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Old 20th April 2012, 09:39   #6581  |  Link
LigH
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Indeed, "Normalization" is not "Equal loudness". It means only: "Make it as loud as possible without messing it up"; but it maximizes only the one loudest sample, no matter how loud the average is.

Especially when downmixing multichannel audio, it is quite necessary. The "trivial" downmix approach is: Theoretically, all six channels could have a maximum at the same sample. So to certainly avoid clipping (overdriving the sound beyond the maximum allowed value), divide all channels by 6 before mixing it to the new left and right channels. Practically, a maximum in all six channels quite certainly never happens. Therefore the weighted channel sums will most probably contain a quite low volume if they were divided by 6 before mixing the channels.

Normalizing in 2 passes first scans the whole audio for the loudest part (so it will take a few minutes before the audio conversion starts with an obvious progress), adjusts a gain factor, and multiplies the downmix so that the loudest sample will just even reach the value you entered.

Dialogs may still sound quiet if there are severe differences to audio effect loaded scenes (like explosions). So you may wish that quiet parts would be amplified more than already extremely loud parts. The "Dynamic Range Compression" does that. Most of current mainstream music is dynamically compressed to make it sound loud, louder, loudest... in contrast to movies where you can sometimes hardly understand people talking in between action scenes.
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Last edited by LigH; 20th April 2012 at 09:42.
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Old 20th April 2012, 10:39   #6582  |  Link
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Originally Posted by Octo-puss View Post
Ah ok. I unclearly rememember I used to use automated 2pass back then.
I also dug a text file with assorted tips up where I had a note about some parameter called --sar, which I passed to x264 encoder, which apparently did something with the AR.

Man this is so frustrating, I read the basic MeGUI guide on the wiki and I still struggle with this big time.
MeGUI possibly has a bit more of a learning curve than other GUIs, but I think it's worth it.
How did you pass --sar to x264? Maybe that's your problem, There's no need to add any aspect ratio info manually as MeGUI does it for you. If you're using anamorphic encoding, as you crop you can switch over to the Script tab (AVS script creator) and watch the aspect ratio being set by MeGUI change. It should change any time you crop if you have the acceptable aspect error option set to 0%.

Using X264 single pass CRF encoding is all the rage these days. The only advantage to using 2 pass encoding is you can hit a particular file size. If you prefer to encode to a particular quality instead, use single pass CRF encoding. When setting up the encoder you'd select the "Targeting Quality" or "Constant Quality" option (it's the same thing but labelled differently if you tick the "advanced settings" box) and the number in the "Quality" field is the CRF value.

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Well it's still only a preview. No matter what I did there the result was stretched :P Is there anything I can do else besides setting SAR then?

What's ITU anyway? Or what is it good for?

edit: thanks LigH, I will try it again.
So after you save the AVS script and the second preview window opens, are you saying if you check the "display aspect ratio" box at the bottom (or whatever it says, it's something similar) the aspect ratio is still wrong? It shouldn't be. Don't add any aspect ratio info yourself and it should be fine.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "it's still only a preview".

ITU is the "official" way to resize a DVD. Using the ITU method 16:9 and 4:3 DVDs aren't exactly 16:9 or 4:3. You can tell MeGUI not to use ITU resizing, or manually change the input aspect ratio to 16:9 or 4:3. The difference isn't all that great, but in my humble opinion most DVDs don't use ITU resizing.

Last edited by hello_hello; 20th April 2012 at 10:42.
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Old 20th April 2012, 12:57   #6583  |  Link
Octo-puss
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I got it now. I just hit clever anamorphic, resize mod16, and surprisingly this time the result is 16:9. I guess I overlooked something before.
I am impressed at x264 btw. It's so much more simple now. I just hit CRF18, very slow, film tuning, and the bloody DVD looks BETTER on the encode than the original. LOL! This might change for HD stuff though, of course.
But. Disk space is generally not an issue these days, but this stuff was 1.7GB before, encode came up at slightly over 700MB. I am thinking whether this is not a bit of an overkill. 2 hours movie might get ridiculously big. Gotta try soon.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LigH View Post
Normalizing in 2 passes first scans the whole audio for the loudest part (so it will take a few minutes before the audio conversion starts with an obvious progress), adjusts a gain factor, and multiplies the downmix so that the loudest sample will just even reach the value you entered.

Dialogs may still sound quiet if there are severe differences to audio effect loaded scenes (like explosions). So you may wish that quiet parts would be amplified more than already extremely loud parts. The "Dynamic Range Compression" does that. Most of current mainstream music is dynamically compressed to make it sound loud, louder, loudest... in contrast to movies where you can sometimes hardly understand people talking in between action scenes.
Hmm. So are you saying it's probably not a bad thing to just normalize everything? I noticed the volume contrast between action scenes and regular dialogues in LOTS of movies, and it was bloody annoying!
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Old 20th April 2012, 13:05   #6584  |  Link
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Unless you have a good reason to I never touch the audio. I encode the video (I always base mine on DXVA template quality 20 , slow either HD or SD depending on source, output device in WDTV which is what I use for viewing ) Click the auto encode button and use "No target Size (use profile settings)" and tick the Add "additional content" click Save then add the original audio file that was demuxed during indexing. Have done all my DVDs and HDTV recordings like that for a while and never had a bad encode. Barry
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Old 20th April 2012, 13:13   #6585  |  Link
LigH
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The optimum is probably not to convert an AC3 audio track from DVD at all, but to copy it into the converted video. Most players, even consumer sets, can handle AC3 audio in most of their supported container formats.

But if you insist in converting to MP3 (and may it be only due to the smaller size), the normalization will be very recommendable for the case that multichannel audio has to be downmixed. If the original audio track has only two channels (DD 2.0, possibly with Pro-Logic surround already), not much changing is required instead, even normalization may be omitted here.
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Old 20th April 2012, 13:35   #6586  |  Link
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Yea that's exactly what I did in several cases back then, I don't believe in multi channel anyway, I am a fan of classical stereo, and luckily most movies still have such track available, so unless it was really huge I just muxed it in as it was.
For other cases I am not sure what bitrate should I go for though. V0 produces pretty much the same size mp3, which kills the purpose :P
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Old 20th April 2012, 13:50   #6587  |  Link
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On the other hand I do enjoy 5.1 sound now that most our HDTV broadcasts have a 5.1 channel

If I have to re-encode the audio 2.0 or 5.1 I use AAC or AC3 as the Samsung TV doesn't support streamed MKV so I have to mux it into an MP4 container with AAC sound. I try to keep the bit-rate "as is" as the amount of HDD space you save is minimal (unless you convert DTS or PCM to AAC!) There's no reason to increase the bit-rate (You can't put back what's not there) But for me the bottom line is how doest it sound on my playback devices?
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Old 20th April 2012, 13:51   #6588  |  Link
LigH
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LAME has presets too, but they are almost obsolete now because the default options pretty much cover them as well, and the "fast" modifier selects the superior new VBR mode today. The most common presets were:

--preset fast standard = -V 2 (suitable for mostly "transparent" quality music)
--preset fast medium = -V 5 (suitable for leisure background music, similar to FM radio)

MeGUI uses a default of "-V 4" in its "LAME *scratchpad*", so I believe it is good enough for mostly human voice and environment noise, as usual in movie audio tracks.
__

If you prefer 2-channel sound, and your DVD contains a 2.0 DD track, prefer this one over downmixing a 5.1 DD track! It is probably already Pro-Logic matrix surround encoded, which gives a remaining rest of surround sound where a decoder is available, but even preserves a little bit of ambient sound even if you have only stereo speakers.

If you have only a discrete 5.1 DD track, then downmix it using the "Pro-Logic II" option, with normalization and possibly even DRC. If you don't like MeGUI doing that, GUIs for BeSweet and alternatives (e.g. BeSweetGUI, BeLight and HeadAC3he) give also access to my "Boost" compressor; use only either this or the AC3 decoder DRC!
__

Gosh, are we already off-topic...
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Last edited by LigH; 20th April 2012 at 13:59.
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Old 21st April 2012, 08:28   #6589  |  Link
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Well I basically use either V0 or V2, but apparently for movies it's a bit of an overkill - for DVDs at least.
And I realized I neded new PC badly. Core2Duo took over TWO HOURS to encode 40 mins of video! Yuck! Gotta punish my wife's i3 during nights it seems :P
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Old 21st April 2012, 09:56   #6590  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Octo-puss View Post
Well I basically use either V0 or V2, but apparently for movies it's a bit of an overkill - for DVDs at least.
And I realized I neded new PC badly. Core2Duo took over TWO HOURS to encode 40 mins of video! Yuck! Gotta punish my wife's i3 during nights it seems :P
2 hours would be bad I guess if you were using the x264 default prest. I use slow and a DVD usually takes about 3-4 hours depending on length.

For mp3 I wouldn't use lower than v2, but with AAC being well well supported is there a reason you don't use that? IMO better quality and size than mp3.
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Old 21st April 2012, 15:54   #6591  |  Link
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Well, which settings should I use then? I don't mind it taking time. I once encoded bluray movie. It took four days
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Old 21st April 2012, 16:02   #6592  |  Link
LigH
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Mode: 1-pass Quality; your personal CRF threshold, test it!
Preset: usually not much slower than "slow"
Tuning: related to your movie content (film = average,reality / animation = cartoon,anime / grain = noise-on-purpose)
Device: if you need compatibility restrictions (Blu-ray limits encoding complexity)

AAC audio works well together with AVC video in the MP4 (or MKV) container. The Nero AAC Encoder used to be one of the best, but the QuickTime AAC routines seem to be slightly superior now (let's hope MeGUI will support qaac too, but that requires QuickTime or iTunes installed). Both easily surpass any MP3 encoder regarding the quality/size relation, and support multichannel audio at all too.
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Last edited by LigH; 21st April 2012 at 16:09.
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Old 21st April 2012, 21:11   #6593  |  Link
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regarding aac. even fhg aac is better than nero.
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Old 22nd April 2012, 12:20   #6594  |  Link
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The Nero AAC Encoder used to be one of the best, but the QuickTime AAC routines seem to be slightly superior now.
-------------------------------------------------
regarding aac. even fhg aac is better than nero.
Only tested with stereo and low bitrates.

And can't be included in MeGUI because licenses.
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Old 22nd April 2012, 12:47   #6595  |  Link
LigH
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Well, the difference between Nero, QT and FhG encoders is rather low, compared to the magnitude to FAAC, as far as I remember the results from Roberto Amorim. So I doubt it would be urgent to switch. And as long as MeGUI can handle pre-converted AAC files, I still have a choice, even if not under one covering GUI.
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Old 28th April 2012, 04:37   #6596  |  Link
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i hadn't used MeGUI in a bit, but when i did I got usual updates along with one that caught my eye, pgcdemux.
i looked in log and see this:
2135 [PGC Demux] added pgcdemux for DVD PGC processing

but my question is where do i access this from?
this is a great tool to implement into MeGUI, but I can't seem to find it. it isn't in the tools drop-down list or anywhere else that I can find.

please guide me, thanks
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Old 28th April 2012, 09:34   #6597  |  Link
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At the moment it is only available here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=163399
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Old 29th April 2012, 19:10   #6598  |  Link
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Zathor
Are you planning update to Xvid 132?

Sorry for my bad English.
Thanks!
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Old 30th April 2012, 12:23   #6599  |  Link
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As soon as there is a xvid_encraw which supports XVID 1.3x and AVI files > 2GB I will update it. But I fear that this will never happen.
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Old 30th April 2012, 17:49   #6600  |  Link
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Thanks. I reported the developers.
Quote:

Quote:
I have problem.. Xvid 1.3.2 can't create output files bigger than 2 Gb. I've just tested it. How to fix this problem?

Discussion:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-162990.html
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...10#post1572310

I would be very grateful if you could help solve this problem.
Sorry for my bad English.
Thanks in advance.

Regards, Dmitry )
Quote:
Hi,

thanks for your message. From the links you sent, I don't think that there
is a problem with Xvid 1.3.x. It's just that in general, AVI 1.0 files
simply cannot be larger than 2 GB by design.

And xvid_encraw produces AVI 1.0 output because it uses Microsoft's AVIFile
API under Windows to write AVI files. But it always did like this (also in
older versions than 1.3.x). AVIFile unfortunately supports only AVI 1.0,
so the AVI output from xvid_encraw cannot be larger than 2 GB.

If you want AVI files larger than 2 GB, you need to mux them into AVI 2.0,
aka "OpenDML", format. You can achieve this by encoding your video with
xvid_encraw into a raw MPEG-4 elementary stream ("-o output.m4v"; do not
use "-avi" option). After encoding, you can then mux the video stream
(e.g. "output.m4v") together with your audio track into an OpenDML AVI
using a separate muxing tool like Avi-Mux GUI:


The resulting AVI file can then be larger than 2 GB.

Some GUI tools can automatize the above workflow. I'd expect that megui
would do this too but I don't know the internals of megui at all. So I
can't tell why megui doesn't work anymore as expected after replacing
its bundled (older) xvid_encraw with xvid_encraw from v1.3.2. My guess is
that the (older) xvid_encraw binary bundled with megui had some custom
modification, which megui relies on. In this case, megui would need to
be updated to work with newer versions of xvid_encraw...

It is basically possible to implement OpenDML AVI also in xvid_encraw
directly. However to do so, we'd need to write our own AVI muxer. This
would bloat xvid_encraw's source code pretty much. And xvid_encraw is
mainly intended to be an example app, so its code should be simple.

Further, because xvid_encraw does not support audio encoding, you'll
still need to remux its output again anyway to add in your audio track.
So I think it's really most convenient to encode to a MPEG-4 elementary
stream ("-o output.m4v") and then remux (and also add audio) with an
OpenDML capable AVI muxing tool like Avi-Mux GUI if you need >2GB AVI.

Best regards,
Michael
original - http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/5821/xvidu.png
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