  |  Link
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madshi: f3kdb(31,dynamic_grain=true,random_algo_ref=2,random_algo_grain=2)
vs. low: f3kdb has more effective debanding but reduced details and more noise, preference depends on the situation
vs. high: f3kdb isn't as effective at debanding, about the same detail, more noise, prefer high over f3kdb
I'm only using f3kdb now for convenience, switching debanding to high every time a new player is opened is annoying when that's no longer an issue high will be default here. Also F2 and Ctrl+J conflict with potplayer without key remapping in madvr or potplayer.

clsid: madshi's reasoning is explained here but I also hope at some point there's an option or auto shift to offload some things to the cpu. Are writing shaders much different then cpu code? JanWillem and madshi seem to be the only two doing the former on this board, the latter has many. Luckily debanding isn't a heavy load compared to anti-ringing and smooth motion.
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Last edited by turbojet; 4th October 2013 at 23:23.
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Old 5th October 2013, 01:15   #20236  |  Link
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Hi, this is my first post here. I've tested the new deband function and I think that even at its low setting, it blows away too many details in dark areas.
You're right. I did some more testing tonight with Blu-rays rather than poor quality content, and it's definitely blurring things too much in dark areas. I need to start collecting some good examples.

On the other end of the scale, I'm also finding things where I expected the debanding to work well, but it had minimal effect.



And it seems that quite a few films must be using the same tools to add an artificial vignette effect at the start of them, because I found another disc which looks like The Fountain example I posted before:



It would be nice to have a test build where the variables could be adjusted to have a play around and see what works well for different content.
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Old 5th October 2013, 03:06   #20237  |  Link
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In MPC, what variables and measures within madVR's information printout should we watch to determine what might be causing "laggy" playback? For example, I gather that "dropped" (28) and "delayed" (20) frame readouts are important. However, those two counts seem to be staying fairly static.

What else should I look to, to determine what might be the culprit?
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Old 5th October 2013, 03:08   #20238  |  Link
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Alright, but no guarantees whatsoever:

http://madshi.net/madVRdeband.rar

You can toggle it by pressing Ctrl+Alt+D, or by using the file name tag "deband=low/high". Not available in the settings dialog yet.

FWIW, this test build also has a nice improvement for FSE mode, where rendering times don't decrease, anymore, when the backbuffer queue is full. In older versions a full backbuffer queue somewhat slowed rendering down. Not anymore (only Vista+).

ctrl+alt+D toggles display mode switcher, so how do i toggle deband?
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Old 5th October 2013, 03:36   #20239  |  Link
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In MPC, what variables and measures within madVR's information printout should we watch to determine what might be causing "laggy" playback? For example, I gather that "dropped" (28) and "delayed" (20) frame readouts are important. However, those two counts seem to be staying fairly static.

What else should I look to, to determine what might be the culprit?
make sure your refresh rate match's the content you play. or try smooth motion.

as long as dropped frames repeated fraes and delayed frames don't increase madvr should work fine.

you can press control + r to reset the stats
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Old 5th October 2013, 03:58   #20240  |  Link
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Originally Posted by truexfan81 View Post

ctrl+alt+D toggles display mode switcher, so how do i toggle deband?
Change your key bindings for the switcher so it's not using CTRL Alt D..

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Uhm, just for your information, dropping down to 8 bit is not necessary
I use Avisynth via ffdshow, it converts 10 bit content down to 8 bit.

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Low seemed to help with banding, but not so much with macroblocking. I was mostly just going through all my bad sources where I remembered banding/macroblocking being a problem than testing with higher quality sources.
Not only helps with banding but flattens anime content out beautifully without harming line detail. I've used a video for testing that was also used in the flash3k thread (below) and the low setting shows a bit of shadow detail loss in comparison to my conservative f3kdb settings, so I too would like to see a slightly lighter option in madvr.

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I think that even at its low setting, it blows away too many details in dark areas.
It's not "blowing away details" it's actually quite conservative, but it does ever so slightly smooth almost the entire picture. It's not limited to dark areas which is interesting as it's
basically acting like a light to almost medium strength denoiser at it's current settings.

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I would like a very low setting that doesn't blow away any (or almost any) details even if the debanding is a little less effective.
It would seem the low setting may be a little excessive for some content, with any luck Madshi will release a build that has a lower setting.
I would like to see a setting that could be enabled be default without impacting the image quality, it would seem the current low setting for high definition content only just crosses that line.

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Originally Posted by Werewolfy View Post
4 or 5 levels would be a good choice .
Maybe three or four might be the go.

Madshi, could madDeband have configuration options? Or does it have to be hard coded?

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Is the whole image softer? Or just certain areas?
Certain areas, but these areas comprise most of the image. Line detail is beautifully kept (which is why it's so great for anime) but there's a lot of detail that is being considered as banding
which is not obviously visible as such. As a result this small scale banding removal does result in a somewhat noticeably but only slightly softer image.

I'd like to see the same strength debanding but perhaps more of a threshold before it's triggered.. in saying that, part of this code would be great as a denoising filter which could be a separate thing altogether...

A few screenshots showing MadVR's deband in action vs my settings with f3kdb, this is one of the videos used to test f3kdb in SAPikachu's first post. Particular attention should be paid to the bikes on the left in the shadows.
I've brightened this up to show more of what's happening, the f3kdb frame may not be the exact same frame as used in the other screenshots but it's identical enough for a comparison IMO.

I chucked the 7 bit result in there as I was curious as to how it would compare. Madshi said he removed the dithering step from f3kdb and dropping to 7 bit output essentially created the same effect.

Original


f3kdb (GrainY=8, GrainC=8, keep_tv_range=true, Y=48, Cb=48, Cr=48)


MadVR deband active (low setting)


MadVR deband active (low setting) 7 bit output.


Ideally I'm looking for a deband quality improvement over my f3kdb result whilst maintaining that same level of detail. I think most would be happy with having that enabled by default.

Last edited by ryrynz; 5th October 2013 at 09:27.
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