Elvis56
30th June 2006, 14:15
HcEasy 0.0.1 beta 30-06-2006
This document assumes you have some basic knowledge about video encoding
using avisynth.
What is HcEasy ?
HcEasy is a collection of script files to automate HcEnc MPEG2 encoding.
Ok sounds good! I don't want to read any more, i want to start encoding!
The quickstart guide:Make sure you have avisynth installed, install Drag And
Drop Robot, extract hceasyfiles.zip to c:\, load easyhc_del_all_temp_files_
keep_source_files.ddr into Drag And Drop Robot, drag and drop some video
files on Drag And Drop Robot and click start.
Why did you create HcEasy?
Because I(and i think many others) want to use the great HcEnc MPEG encoder
to encode many files in a batch run. While this seems very straightforward it
turned out there wasn't a single frontend available which suited my needs.
So what are your needs then?
Pretty simple: drag and drop a bunch of video files on a program window,
let the program create an avisynth file, encode the video using HcEnc,
encode the audio using FFmpeg, mux the files together and optionally delete
temporary files.
And HcEasy CAN do this?
This is exactly what HcEasy does.
How does it work?
While i have pretty much zero programming skills I do know how to create
batch files. However only batchfiles aren't going to do the job(not if you
have pretty much zero programming skills anyway). This is where Drag and
Drop Robot comes in.
Drag and Drop Robot is a program which i always wanted to have but never
could find. It's basically a frontend to execute a commandline on files
dropped on the program window. You can parse things like filename (with or
without extension) to the commandline and you can even have some user input
strings.
So i started creating a commandline which would encode an avisynth script
using HcEnc. This worked very well so i added a command to encode audio
using FFmpeg. Muxing was also pretty straightforward but the biggest
challenge was generating the avisynth files. On the Doom9 forum i found a
thread in which posts by stickboy and Eric B pointed me in the right
direction. After this I added commands to optionally delete temporary files
and source files. So after a few hours of searching and testing i finally
had the frontend that suited my needs.
This doesn't sound very advanced, sounds like i could do that much better!
I'm sure anyone with some basic programming skills could create a frontend
ten times better. But the point is nobody has made a frontend like this
before. Most of the frontends are aimed towards DVD ripping/Re-encoding.
Tools like Mediacoder and SUPER work very well but don't support HcEnc.
The frontend that was closest towhat i was looking for was Filmmachine.
Your settings are crap!Using XYZ -dts_delta_threshold*ADAPTIVEMATRIX_BIAS
will get much better results!
Could be, but the default settings are what's good enough for me. I
primarily use the script to encode interlaced DV avi files to MPEG2 streams.
Ok fair enough but i still want to use CQ_BFACTORCLOSEDGOPBIASLOWTELECINE !
You can easily adjust the settings to suit your needs. There are a few
configuration files:
HC.ini
HCencoder default options(commandline arguments override these settings) For
configurations check hcenc018.pdf in c:\hceasy\docs
Avstemplate.avs
These are the options added in the avs file. Here you can resize your video
source if needed. The default Avstemplate.avs does not do any resizing.
Templates to resize to PAL or NTSC resolutions are provided in
c:\HcEasy\templates\avs
XXX.ddr
These are the configuration files for Drag And Drop Robot. The commandline
is specified here. Some fields are user definable. You can pretty much make
any option user definable. For now i chose options that are useful to me:
Average video bitrate, maximum video bitrate, interlaced source on/of and
audio bitrate. I am going to contact donationcoder.com to see if they can
add more user definable fields.
Sounds good, what's the catch?
Well there isn't really a catch but you do need to have avisynth(I tested
with version 2.5.6a) and Drag And Drop Robot installed. Avisynth is free to
use but for DADR you need a keyfile to keep using it. Ok small catch there
but you can get the keyfile for free by going to donationcoder.com and
signing up. If you don't want to sign up you can get a free key here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Keys/nosignup.php?appcode=dragdroprobot
However you will need to renew your key file every 60 days then.
Are you in any way related to donationcoder.com/hank315/sysinternals etc. ?
No, I just combined the right programs to create HcEasy.
Ok but I'm sure you must have some knowledge about video encoding to combine
these programs.
True, I've been hanging around at doom9.org for many many years. I just
checked my last post at the Doom9 forum, that was from april 2003 and even
then i wrote that it had been forever since i last posted something. At the
old forum there were more posts by me i think. Ok a bit further down memory
lane...a long long time ago i was a regular at the r3mix forum which is now
long gone. It used to be THE place to discuss mp3 encoding. I've been
working in the computer/video industry for over 10 years.
Ok enough talk, I want to start using HcEasy!
1 Install Avisynth(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57023)
2 Install DADR(http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/dragdrop/index.html)
3 Run hceasy001.msi or Extract HcEasy001.zip to c:\
4 If you used the installer there is a now a start menu entry called HcEasy.
If you extracted the zip manually check if there is now a c:\HcEasy folder
5 Start DADR, select File/Open configuration file and browse to
c:\HcEasy\templates\DADR and select easyhc_del_all_temp_files_keep_
source_files.ddr. If you want to delete source files after encoding (not
really recommended) select easyhc_del_all_temp_files_and_source_files.ddr
in the expert folder.
6 Drag and drop some video files on DADR and click start
7 You should now see HcEnc Encoding, after that see a few dos boxes open
and close and you should end up with an MPG file in the same folder your
source file is located.
So far I have tested HcEasy only on 2 windows XP SP2 machines. I don't think
any of the programs used requires a cpu with SSE2/3 instructions nor do any
of the programs specifically require XP. While it works well on my test
machines i can not guarantee it will work on your system. I do not recommend
using the profile that deletes your source files after encoding unless you
have done some test runs.
Are there going to be any updates?
Well HcEasy does everything i want it to do now so I don't really have a need
to add features. I do want to add some more predefined profiles so pretty
much anyone can use HcEasy. If you created some super duper config files to
do IVTC/noisereduction/encode to AC3/whatever let me know.
So happy encoding, feedback appreciated. Either contact me at the Doom9
forum, username Elvis56 or at hceasy@twilite.nl.
Download HcEasy at http://www.twilite.nl/hceasy
Programs used
HcEncoder 0.18
FFMpeg 2006.04.10
Mplex1 1.0 Beta 2
DADR 1.10.01
Sdelete 1.4
Installer created using advanced installer 4.1.1 freeware
Thanks to:
hank315 for HcEnc
stickboy, Eric B (Doom9 forum) for .avs generation commandline
Sysinternals.com for sdelete.exe
Johann Langhofer for mplex1.exe
Fabrice Bellard, originator of the FFmpeg project
Celtic Druid for his ffmpeg compile
DonationCoder.com for DragAndDropRobot
This document assumes you have some basic knowledge about video encoding
using avisynth.
What is HcEasy ?
HcEasy is a collection of script files to automate HcEnc MPEG2 encoding.
Ok sounds good! I don't want to read any more, i want to start encoding!
The quickstart guide:Make sure you have avisynth installed, install Drag And
Drop Robot, extract hceasyfiles.zip to c:\, load easyhc_del_all_temp_files_
keep_source_files.ddr into Drag And Drop Robot, drag and drop some video
files on Drag And Drop Robot and click start.
Why did you create HcEasy?
Because I(and i think many others) want to use the great HcEnc MPEG encoder
to encode many files in a batch run. While this seems very straightforward it
turned out there wasn't a single frontend available which suited my needs.
So what are your needs then?
Pretty simple: drag and drop a bunch of video files on a program window,
let the program create an avisynth file, encode the video using HcEnc,
encode the audio using FFmpeg, mux the files together and optionally delete
temporary files.
And HcEasy CAN do this?
This is exactly what HcEasy does.
How does it work?
While i have pretty much zero programming skills I do know how to create
batch files. However only batchfiles aren't going to do the job(not if you
have pretty much zero programming skills anyway). This is where Drag and
Drop Robot comes in.
Drag and Drop Robot is a program which i always wanted to have but never
could find. It's basically a frontend to execute a commandline on files
dropped on the program window. You can parse things like filename (with or
without extension) to the commandline and you can even have some user input
strings.
So i started creating a commandline which would encode an avisynth script
using HcEnc. This worked very well so i added a command to encode audio
using FFmpeg. Muxing was also pretty straightforward but the biggest
challenge was generating the avisynth files. On the Doom9 forum i found a
thread in which posts by stickboy and Eric B pointed me in the right
direction. After this I added commands to optionally delete temporary files
and source files. So after a few hours of searching and testing i finally
had the frontend that suited my needs.
This doesn't sound very advanced, sounds like i could do that much better!
I'm sure anyone with some basic programming skills could create a frontend
ten times better. But the point is nobody has made a frontend like this
before. Most of the frontends are aimed towards DVD ripping/Re-encoding.
Tools like Mediacoder and SUPER work very well but don't support HcEnc.
The frontend that was closest towhat i was looking for was Filmmachine.
Your settings are crap!Using XYZ -dts_delta_threshold*ADAPTIVEMATRIX_BIAS
will get much better results!
Could be, but the default settings are what's good enough for me. I
primarily use the script to encode interlaced DV avi files to MPEG2 streams.
Ok fair enough but i still want to use CQ_BFACTORCLOSEDGOPBIASLOWTELECINE !
You can easily adjust the settings to suit your needs. There are a few
configuration files:
HC.ini
HCencoder default options(commandline arguments override these settings) For
configurations check hcenc018.pdf in c:\hceasy\docs
Avstemplate.avs
These are the options added in the avs file. Here you can resize your video
source if needed. The default Avstemplate.avs does not do any resizing.
Templates to resize to PAL or NTSC resolutions are provided in
c:\HcEasy\templates\avs
XXX.ddr
These are the configuration files for Drag And Drop Robot. The commandline
is specified here. Some fields are user definable. You can pretty much make
any option user definable. For now i chose options that are useful to me:
Average video bitrate, maximum video bitrate, interlaced source on/of and
audio bitrate. I am going to contact donationcoder.com to see if they can
add more user definable fields.
Sounds good, what's the catch?
Well there isn't really a catch but you do need to have avisynth(I tested
with version 2.5.6a) and Drag And Drop Robot installed. Avisynth is free to
use but for DADR you need a keyfile to keep using it. Ok small catch there
but you can get the keyfile for free by going to donationcoder.com and
signing up. If you don't want to sign up you can get a free key here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Keys/nosignup.php?appcode=dragdroprobot
However you will need to renew your key file every 60 days then.
Are you in any way related to donationcoder.com/hank315/sysinternals etc. ?
No, I just combined the right programs to create HcEasy.
Ok but I'm sure you must have some knowledge about video encoding to combine
these programs.
True, I've been hanging around at doom9.org for many many years. I just
checked my last post at the Doom9 forum, that was from april 2003 and even
then i wrote that it had been forever since i last posted something. At the
old forum there were more posts by me i think. Ok a bit further down memory
lane...a long long time ago i was a regular at the r3mix forum which is now
long gone. It used to be THE place to discuss mp3 encoding. I've been
working in the computer/video industry for over 10 years.
Ok enough talk, I want to start using HcEasy!
1 Install Avisynth(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57023)
2 Install DADR(http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/dragdrop/index.html)
3 Run hceasy001.msi or Extract HcEasy001.zip to c:\
4 If you used the installer there is a now a start menu entry called HcEasy.
If you extracted the zip manually check if there is now a c:\HcEasy folder
5 Start DADR, select File/Open configuration file and browse to
c:\HcEasy\templates\DADR and select easyhc_del_all_temp_files_keep_
source_files.ddr. If you want to delete source files after encoding (not
really recommended) select easyhc_del_all_temp_files_and_source_files.ddr
in the expert folder.
6 Drag and drop some video files on DADR and click start
7 You should now see HcEnc Encoding, after that see a few dos boxes open
and close and you should end up with an MPG file in the same folder your
source file is located.
So far I have tested HcEasy only on 2 windows XP SP2 machines. I don't think
any of the programs used requires a cpu with SSE2/3 instructions nor do any
of the programs specifically require XP. While it works well on my test
machines i can not guarantee it will work on your system. I do not recommend
using the profile that deletes your source files after encoding unless you
have done some test runs.
Are there going to be any updates?
Well HcEasy does everything i want it to do now so I don't really have a need
to add features. I do want to add some more predefined profiles so pretty
much anyone can use HcEasy. If you created some super duper config files to
do IVTC/noisereduction/encode to AC3/whatever let me know.
So happy encoding, feedback appreciated. Either contact me at the Doom9
forum, username Elvis56 or at hceasy@twilite.nl.
Download HcEasy at http://www.twilite.nl/hceasy
Programs used
HcEncoder 0.18
FFMpeg 2006.04.10
Mplex1 1.0 Beta 2
DADR 1.10.01
Sdelete 1.4
Installer created using advanced installer 4.1.1 freeware
Thanks to:
hank315 for HcEnc
stickboy, Eric B (Doom9 forum) for .avs generation commandline
Sysinternals.com for sdelete.exe
Johann Langhofer for mplex1.exe
Fabrice Bellard, originator of the FFmpeg project
Celtic Druid for his ffmpeg compile
DonationCoder.com for DragAndDropRobot