HC encoder issue

[tom942]

Hello,

First of all, to say Hank that you are doing a great great job :).

But, I've got a little problem and I don´t know how to address it.

I have rebuilded King Kong and Crash, and all the encoding went fine, except the slow motion scenes, exactly the ones in the image makes little jumps when I play it on my dvd player (JVC XV-N33SL)

In Kong, when Adrian Brody is typing "Skull", it stutters, with little cuts in sound, or when they arrive to the island and they "meet" the natives.

In Crash, at the begining, the movie starts with slow motion and little jumps in the car lights, then the sound stutters, or when the persian goes to see the latin man a kill his daughter.

I've done it with CCE, and everything went fine, but I've tested with HC 0.17 and 0.18, and nothing, the problem is still there.

I suppose that is a player problem, because it plays fine on a xbox, on computer and a friend's dvd player.

The movies are rebuilded with menus, two audio streams and at least two subpictures streams.

Which could be the reason?, maybe changing some option in the encoder could avoid this?

If this question disturbs or I've done it in the wrong section, please excuse me.

Thanks in advance :)

P.S.: Sorry for my english, I'm not use to write it or speak it a lot.

[Dashiell]

I must say that I too have experienced this issue. The funny thing is that the disc works fine in all of my pioneer players, but does that short stutter thing you bring up on my Magnavox dvd player that's built into a 20in tv.

I notice the stutter when the bitrate gets high, lots of things happening on screen.

Used HC Encoder, Best quality, everything at default. The opening title in "Kung FU Majhong 2" was stutter-city due to the firey explosion and whatnot.

[Mug Funky]

try turning autoGOP off. i think there was an issue where it'd put 3 b-frames in a row on particularly calm scenes. this is not DVD compliant, hence the problem.

xbox can probably handle it because it'd be using a more generic MPEG-2 decoder rather than a DVD specific decoder (i sorta wish all DVD players did this... and came with 2x or 4x drives. bitrate wouldn't be such a problem then).

i may be wrong - i though hank might have changed the autogop behaviour in 0.18

[edit]

@ Dashiell:

that might be a different issue - max BR 9000 is the default for HC, and that might be a bit high for your player. i tend to go max 8500 or less, even on glass mastered discs. recordables typically have more problems (though 8500 is still pretty safe), and if you have lots of audio streams you'll have to lower it more. try 9800 - (audio1 + audio2 + ... ) and you'll be pretty safe. DVD supports total combined BR of 10.08 mbps, but it doesn't mean DVD players can actually sustain it.

[Boulder]

I think that the three B-frames were possibly only in v0.16 and earlier versions. My guess is also that the problem is because of a too high total bitrate.

[Dashiell]

[edit]

@ Dashiell:

that might be a different issue - max BR 9000 is the default for HC, and that might be a bit high for your player. i tend to go max 8500 or less, even on glass mastered discs. recordables typically have more problems (though 8500 is still pretty safe), and if you have lots of audio streams you'll have to lower it more. try 9800 - (audio1 + audio2 + ... ) and you'll be pretty safe. DVD supports total combined BR of 10.08 mbps, but it doesn't mean DVD players can actually sustain it.

Thank you for your help, Mug!

I'm a bit confused, though... should I set the max bitrate at 8500 or 9800? While I'm at it, I can't even remember where the max bitrate setting might be... I'm using HC with DVD-RB Pro :D :thanks:

[hank315]

@Dashiell
The last releases of HC don't use 3 B-frames.
I tried 3 B-frames in one of the test releases of HC016 but as Mug Funky already mentioned it's not DVD-compliant so it was dumped.
Seems the total bitrate is just too high for some players.
The autogop behaviour didn't really change in HC018 (but it will in HC019).

@tom942
I also did KingKong and checked the slow motion scenes.
HC will output short GOP's on these scenes, like IPIPIBPIBP...
The bitrate is certainly not too high and compliant, it played OK on my HW player.
But that's one of those cheap "can play it all" devices :)

[techmule]

The autogop behaviour didn't really change in HC018 (but it will in HC019).


When is the HC019 expected to be released and what will be the key changes

[foxyshadis]

Formula for estimating next release date:
(HC018 date - HC01 date) / 17 + HC018 date.
You may wish to fit to a regression curve if this isn't exact enough for you, or you suspect a gradual slowdown in releases. xD

[Dashiell]

@Hank *or anyone else* :o


Does anyone have any other recommendations for solving the issue other than "wait for the next version?"

Is there any setting to try that might do the trick? I'm using HC Encoder with the latest version of DVD-RB Pro.

:thanks:

[Dashiell]

try turning autoGOP off. i think there was an issue where it'd put 3 b-frames in a row on particularly calm scenes. this is not DVD compliant, hence the problem.

If I were to try this, (and I remember correctly) DVD-RB Pro offers automatic GOP, and then 3 other choices... does it matter which one is chosen?

[Boulder]

For PAL, 15 frames is the maximum. IIRC for encodes that are pulldowned (like most of NTSC stuff are), you should use 12 frames.

[Dashiell]

For PAL, 15 frames is the maximum. IIRC for encodes that are pulldowned (like most of NTSC stuff are), you should use 12 frames.


Wow... that was a speedy response! Thank you. Would that change if, say, the source material was from tv (ala episodic television dvds) and not from pulldowned material (24 frame motion picture)?


Thank you much!

[Boulder]

Many (most?) TV series are shot on film as well.

[Dashiell]

Many (most?) TV series are shot on film as well.



True, true... I guess what I mean to ask is would that setting have an adverse effect on material that was not shot 24fps?

[Boulder]

Well, generally speaking: the longer the GOP, the better the compression. Six frames is quite a lot so I would adjust the GOP length according to the material every time.

Still, AutoGOP shouldn't be the problem because it does output compliant GOPs. Try lowering the maximum bitrate to something like 8000 and see if it fixes things. Many standalones have problems with burnt discs and high bitrates even though the bitrate wouldn't exceed the DVD specs.

[Dashiell]

Well, generally speaking: the longer the GOP, the better the compression. Six frames is quite a lot so I would adjust the GOP length according to the material every time.

Still, AutoGOP shouldn't be the problem because it does output compliant GOPs. Try lowering the maximum bitrate to something like 8000 and see if it fixes things. Many standalones have problems with burnt discs and high bitrates even though the bitrate wouldn't exceed the DVD specs.


Yeah, I was thinking along those lines... I hate to sound like a newbie, but I'm not sure how to access the MBR... JDobbs said it's in the 'hidden' ini settings, but I'll be damned if I can find an ini in the RB or HC Enc folders... can this be accessed somewhere in the options tab?

[Boulder]

There's the rebuilder.ini file in the folder where you have installed DVD-RB. Under [Options], add the line max_bitrate=nnnn where nnnn is the value you wish to use.

[tom942]

Hi everybody,

Sorry for not answer before. I lost the thread because I thought that it was not of your interest :(.

I've got the same problem with Matrix movie (almost the end, at the elevator's hall, when Neo shots and all is done in slow motion with flashes going out from Neo's gun), so when I can, I'll do a test encode with gop set to 12 and max_bitrate to 8000.

Any suggestion? :)

And when is new version to be out?. I'm anxious (although I´m not the only one :p )

One thing I forget to say. I've done test encodes with CCE and AQE (Right now I'm testing QuEnc) and they didn´t stutter. Then I remenber that the DVD player got an option to see the average bitrate each 2 seconds (more or less) and what I could see was that with HC the variation of the average bitrate was huge in that scenes, moving in a range for example from 5 Mbps to 1Mbps or lower. With CCE and AQE this variation was about 2 Mbps, I mean, from 5 Mbps to 3 or a bit lower.

I hope this little info can help you to identify the issue.

See you.