Mainconcept V2 Encoder released

[pandy]

Mainconcept is fast but have so many bugz and very poor technical support - x264 at this moment seems to be much more reliable software than commercial MainConcept encoder...

[Sergey A. Sablin]

Mainconcept is fast but have so many bugz and very poor technical support - x264 at this moment seems to be much more reliable software than commercial MainConcept encoder...

which bugs you are talking about?

[foxyshadis]

2. It has extremely good quality with extremely good speed. only x264 can beat it with 2 times slower speed by +0.4-0.5 ssim and 5 times slower settings (Megui's Slowest or Insane Profiles ) by approx +0.8 ssim. With the same speed MC performs already better.

I found for me the best tradeoff speed/quality that x264 and Nero couldn't provide untill now (imho and my visual perception :p ):
Sounds good. What kind of size are you talking about? Small improvements at a large size often translate to large improvements at a small size (not always, but often). Hope the site is back up soon.

[acidsex]

Does the demo only let you encode 30 seconds of audio?

[Sergey A. Sablin]

Does the demo only let you encode 30 seconds of audio?

NOTE: The demo version of the MainConcept H.264 Encoder v2 is fully functional, though it adds a watermark to processed video (without harming your source material) and has a video capture recording restriction of five minutes. Moreover, it has an AAC Audio encoding limitation of 30 seconds. When you purchase the H.264 Encoder v2, you will receive a registration code which unlocks the demo. This means that you can start enjoying the full version without an additional download. (DirectX 9 required)

http://www.mainconcept.com/site/index.php?id=803

[IgorC]

Sounds good. What kind of size are you talking about? Small improvements at a large size often translate to large improvements at a small size (not always, but often). Hope the site is back up soon.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by size. Bitrate, lenght of video or final size of video?

Serg.A.Sablin Will be first fast pass enable any soon?
Elecard has it. So it is a deal to include it to GUI, right?
It's really good news that MC suports mp4 muxing, profiles (compability with HD-DVD ) and different presets like Sony PSP and Apple iPod.

[foxyshadis]

I guess average quantizer, since bitrate and file size can vary wildly. I'm usually interested in when they fall in the 25-30 range, sometimes higher, since I'm always aiming for really small files.

[IgorC]

DVD or HD-DVD resized to DVD content at 700-1500 kbit/s (maybe sometimes lower than 700 kbit.) Range 23-32 q. Don't know if it's really average due to testing of slow, high and mix motions.
Only way to judge performance (quality/speed trading) it is try by yourself.

[Sergey A. Sablin]

Serg.A.Sablin Will be first fast pass enable any soon?
Elecard has it. So it is a deal to include it to GUI, right?
It's really good news that MC suports mp4 muxing, profiles (compability with HD-DVD ) and different presets like Sony PSP and Apple iPod.

Igor,

fast first pass will be included into gui soon. it is working for a long time, but I still have no time to implement it in API...

Sergey.

[pandy]

which bugs you are talking about?

Plenty of them eg lack in access to some options, poor scheduling of task to do, very weird profiles managment, issue with more than 3 B pictures,major issue with multplexer, plenty of PTS/DTS errors
... and many more.
After few contacts with technical support of MainConcept i giveup - those peoples are very sensitive, they always say, Yes, We know that, We will fix this in new release... (about one year ago)
So i buy MainConcept, i use latest build and swearing sometimes very heavily...
At this moment this is like pay&cry...

[DarkZell666]

Hmm, I *must* be doing something wrong, because when I throw a 25min anime avi file at it, select 256kbps average bitrate using High Profile @ Level 4.1 (2pass mode), and ask for MPEG Layer2 audio @ 96kbps I get a huge 350MB TS MPG file (TS 'coz I selected Transport (Video+Audio)). This doesn't reflect 256kbps at all (which should rather be a 75mb file with the 96kbps audio).

"Sometimes" I manage to reach target filesize, but more often than that I get a well oversized file. One-pass works from what I remember. It must be fashionable nowadays to avoid reaching target bitrate/filesize.

I imagine some sort of fashion-victimized pre-teen discussion around this :

A-"Hey you have MainConcept encoder ? It looks so cute *_*"
B-"Yeah, and you use Nero's ? Smells nice indeed *slurp*"
A-"Yup, and it doesn't reach target filesize, that's so cool !!. I bet yours does ! Mine's cuter than yours anyway *_*"
B-"Not reaching target filesize isn't luxury now anymore, everybody can do it ! And I bet mine avoids target filesize even better 'coz it costs more :D"

Sorry for the sarcasm but I'm pretty surprised that, once again, using the app simply by reading what's written on the buttons doesn't give me the expected result. I've had the same problem with the 2.0.15 version I tried a couple of weeks ago.

Can anyone reproduce this ? I'll be happy to hear I've missed something but please tell me what.

Edit:

I do notice one thing, after going mad :
For one encode I had set the max bitrate to 2000kbps, which indeed produces 366MB of video if maxed out.
For another encode, I had set the maxbitrate to 1000kbps, which indeed produces around 190MB of video, and I've just found a 217MB mpg file that was produced using those settings. 187+30=217. However the audio wasn't 30MB but only 15MB. The video bitrate doesn't even seem to be correctly capped according to the maximum bitrate.

Hope this helps, forgive my sarcasm again but this is really shocking to some extent.

[Jay Bee]

Another Bug. Try to save your settings as a profile and use a file name with spaces in it: it won't save your settings but it will mess them up for you. And TS files are too large for me too and I can't play them using CoreAVC and Haali's Splitter. Also it crashes when trying to open a HuffYUV AVI.

Apart from that the app is pretty decent, mainly because the interlaced encoding works.

[IgorC]

It can be a lot easier. I encoded video to elementary stream then rename extension to .h264 or .264 and then mux them into mp4 container with your favorite muxer. It works fine.
yes, GUI is a kindly messy :) but once I learned all its weaknesses and abilities I got a pleasure to encode with this encoder.

[DarkZell666]

True, I can remember clearly now, using elementary streams and muxing the 2 streams worked. (Using Program Streams didn't even work, I couldn't play the mpg file in mplayer/mpc or even vlc.)

This is surely worth 499$ ... :p

[chilledoutuk]

igorc i eventually worked that out lol it seems that when encoding to ts it automatically sets it to cbr which is the max bitrate setting.

Other than that i really like the quality of this codec works very nice and i think i am using an older version of the v2 application.

one strange thing is that 5.1 high profile plays back with nero and cor avc decoders but libav has a baby with blocks going mental and eventually crashing i assume there is something libav doesnt support yet.

[bkman]

Some impressions:

* speed is 2X x264 at high settings thanks to fast inter and intra decisions. Speed becomes similar to x264 with those disabled.

* The "best" constant quantiser is not good enough. I encode with x264 at crf 20, and mainconcepts "best" is 150kbits behind on one test source. Finer control over quantiser would be useful.

* The colour is different with mainconcepts (it seems darker) compared to x264. Maybe some conversion is being done when the avs is being rendered with dshow. Native AVS handling would be great.

[foxyshadis]

igorc i eventually worked that out lol it seems that when encoding to ts it automatically sets it to cbr which is the max bitrate setting.

Other than that i really like the quality of this codec works very nice and i think i am using an older version of the v2 application.

one strange thing is that 5.1 high profile plays back with nero and cor avc decoders but libav has a baby with blocks going mental and eventually crashing i assume there is something libav doesnt support yet.
Is it interlaced? You can check with h264_parse. If so you still need a special interlaced AVC build to decode it, it's not enabled by default in SVN yet.

[IgorC]

* The colour is different with mainconcepts (it seems darker) compared to x264. Maybe some conversion is being done when the avs is being rendered with dshow. Native AVS handling would be great.
You can adjust chroma offset. By default it's +1 q.

[chilledoutuk]

the encode is progressive and so is the source its only when i enable mode 5.1 on 4.1 the encodes playback perfectly in mplayer and vlc.

I will encode a sample and upload.

[DarkZell666]

I was about to post here to say that MC's encoder is in fact very slow, but just before posting I noticed that the avi file I threw at it was being decoded by the DivX codec (not XviD as I was expecting). The DivX decoder is about 1.5x slower on my system than XviD's, at least when used in conjunction with MC's encoder.

I though I'd just report this in case anyone else was wondering about the speed =)


Edit: ehm 2h15min to encode 25mb anime episode @ 512*384 @ 256kbps (2-passes, halfpel only, fast inter/intra decisions, 3refs+3bframes, 8x8 search, based on lvl 4.1 High Profile)
However, the quality isn't bad at all imho. Higher than the latest Recode 2 from what I'm seeing right now. I'll try a cleaner source for my next test.
Using Elementary Streams indeed worked and gave me the target 50MB video I wanted. *pulls mp4box out*

[chilledoutuk]

foxy your correct somehow i was encoding interlaced h.264 but once i told it to deinterlace the output played perfecly in mplayer:)

[dvdboy]

Just been using this for a couple of days now (2.1.0.0):

One thing I did notice was that the black bars on 2.35:1 footage come out rather grey,as if the black levels are wrong by default?

What are people's experiences with the preview window? It seems to be very small and when you drag it to a larger size, as soon as you make a change in the cropping dialogue it snaps back to "postage stamp size" - pretty much next to useless!

Performance seems good IMO - about 2x realtime on a Dual Xeon 3.0Ghz machine - certainly considerably faster than Sony's UMD Composer!

I've also noticed that the final file sizes vary hugely from the estimates 350Mb vs 1.8Gb!!

It looks like MP4Box is considered the best way to go for muxing the streams into an mp4, but I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a (preferrably freeware / shareware) mpeg-2 transport stream muxer?

[DarkZell666]

dvdboy : read the thread again, the oversized problem occurs with transport streams, and program streams don't even work (at least for me). Use Elementary (video+audio) instead and mux them with something else (dunno about mpeg2 muxing, but mp4box is indeed the best thing you can use for mpeg4).

I have the same problem with the preview window too, it is useless indeed ... :)

[dvdboy]

dvdboy : read the thread again, the oversized problem occurs with transport streams, and program streams don't even work (at least for me)

No need to reread, I was confirming that i have the same problem with transport streams. :D

Program streams on the other hand seem to play back 'fine' under windows media player, ignoring the visible tearing which I assume is down to the quality of the decoder - something which should go away with CoreAVC???

[VincentNguyen]

OUt of curiosity, I'd like to try it with some of my transport stream (1080i MPEG2), but I believe I have to convert them first since MC does not support AVS import.

What tool do you use for that purpose ?

[dvdboy]

Hi Vincent,

I'm trying to produce MPEG-2 Transport streams within MC, not feed them to it - I'm using HuffyAVIs without any problems for that.

I'm not sure whether it's just in the new update, but certainly the manual for my version says the software accepts frameserving from VirtualDub and AVSynth. Haven't had a chanc e to try that out yet TBH.

[IgorC]

since MC does not support AVS import.

MC does support AVS.

[DarkZell666]

No need to reread, I was confirming that i have the same problem with transport streams.
Sorry, my bad for not reading your post twice ^^

@VincentNGuyen : since MainConcept uses DirectShow all along, if you have a .ts splitter that will connect to an MPEG2 decoder, you can feed them to MC encoder "as-is".

[pandy]

New build of mainconcept 2.0.0.1.0 can't parse mpeg-2 files (earlier ie 2.0.0.0.15 parse them without any glitch)...

[pandy]

OUt of curiosity, I'd like to try it with some of my transport stream (1080i MPEG2), but I believe I have to convert them first since MC does not support AVS import.


Earlier build of MC (2.0.0.0.15) can parse and transcode MPEG-2 files but new have very big problem (crash and request to send crash debug to the MS)


What tool do you use for that purpose ?

Avisynth - MC accept on input avs - You must only in input chose all files (not only with video extension known by MC)

At this moment i try to transcode 1080i stream by avs (35hr to the finish...)

[vanger]

2pass encoding of 90min movie (608x480) -- 15hours with such settings (others are default) on AMD64 X2 3800+ (overclocked to 2500MHz) - is this speed normal?

[DarkZell666]

Use Multiple Slices = 2, this is for multithreading if I'm not mistaken, and since you have an X2 CPU, this is the most logical thing you could to :) Using 3 slices *might* squeeze some extra speed, just have a try :)

Edit: considering you're targetting 1000kbps+, CABAC is probably slowing the encode down a bit more than on my usual <300kbps anime encodes.
And you set 33 frames keyframe interval, which isn't much, and coding all those keyframes maybe take longer. Try setting that to something more reasonable, like 250.

[Sergey A. Sablin]

Use Multiple Slices = 2, this is for multithreading if I'm not mistaken, and since you have an X2 CPU, this is the most logical thing you could to :) Using 3 slices *might* squeeze some extra speed, just have a try :)

Edit: considering you're targetting 1000kbps+, CABAC is probably slowing the encode down a bit more than on my usual <300kbps anime encodes.
And you set 33 frames keyframe interval, which isn't much, and coding all those keyframes maybe take longer. Try setting that to something more reasonable, like 250.

CABAC doesn't slowdown encode significantly.

@vanger are you encoding avi/mpeg or avisynth script? probably processing movie in a script might slowdown encoding.
Is CPU load 100% or lesser? if it is about 50% then follow tips of DarkZell666 about slices. (increasing keyframe interval is also useful for increasing overall quality).

Sergey.

[shon3i]

@Sergey what you suggest for Keyframe interval for 25fps video, 250?? or 25?, what is correct.

And since Mainconcept use Elecard encoder, why there isn't any AQ options

[Inventive Software]

Keyframes ideally should be placed 10 seconds apart, though you can get away with 15 or 20 seconds most times. So 250 is fine, though you can get away with 500.

[vanger]

Use Multiple Slices = 2, this is for multithreading if I'm not mistaken, and since you have an X2 CPU, this is the most logical thing you could to :) Using 3 slices *might* squeeze some extra speed, just have a try :)

probably processing movie in a script might slowdown encoding.
Is CPU load 100% or lesser? if it is about 50% then follow tips of DarkZell666 about slices.
:thanks: for advice, I know about slices, but I have noticed no difference between 1, 2, 3 or 8 :) and the CPU Load was below 70%.
And the problem was really in my avs-script.
I took deinterlacing procedure from megui script:

edeintted = last.AssumeBFF().SeparateFields().SelectEven().EEDI2(field=-1)
TDeint(order=0,full=false,edeint=edeintted)
And the processing was too slow... :devil:
But when I have changed to

LeakKernelDeInt(order=0,sharp=true)

The CPU Load with 2 Slices goes to 100% and the encoding of 90min movie tooks only 4 hours. :D

And you set 33 frames keyframe interval, which isn't much, and coding all those keyframes maybe take longer. Try setting that to something more reasonable, like 250.
This value was set by default :confused:
OK, I'll fix it.

[Sergey A. Sablin]

@Sergey what you suggest for Keyframe interval for 25fps video, 250?? or 25?, what is correct.

And since Mainconcept use Elecard encoder, why there isn't any AQ options

Hi shon3i,
it depends only on your needs. Encoder allows to use up to 300 frame GOP, so if you have no restrictions for a stream then use this maximum, but if you need to playback this stream from network or you need fast positioning - then just set GOP size to the time which is convenient for you (lets say 2 sec delay will be 25 fps * 2 / sec = 50 frames)

[shon3i]

Hi shon3i,
it depends only on your needs. Encoder allows to use up to 300 frame GOP, so if you have no restrictions for a stream then use this maximum, but if you need to playback this stream from network or you need fast positioning - then just set GOP size to the time which is convenient for you (lets say 2 sec delay will be 25 fps * 2 / sec = 50 frames)
OK thanks, but can be better for 25 fps to use 250 instead 300, is there any rule, like is fps*10, for example like in xvid encoder, i am not encode for streaming, i am encoding to max possible quality, so why i asking where aq options

[Sergey A. Sablin]

OK thanks, but can be better for 25 fps to use 250 instead 300, is there any rule, like is fps*10, for example like in xvid encoder, i am not encode for streaming, i am encoding to max possible quality, so why i asking where aq options

there is no such restriction - dont bother, just use max if you haven't any special restrictions from your application.

[DarkZell666]

IIRC the fps*10 rule of thumb (which isn't a restriction) was there to prevent eventual seeking problems. If 2 keyframes are too far apart, seeking will at the very least take longer. But setting i-frame interval too short will lead to the unpleasant pumping effect (at least it was the case with MPEG4 ASP, dunno with AVC, i've never tried ^^), and will need much more bitrate.

However, note that keyframes are usually inserted at each scenechange (or when there's a lot of action going on), and that in most movies this has a probability of happening more often than once every 10 seconds anyway.


Side-question for MC devs: any 2.1.1 or 2.2.0 version planned soon ? ;)

[Sergey A. Sablin]

However, note that keyframes are usually inserted at each scenechange (or when there's a lot of action going on), and that in most movies this has a probability of happening more often than once every 10 seconds anyway.

exactly. that's why I said use max :)


Side-question for MC devs: any 2.1.1 or 2.2.0 version planned soon ? ;)
Of course we are working on improvements, but I don't want to make any advertisement here and promise something which hasn't yet final release date. (commercial solutions make much longer way than OSS because of internal QA and customer support)

[shon3i]

Qucktime import plugin not work correctly, least for QuickTime 7 encoded files which is H264+AAC, trailers downloaded from www.apple.com/trailers, for other mov files i don't know