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Old 3rd August 2007, 01:39   #401  |  Link
zambelli
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OK, that didn't come as I ment it. I wasn't saying ISVs didn't get support. I wanted to point out the support bias towards big business. They got PEP, SDKs and ES specs for instance and all under NDA.
The expectation is that the end users will be served by the ISVs making products which will integrate our VC-1 SDK. Many companies in the codec business operate in this way (MainConcept comes to mind).

As for independent developers not getting support... Take the DMO codecs that shipped in WMP11 and Vista for example. They are fully documented on MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288690.aspx). Those video and audio codecs can actually be used independent of ASF and WMF SDK. One could use the MSDN documentation to write an encoder app that produces VC-1 ES streams or muxes them into MPEG-TS, MP4, AVI, etc. The free stuff is certainly out there but it does indeed take work on both sides to create good tools and applications.
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Old 5th April 2008, 10:19   #402  |  Link
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Hello all!

we can restart this thread. Ben will give (after 7month) the video.
We need to change the name (not HDDVD but BD today ).

About video restriction, I'm sure some people will give BD specification of all codec.

Sagitaire, do you have the last version of PeP core?



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Old 5th April 2008, 17:21   #403  |  Link
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Originally Posted by Golgot13 View Post
Hello all!

we can restart this thread. Ben will give (after 7month) the video.
We need to change the name (not HDDVD but BD today ).
I will change specification: BD9, BD25 and BD50 ...
Where is the source from ben ... ???


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About video restriction, I'm sure some people will give BD specification of all codec.
I will change that too


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Sagittaire, do you have the last version of PeP core?
Yes ... VC1 core from CinevisionPSE and VC1 core from SDK. VC1 core from CinevisionPSE is by far better at low bitrate than VC1 core from SDK. Anyway it's not the same price ... ;-)
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Old 5th April 2008, 17:53   #404  |  Link
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Um, Golgot? You seen this, right? http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135938

You even posted in this thread! He has other deadlines, so give him a break! He doesn't get paid to provide us with source material.

And Sagittaire: before you change this thread's original post, may I suggest you add BluRay to the bottom of it, still keeping the HD-DVD encoding specs please?
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Old 9th April 2008, 17:47   #405  |  Link
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since this thread is already 21 pages long i suggest to start a new one or ppl will get lost reading it...
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Old 9th April 2008, 20:12   #406  |  Link
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Well where is the 1080p source ... ???
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Old 9th April 2008, 23:52   #407  |  Link
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Well where is the 1080p source ... ???
I'll get back to it again after NAB, but I'm looking for feedback on the content I presented and suggestions on how it can be further tuned to be a useful test for this organization.
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Old 10th April 2008, 13:42   #408  |  Link
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Hi Ben,

If you want to show at all studio that VC1 is good codec, you must to ask MS
to participate at "Annual MSU Codec Comparison". You can see at NAB one company,
Mainconcept, say they win the last codec comparison.

Ben, you can resume me what you will say at your DVDA presentation ?

I hope to be at this NAB, but my company must to finish some BD project
(in VC1 ... from HDDVD product made by another company).


But I have some friends who will go.
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Old 10th April 2008, 18:45   #409  |  Link
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Hi Ben,

If you want to show at all studio that VC1 is good codec, you must to ask MS to participate at "Annual MSU Codec Comparison". You can see at NAB one company, Mainconcept, say they win the last codec comparison.
Is the MSU test that relevant? Last I looked at their methodology, it was on an older single-core P4 with some pretty tight encoding-time requirements. It seemed much more of a test of optimizing quality/encode time than visual quality in a more typical workflow. And by using such an old processor, they're missing the benefit of most recent performance optimization, like spatial multithreading and SSE3/4.

No argument that speed is one factor in comparing codec implementations, but it seems to me any speed test should at least run on typical compression workstations. I doubt anyone is using less than Core 2 Duo these days, and I don't think I've seen a new machine with less than four cores in the last couple of years. I've got 8-core on both by main encoding boxes.

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Ben, you can resume me what you will say at your DVDA presentation ?
I'm not quite parsing your question here.

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I hope to be at this NAB, but my company must to finish some BD project (in VC1 ... from HDDVD product made by another company).

But I have some friends who will go.
Yeah? Here's my NAB schedule if anyone wants to attend one of my sessions or drop by the Microsoft booth when I'm there.

http://www.on10.net/blogs/benwagg/21804/

Anyone around on Tuesday night is welcome to come to the "Compressionist's Party" - just let me know you're coming so I can track snack requirements.
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Old 15th April 2008, 19:37   #410  |  Link
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Originally Posted by Golgot13 View Post
I listen many news from you at NAB from my contact...
You're a liar?
VC1 give better quality than H264 at same bitrate (more detail) !!!!
Its called marketing. Everyone wants to be able to claim they're the best, so they use contrived tests to prove their superiority. This is how VC-1 can claim to be "superior" to H.264 when it actually ends up being drastically worse in basically every situation. They probably compared against the JM, or compared against some of the terrible encoders available back in 2004 when they first marketed it as an H.264 competitor.

Other companies do the same; this isn't unique. Though unlike most others at least VC-1 has some advantage (faster playback).

Real claims their RV30/RV40, which are basically direct ripoffs of H.264 (x264 can be modified to output RV30), are superior to H.264. Of course, maybe they're superior to the JM, but I have never actually seen a test where they remotely came close to any competent encoder.

Same with On2, who make similar claims about VP7: its both faster and better quality than H.264. Of course, in reality, encoding is slow, playback is slower than ffh264, and quality is worse; but that doesn't stop marketing, does it?
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Old 16th April 2008, 00:25   #411  |  Link
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I listen many news from you at NAB from my contact...
You're a liar?
VC1 give better quality than H264 at same bitrate (more detail) !!!!
If I'm parsing you right, are you talking about the DVDA event on Saturday? What your contact may be thinking of is my discussion of PEP's VC-1 implementation as doing a better job of maintaining the texture of film grain compared to competing proudcts. For this, I'm quoting recent feedback from the compressionists at major studios who are evaluating the various professional encoder products.

Now that the format war is over, a number of BD-only studios are adopting VC-1. At this point there is only a single studio not actively working on VC-1 encoded Blu-ray titles.

I know you disagree with this, but the growing consensus among the Hollywood compressionists I get reports from is that PEP provides better overall quality and workfow at BD data rates than the H.264 encoders targeting the same market that they're evaluating.

And remember, this isn't a comparison of codec standards in this case, but implementations in particular products for particular workflows.
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Old 16th April 2008, 00:35   #412  |  Link
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Its called marketing. Everyone wants to be able to claim they're the best, so they use contrived tests to prove their superiority. This is how VC-1 can claim to be "superior" to H.264 when it actually ends up being drastically worse in basically every situation. They probably compared against the JM, or compared against some of the terrible encoders available back in 2004 when they first marketed it as an H.264 competitor.
Well, I don't know that we're doing any VC-1 marketing right now at all, so I don't even know what Microsoft's official opnion on the topic could be said to be .

I'll get my presentations from NAB posted in the next few days for everyone to check out, but I'm talking about a particular case where feedback from professionals is that the output of our VC-1 tool outperforms the output of competing H.264 tools.

There's lots of scenarios where VC-1 can outperform H.264 for particular goals, but the converse is certainly true as well. It all depends on what you're trying to do and what you're trying to do it with, and to.
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Old 16th April 2008, 00:57   #413  |  Link
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I have noticed a number of unbelievably badly encoded Blu-ray discs lately. This is probably for the same marketing reasons as previously mentioned; many companies are still marketing really bad encoders. Its ironic to see that real-time broadcast encoders can do better jobs than Blu-ray encoders

One particularly bad one I saw had the following properties:
1. No P or B subpartitions.
2. 8x8dct only.
3. i8x8 only; no other block types.
4. Ridiculously long motion vectors throughout the frame in nearly static scenes.

Last edited by foxyshadis; 16th April 2008 at 08:54. Reason: Sorry, accidental edit due to still learning mod interface :) // undid ben's edit~foxy ;)
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Old 16th April 2008, 01:07   #414  |  Link
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I have noticed a number of unbelievably badly encoded Blu-ray discs lately. This is probably for the same marketing reasons as previously mentioned; many companies are still marketing really bad encoders. Its ironic to see that real-time broadcast encoders can do better jobs than Blu-ray encoders!
Yeah, I'm a judge for the DVDA Excellence Awards, and just got done judging a number of DVD and BD discs. I was really surprised how problematic many of the BD discs were, particularly in dark areas. Tons of blocking in black and other problems.

Keeping low-luma looking good was a major focus of all our work in PEP for VC-1, and one of the reasons why many compressionists prefer it over the H.264 products. Apropos of what what I was saying above, I don't think there's anything particular about VC-1 that made it easeir to do this; it was a matter of hearing the feedback that this had become a big problem due to all the consumer displays with non-perceptually-uniform gamma an elevated blacks, and then our spending a ton of time tweaking the encoder to do well in that case.

Quote:
One particularly bad one I saw had the following properties:
1. No P or B subpartitions.
2. 8x8dct only.
3. i8x8 only; no other block types.
4. Ridiculously long motion vectors throughout the frame in nearly static scenes.
Wow. Can you share what title that was?

I'm not aware of any commercial BD encoders that are THAT bad, although I haven't done stream analysis of the output of all of them by any means. Being all 8x8 seems particularly odd.
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Old 16th April 2008, 01:14   #415  |  Link
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Wow. Can you share what title that was?
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. An Ateme employee (bobobolo) suggested to me that it might be using the Vegas encoder. And a correction: it didn't only use 8x8dct, it almost only used 8x8dct. There are some very few choice blocks where it doesn't use 8x8dct (but intra is all 8x8dct). For AQ it used what appeared to be some sort of lumimasking.

I have found it quite odd that the Blu-ray encoders are so drastically behind the times; its as if everyone has leapfrogged them in the past 4 years.

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Old 16th April 2008, 03:47   #416  |  Link
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Last edited by benwaggoner : Today at 02:06. Reason: Sorry, accidental edit due to still learning mod interface
Huh did i miss something, congratz to the mod position

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it was a matter of hearing the feedback that this had become a big problem due to all the consumer displays with non-perceptually-uniform gamma an elevated blacks, and then our spending a ton of time tweaking the encoder to do well in that case.
Yep and this is indeed a big problem and the high quantization behavior of H.264 does indeed really bad @ those cases visually , and for sure Microsoft put allot off effort in this especially tweaking all the bells and whistles out of the encoder "visually" to win the Race @ the Studios.
And they succeeded with this because most of the H.264 codec implementer are still concentrating more on mathematical efficiency then finding solutions for certain visual problems (speaking of HVS) and unfortunately that is still the case, there seem to be only a few companies that really put allot of research into this area of improvement (and of course X264 slow but steadily).
My visual experience from what i saw so far is also that the Adaptive behavior (in all ranges Scenecut,B-frame placement decision,Adaptive Deadzones,Partition decisions) of the VC-1 encoder is much better refined @ the moment then for example it is in case of X264 (X264s Adaptive behavior even seems to hurt in some cases more than it helps visually) and that allot of tweaking effort was put into this by Microsoft over the years of development and research ahead of the others, because they knew it's not only about efficiency alone but about a good balance for a given target which in that case would be HD Film Content and they really did there work.
Dark Shikari sure the DVD Forum tests where long ago but it doesn't change the fact that the visual results @ that time where already more pleasing for VC-1 and that this started the existence of FRExt on H.264's side, and this tells already allot imho FRExt seems just like a workaround of a Problem that Microsoft solved before H.264 even realized it is existing (would High Profile even exist without the DVD Forum test results vs VC-1?) .
Tough what i don't understand is why FGM isn't still used for this Problem, modeling Grain instead of Preserving it and keeping the bandwidth free for more detail seems a much better solution then FreXt or Microsoft's internal changing partition approaches that try to preserve it @ all costs which results in a heavy encoding speed and bandwidth lose, but it doesn't seem to be used yet by the Studios, they rather still like to compress the Grain than to model it?.

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At this point there is only a single studio not actively working on VC-1 encoded Blu-ray titles.
Disney?
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Old 16th April 2008, 15:28   #417  |  Link
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Originally Posted by benwaggoner View Post
There's lots of scenarios where VC-1 can outperform H.264 for particular goals, but the converse is certainly true as well. It all depends on what you're trying to do and what you're trying to do it with, and to.
Well H264 outperform VC1 at high quantisation encoding (aka "low bitrate"). For low quantisation all the advanced fonctionality from H264 (adaptative partition, inloop, multiref, wpred, cabac) became useless and HVS fonctionaly are more and more important. In this case It's possible that good VC1 implementation outperform H264 implementation not specifiquely optimised for low quantizer encoding.


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Yeah, I'm a judge for the DVDA Excellence Awards, and just got done judging a number of DVD and BD discs. I was really surprised how problematic many of the BD discs were, particularly in dark areas. Tons of blocking in black and other problems.
Well it's not a VC1 particularity. VC1 implementation (PEP or CinevisionPSE) from MS use particular HVS tweak for DarK Area
- Internal Dark Noise Filtering (pre-process with 3D filtering with luma masking)
- Adaptative Dead Zone (certainely with luma masking too)
- Adaptative Qunatisation (certainely with luma masking too)

All these HVS tweak can be used for H264 (easy for Dark Shikari to implement that with x264 I think). Anyway you can make that too with actual commercial H264 implementation like Cinevision 2.5 with Mainconcept/elecard implementation:
- Internal Dark Noise Filtering (call "black normalisation level")
- Adaptative Quantisation (call "AQ with luma masking")
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Old 16th April 2008, 16:17   #418  |  Link
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Yes and that's also why the PEP Encoder is not 100% the same like the consumer encoder it is especialy tuned for Film Content the same for Cinevision and Cinemacrafts Encoder and in those regards X264 is still @ the start it is more tuned for Anime then anything else tough it's high bitrate visual results with Film Content improving constantly since some time now (and also it's very flexible due to it's wide variety of settings that can be adapted for certain source encoding scenarios)
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Old 16th April 2008, 18:01   #419  |  Link
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I must admit, since VAQ made it into x264's trunk, I've noticed encodes not only needing less bitrate, but also looking better(?) than without it! However VC-1 still wins in the high bitrate (20+ Mbits) scenario, since it doesn't throw away detail when quantisers are lowered like MPEG-2 and H.264.
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Old 17th April 2008, 18:43   #420  |  Link
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Ben,

you can go to see Sony or Thomson on NAB, they show their H264 encoder and you will understand what can do
a H264 encoder (better than the software that you used for DVDA session)....

If you, Ben, can put some video we will show you (same that DVDA session or other in Full HD)
I can use some H264 studio encoder if you want...


About evolution of encoding process in H264 encoder, I understand that KDDI make a good demo
about better quantizer use when their many informations on picture: so if somebody can go to see
the demo to report all information.
NHK do a demo about broadcast UHD (Ultra HD: 8K !!!) in H264 at 128Mbps in realtime encoding and decoding.
NHK use only H264 solution (no VC1, it's really strange...) for HD and 3D HD (3D video in HD format)...
I understand there is only MS which show VC1 solution (except some transcoder solution for SD size).

Last, we will have soon more HD channel in H264 because many companies show
H264 HD statistic encoder and broadcasted multiplexer.
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