high quality anime ripping

[daxab]

Hm, it took me awhile to find this. The search facility seems to ignore attachment names. Here's the thread:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15802

[poopity poop]

he he I just clicked on the number 150 (prolly now 151) in replies under this thread. When you do that it brings up a window and tallies the number of response per person.....





I'm WINNING, nanny nanny BOO BOO, stick your head in..POOP!



anyway....yeah...just found that option and thought it was cool

[poopity poop]

Let us compare nandub vs CCESP SVCD's. I am playing the devils advocate here :devil:, and trying to get a rouse out of you guys for some good conversation...be nice to me.

We shall start with 0 points for nandub, 0 points for SVCD

Fact 1:
It is possible to produce a 2ep/CD SVCD encode (~400mb's), and a 3 ep/CD nandub encode (~233mb's), and have the same comparable quality. I hope none of you will argue with me on that one; if the CCESP encode was done correctly with 3 or more passes, and the nandub was set up correctly the quality is the same...maybe even the mpg is of higher quality (debatable with no side winning: mute discussion)

1 nandub, 1 SVCD

Fact 2:
One can play an SVCD in most DVD players and basically have DVD quality, nandub you can not.

1 nandub, 2 SVCD ( I think it should be 3, because that is such an ENOURMOUS plus, but...)

Fact 3:
If one does not have a DVD player, one can download Elcard video decoder (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/MPGDec.zip) and stream the mpg file from the CD to play on the computer, much like one starts an .avi from the CD.

2 nandub 3 SVCD

Fact 4:
Downloading 800 megs for 2 episodes is more than downloading 700megs for 3. SVCD defense (my opinion): Hey...quality is the only thing that matters, if people can't handle the bandwith get a crappy encode instead.

final score:
3 nandub 3 SVCD

If SVCD's can do everything that nandub avi's can do, PLUS play in a DVD player -- Why are people so opposed to SVCD's? Let's here some opinions


:devil:

[Inindo]

1) You can do Sub-Dub with Nandub
2) People need computers to download the stuff with, and so should be able to play them as well. Now there is a DivX player for Macs and Linuix.
3) Movies, where the movie is so long that file size becomes more of an issue (i.e. Mononoke Hime)

[ThePanda]

Although I haven't forced myself to spend the money yet, I'd say DVD-R is the best format. It's finally becoming affordable but I'm going to wait a bit longer.

[poopity poop]

Inindo
You...really didn't answer the question did you?.
1.SubDub..what does that have to do with anything
2. a DivX player for mac and linux..What? I was tlaking about being able to play it on a TV
3and your sentance fragment just came out of no where:
Movies, where the movie is so long that file size becomes more of an issue

Your entire statment was a non-sequitor.


ThePanda
While you didn't really answer the question, you bring up a good point, and is worth responding too he he:
Yeah DVD-R will be the best. When they become just a little more affordable, I will burn SVCD format onto the CD-R's with 2-3 movies on the 4.7gig and like 5-6 movies on the 9gig DVD's. That will be sweet

[ThePanda]

Are you allowed to use AC3 audio in an SVCD movie? It would be sweet if DVD players could play MPEG4 or something and you could encode it like SVCDs without having to worry about the interlacing. I think that is the next DVD technology that is coming out.

[poopity poop]

no unfortunatly SVCD's ONLY can have mp2 audio. Trust me I've tried muxing mp1, mp2, mp3, and ac3...and they accually do not work, although my DVD player can read mp3's(individually) and AC3's(DVD's).
And yes that is the next DVD technology that is coming out from the news section on doom9 a couple weeks ago...that will be cool as hell.
But most liekly it will only support 720x480 reoslution and interlacing...and whatever so like we most likely won't be able to play our old DivX3 movies in there.
There is a player coming out for dreamcast...what dreamcast...yes dreamcast. Its called dreamplayer, I had a link somewhere, but right now it only supports super small resolutions and small bitrates, its under development

[OUTPinged_]

poop, all your statements above are true only for 4:3 aspect ratio video. wide screen movies suck ass in svcd.

here are some statements from me :-PP :

SVCD strong points:

1. easy to use(no compatibility problems)
2. somewhat easyer to produce a good rip than with nandub. (debatable)
4. plays with dvd players and slow pcs
4. better quality on interlaced content


divx strong points:

1. better compression, 50% smaller files for same quality.
2. dont have to be burned to watch.
1. clearly superior for encoding of 1.85:1 and expecially 2.35:1 content
2. a small part can be downloaded and watched before getting all. (svcd usually coem in rars)
4. evolving (better and better a/v compression)


so in both cases we have 4 advantages. so just pick what you need.

and remember, divx rips are MooPolice approved!

[poopity poop]

ha ha well you need to take a writing class.
You give no arguments for your stements and are false on some of them:
the main point is that....aspect ratioed movies suck ass in SVCD format? WHAT? How can you say that? What is your proof, WHY WOULD THEY? All you have to do is get the aspect ratio correct and it encodes the entire frame..its not harder to do, or produces any crap.. It looks great! If you don't beleive me download any of the latest DVD encodes.
A small part can be downloaded and watched:
Um...no. You can't download part of a DivX avi and watch it. It just can't do that. Of course most SVCD's do come in rar's but I distribute mind as one large rar. works fine.
has to be burned to watched SVCD's.
No, extract the mpg using vcdgear/vcdgearGUI, and double clikc on the file.

Here's the things: i've done both, perfectly, I know the ins and the outs of both, and I don['t want to get on your case or anything, but it seems to me that all you know is nandub, because the statements you made just aren't true. I mean, some thigs are debatable(quality,i ssues and what not), but 16/9 and 2.35:1 AR work fine, you can sxtract the mpg from an iso(sometimes gorups distribute JUST the mpg), and you CAN'T watch part of a DivX file
(well you can recontruct the missing index block by direct stream copy audio and video, and save it, but...whatever)

[OUTPinged_]

in divx you compress wide stuff in at least 640x resolution.

most divx 2cd encodes go as 672x or even 704x. the movies i had were compressed at 480x horisontal res.

i didnt mean it gets screwed or something. it just looks more blurry on SVCD. may be taht i have badly encoded svcd, but i watched 4 movies already and all looked worse than their divx encodes.

bah, you need just to check a picture and if it is ivtc'ed, so small preview is enough. you cant preview a 15mb rar of svcd.

a couple of says ago i have watched newer hellsing ep which was 7% from completion and even w/o rekeying it played ok in vdub.


i can extract mpg from iso, that is true. dump that :-) though its not like just playing an avi :P

disclaimer: i'm by no means am svcd expert. i am judging them only from users standpoint. and i watch stuff on my PC, so SVCD are no go for me.


(and these spelling errors are MooPolice approved, so... :PPP)

[poopity poop]

I am by all means an SVCD expert, AND an SBC encoding expert (at least I'd liek to think I am). and I'm telling you from an objective viewpoint, when I encode an SVCD it looks better than SBC DivX on my TV(using s-video, or component or optical). Even with DivX on full decoding processing priority...you can still notice miscolorings in large areas of color. A properly encoded SVCD simply looks like the original movie on the original frames...is my opinion.

[OUTPinged_]

sorry, but i dont watch anime on TV (only checked how it looks like at my friend and it looked like crap)


for PC divx looks better :P

although it depends. i am pretty confident in my divx viewing setup but i can not tell the same for my svcd setup.



(divx is still 50% smaller :PPPPP)

[ThePanda]

if you use SVCD can you use Temporal Smoother or will it mess up the picture because of the interlacing lines?

[OUTPinged_]

sure you can, but you have to use a version which is adapted for interlacing.

[ThePanda]

do you know where i could find that version?

[OUTPinged_]

tmpeg's one is afaik.

[ThePanda]

oh but there's not one for avisynth or something? thinking about it, would temporal smoother smooth together the blackness from the interlace lines into each other as they jump back and forth from frame to frame, making the rest of the picture look worse, or would they not have a bad effect like that? hmm maybe i should just leave temporal smoother off if there is no easy way for me to use it together with dvd2svcd..

EDIT: I turned up TemporalSmoother in the .avs to a really high setting, then stretched it out vertically in VirtualDub and I could clearly see some interlacing in both fields where it blended the frames together, so I guess it doesn't work right for interlaced movies (as I suspected).

EDIT2: Hmm, it seems that the original frames are like that too at that spot. So I guess it wasn't because of temporal smoother. Maybe it's because you're not supposed to see one of the half-images or something?

[geoffwa]

Some DVDs, like The Castle Of Caligostro just make me want to quit ripping altogether.

For people who haven't seen it, the material appears to have undergone a conversion process like so:

Film -> NTSC -> PAL

It shimmers, it gitters, it ghosts, it does it all. There's no magic cure for crap blended fields.

[OUTPinged_]

lame.

ripped it. (r1) no problems at all with default decomb 191 setup.

if you are ripping pal dvds and they are blended, then nothing can be done. no curent tool will help you.

just give your encode more bits and watch the blended output.


(for real castle of cagliostro encode (by me of course) check SSX 2CD version =) Its quality is even a MooPolice approved!)

[triffid]

ack! these ranma season 2 dvds that i just ripped are evilly interlaced...tried a host of settings on decomb as well as auto IVTC in TMPG and i still get incredible amounts of ghosting...im no newbie and this is killing me - this is an SOS, any info not already on this thread on IVTC is requested. Especially decomb.

PS: hmm maybe i shoulda started a new thread, but this one is so nice i dont wana leave it behind, and as this is an anime encoding question...

PPS: Dont you just hate it when they stick each episode in its own set of vobs? And then encode it at a super-low bitrate on top of that? I expect better from Pioneer and Viz. For shame.

UPDATE: I'm managing to manual IVTC in tmpg but its driving me nuts with the pattern switching several times each minute of video. I dont know if i can take doing this 18 times (once for each ep in the season)...

-triffid
doing his part to keep this thread near the top of the list.

[ThePanda]

I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right place either, but as I'm talking about anime, if you are making an SVCD and leaving it as interlaced, if it is a 23.976fps framerate from the DVD, do you encode it at that and use the pulldown.exe with it, or do you just encode it at the 29.97fps? Would you lose any frames that aren't duplicates by going to the 23.976fps? And would you go from 30 to 24 by using Force Film? Sorry for all the questions, I couldn't find much info on encoding while leaving it as interlaced, although I don't know why you would do it any other way.

[OUTPinged_]

tri:

use interpolation at low thresh.
be sure field order is right. decomb 1.91 output was good already.
download random hq ep and check how does ivtc'ing look there.

the r1 dvds arent producing that good output. get your hands on r2 ones :-)

panda: if you want to leave it in interlacing mode, dont ivtc. be sure your svcd will have "interlaced" flag through the whole ep(dvd2avi).

FF drops fps to 24.

[triffid]

thanks outpinged

i think i tried interpolation but couldnt really figure out the thresh settings...im using the latest decomb, do you recommend finding the old ver?

anyway i did manual but it was mind-numbing...im really annoyed with pioneer/viz on their ranma 1/2 s1/s2 dvd releases, but oh well. Could have been worse...somehow. I had to filter the heck out of these to get them to look good, get rid of mpeg2 artifacting etc, and still my final encode doesnt look all that great.
oh well...

[OUTPinged_]

try to set thresh at 5

i checked some group's ranma eps and it looks like you cant do anything.

a hint: dont use filters on that. it will make thins look only worse.

[triffid]

outpinged: thanks for the settings, i finally got around to trying them out and they seem to be doing a much better job of pattern matching now. However, there are weird effects in certain frames (namely, the ones where the bottom half of a frame is interlaced while the rest is OK) giving some frames a squished effect...BTW i agree with you on the filtering, gona try again running just a light denoise to help with the graininess a bit.

[OUTPinged_]

>However, there are weird effects in certain frames (namely, the
>ones where the bottom half of a frame is interlaced while the rest
>is OK) giving some frames a squished effect...

You cant do anything about these. Just leave them alone. They do look a tiny bit smoother with blend postprocessing.

here is a list of settings one guy used on this:

post: on/blend
gthresh: 50 thresh 15 dthresh 5

these are confirmed to work and give a tolerable output.

[triffid]

another extremely weird circumstance: for some reason nandub's anti-shit and min quality settings hate the subtitles this anime has. When the subtitles are on (only when they are displayed in a frame, everythings fine between subs), it kicks in heavy and causes a 50-90% decrease in encode speed as well as creating macroblocks all over the frames with subtitles. Upping min quality to 20 got rid of the macroblocks but didnt help the speed at all. Running with just anti-freeze on, the encode came out just fine. Anyway, just wondering if anyone has seen this before. I find it very weird.

and this on top of all the other problems with this anime...

[OUTPinged_]

a color of subtitle is guilty.

if you are using pure white/yellow with pure black borders, then make a color a couple of notches darker and a border a couple of notches brighter.

still, wonrking antishit = slow.

the bad thing about antifreeze is that you will end with macroblocks anyway :-)

[triffid]

actually, i was surprised with the final output, no noticable macroblocks. I'll experiment with the color some more, im using the default sub colors (which happen to be semi-transparent yellow with black borders). I had already experimented with colors that i had used before successfully, so i'm thinking that the font used might be partially behind this.

btw i also tried out subrip, planning to convert to SSA and use subtitler to put the subs in (or maybe use ogg subtitle stream) but this font seems to be particularly hard on the OCR, would take at least an hour to edit them back to how they should be. Its still an option tho.

thanks again outpinged

[Dreassica]

Im new to anime ripping, but im still gonna resurrect this thread.
I read this thread with a lot of interest as i am trying to rip anime myself. I was wondering if someone has some new settings for SSm HQ and 2d cleaner? I tried tweaking its settings but i didn't get satisfactory settings for my PAL DBZ rip. Maybe someone doing DBZ as well has some settings that work for him. I know, those settings may not apply to my case, but then i have something to work off again, because reading this thread showed that one time preferred settings become obsolete and replaced by new ones and as the thread is silent for 2 months now i guess the settings have changed again.
any pointers will be appreciated!

[Hanty]

Settings becomes obsolete once you finish an encode, when you start a new one you do it all over again. One of the most basic but still most hard-to-accept fundamentals of encoding that newbies get stuck on is that what works on one encode might be a disaster for the next. There are no general settings that will always do you well.

[Dreassica]

I wasn't looking for the "perfect" combination of settings, but more of a general set that produced satisfactory results, that i can use to work off.
Reading this thread i saw that at one moment a certain combo seemed to be favourite amongst several people only to be replaced by new ones weeks later and even those changed or were adjusted.
Like the 2d cleaner which preferred settings was adjusted downwards after awhile because their effects weren't that pleasant as it was first made out to be and because the thread was silent for more than a month, i thought they had changed in the meantime and that reinitiating the conversation would shed more light on it>
Hope i clarified myself a bit now and u don't think i expect any perfect settings.
Any comments on this subject are welcome!!;) ;)

[MasterYoshidino]

hate to resurrect this thread but i am just addressing what ppl should have learned about some of the plugins mentioned
and to also bump it for the n00bs to read =)

When encoding an anime, no one setting is best. This applies especially to encoding in SBC or DIV3 codec. Some general settings apply though. Most anime is telecided from 24 to 30 fps and needs to be inverse telecided. You can either use ITVC or Decomb. They both do the job well , as long as you have the recent dll's. Decomb needs to be correctly tweaked for the source, to prevent ghosting, which occurs when incorrectly ivtc'ed, leaving behind fields that were not dumped by the plugin. (Fields are interlaced 1/2 frames that when played quickly enough, appear to produce whole frames. Two fields can reconstruct a frame)

Filtering is a touchy subject as some believe that 2d cleaner is better than sshiq (Smart Smoother HiQ). Actually it depends on your goal. 2d cleaning blurs the screen, thus fine details are lost. This is though faster than the edge preserving sshiq (which when I use in an avs script with C3D (convolution 3d, helps simplify the image for better smoothing) and DCT filter (to help smooth mpeg2 compression blocks) I encode at a fast 8~10 fps on a 2.4 GHz Pentium4 (shows how slow the sshiq is).:D

If you want to encode for details, sshiq is the way to go, otherwise a simple 2d cleaner will suffice.

Temporal smoothers can help smooth as well and can produce just as good as results as spatial smoothing. The only importance is it will _not_ smooth very wide and similar color areas as effectively as spatial smoothers. They can produce nice results but can destroy the mpeg2 look as generally compression blocks are filtered and can cause some objects to appear blurred or the background to have luma noise , which spatial smoothers better handle.

It takes several encodes and settings to see how the codec will compress various settings. Never assume that your 1st encode will do it, encode several times with various settings to see which is more pleasing/asthetic to the eye.