Encode EVO HD files to AVI/MKV/MP4/MPG 1/2 etc.?

[JeffAlso]

It's been awhile since I've played with this, but I don't believe theres a way to make seeking work properly for h.264 and VC1 video using AVS scripts. The reason is that when seeking the pulldown flags aren't honored and the framecount gets out of sync.

In order for seeking to work in AVS, a frameserver like DGIndex needs to be used. Unfortunately, DGIndex doesn't work with h.264 or VC1 video, and I don't know of any other utilities that do. In the absence of having a frame server, the next best thing is to use an AVS script like the following:

DirectShowSource("video.grf",video=true,audio=false,fps=23.976,framecount=[calculatedFrames],seek=true,seekzero=false)

[Tegeril]

Can you describe your seeking issue? Is it that it doesn't seek at all, or that it takes 0-15 seconds to resync the video and audio together? Because if it's the latter, I don't believe you can get around that at all.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Mine don't seek at all, meaning if I open the script in virtualdub (it opens fine, and will play fine), and try to scrub to anywhere in the timeline, the program locks up and has to be manually killed. MeGUI will not open the AVS, because it automatically seeks through it, and also crashes.

It was all working perfectly before I rebuilt my machine, so I know it will work again somehow. It's still baffling me and is really pissing me off!

What pisses me off more is the death of HD-DVD. *shakes head* I guess bribery is still the most effective way to get what you want in the corporate world. I'll be selling my Xbox360 drive and collection of HD-DVDs soon, and getting a blu ray drive soon.

God damn it.
/OT

~MiSfit

[Blue_MiSfit]

Finally fixed my problem.

I was using a prerelease build of AviSynth 2.5.8.

Reverting to vanilla 2.5.7 fixed all seeking issues.

*smacks self upside stupid head*

~MiSfit

[JeffAlso]

Keep in mind that skipping ahead in a video isn't exactly the same thing as seeking. Seeking indicates moving ahead in the video to a specific point in time, at least as how I've understood the term.

This cannot be done in AVISynth with a video with pulldown flags without a frameserver. You may be able to skip ahead within the video, but when you do so you will go out of sync with the timeline, chapters, etc.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My video doesn't have pulldown flags :)

DirectShowSource(...) returns the "real" 23.976fps

~MiSfit

[BLKMGK]

Well, as of now I'm able to EASILY move files from EVO files into MKV containers sans transcoding to compress them further. Eac3to facilitates nearly all of the conversion. One thing that seems oddest to me though is that when I use FLAC encoding the file sizes actually seem to get larger on AC3 and DTS tracks, anyone else seen this? MeGUI is proving a good front end for those files I want to compress further using an AVIsynth script. In Graphedt, depending upon source encoding, I use Haali outputting video to either ffdshow or the WMVideo filter shown on the first page. Still figuring out profile to use but I set the datarate (?) at like 11K or so and end up with about 11Gig files usually.

VERY unhappy that HD-DVD has thrown in the towel. BR doesn't look like it will be much harder to do than this with the added twist of the audio channels being queered.:rolleyes:

[Sephiroth0000]

Well, as of now I'm able to EASILY move files from EVO files into MKV containers sans transcoding to compress them further. Eac3to facilitates nearly all of the conversion. One thing that seems oddest to me though is that when I use FLAC encoding the file sizes actually seem to get larger on AC3 and DTS tracks, anyone else seen this? MeGUI is proving a good front end for those files I want to compress further using an AVIsynth script. In Graphedt, depending upon source encoding, I use Haali outputting video to either ffdshow or the WMVideo filter shown on the first page. Still figuring out profile to use but I set the datarate (?) at like 11K or so and end up with about 11Gig files usually.

VERY unhappy that HD-DVD has thrown in the towel. BR doesn't look like it will be much harder to do than this with the added twist of the audio channels being queered.:rolleyes:

Not very happy about HD DVD being finished. Im just going to wait now though for the sales blitz on films and then you have the people panicking and selling their stuff on the cheap on Ebay :) Welcome HD DVDs.

[BLKMGK]

Amen! I too will be prowling the bargain bins. The price of BR and HD-DVD has been mostly too expensive, I do not expect BR to come down any time soon as a result of this. I will happily take "rejects" from the HD-DVD camp....

[Sephiroth0000]

Amen! I too will be prowling the bargain bins. The price of BR and HD-DVD has been mostly too expensive, I do not expect BR to come down any time soon as a result of this. I will happily take "rejects" from the HD-DVD camp....

I just cannot see how people thought Blu-Ray was better. I mean if you break it down to basics then YES Blu-Ray does have more space but that is the only aspect that Blu-Ray had over HD DVD and even that they did not use that space properly. I own both players so I am a fan of neither but HD DVD I feel had more to offer. The interactivity of HD DVD beat that of Blu-Rays hands down, they had their films standard finilasied where is Blu-Ray still have'nt and some of the lastest Disney Blu-Ray films are not working properly on standard Blu-Ray players and companies like LG, Samsung and so on are having to release firmware updates to get them to run, that and there is also no internet abilities yet for Blu-Ray and most importantly it is REGION LOCKED. HD DVD is not region locked and only had room to improve on what they have already accomplished and it was always going to be cheaper then Blu-Ray because of factory costs and what not.

People do not relise that to do Blu-Ray entire production lines are going to have to be changed along with Factories as Blu-Ray does not use a current production line unlike HD DVD which was a Hybrid of DVD so to speak (if you want to call it that) so production lines did not need to be changed (only the disc they use)...this is ultimately going to keep the prices of Blu-Ray up and costly. I feel the public and film studios have not made the best choice.

[Blue_MiSfit]

But Sony lined the studios' pockets nicely. Typical.

Oh well... I was getting bored with HD-DVD anyway :D Time to learn how to rip Blu-Ray (after I get one of the LiteON drives)

~MiSfit

[beameup]

I have encoded several HD DVD and Blu-Ray disks to WMV-HD for streaming on XBox360 with success.

However, I have ran into 1 title that is giving me fits; Stardust on HD.

In EvoDemux it says it is 60 FPS. I have rebuilt into a new EVO using only one video stream (no sound, no sub); and joining the two EVO files. I have used eac3to <source> <targ>.ac3 -libav to convert the audio.

If I encode it at 60 FPS in TMPGEnc, the sound lags behind (starting in sync, then running behind at a different speed than the video). If I encode at 23.96 then the video / audio speed match up, but the video stutters. I have tried different FPS, but either have video that stutters, or video that runs to fast. I have tried the audio from the DVD version and it also runs slow compared to the video.

Anyone else run into this type of problem? Or alternatively had success with this title and/or config using a different approach than TMPGEnc?

[Blue_MiSfit]

I would suggest figuring out exactly what the source is. EvoDemux might be inaccurate.

1) Use eac3to to remux the EVOs to an MKV.
2) Load this MKV into an AviSynth script with a simple DirectShowSource.
3) Open this script in VirtualDub and step through it frame by frame. What (if any) interlacing artifacts do you see?
4) Look in the file -> file information window, what does it say regarding frame rate?

These bits will help you / us plan a course of action.

~MiSfit

[firepowr]

I have encoded several HD DVD and Blu-Ray disks to WMV-HD for streaming on XBox360 with success.

However, I have ran into 1 title that is giving me fits; Stardust on HD.

In EvoDemux it says it is 60 FPS. I have rebuilt into a new EVO using only one video stream (no sound, no sub); and joining the two EVO files. I have used eac3to <source> <targ>.ac3 -libav to convert the audio.

If I encode it at 60 FPS in TMPGEnc, the sound lags behind (starting in sync, then running behind at a different speed than the video). If I encode at 23.96 then the video / audio speed match up, but the video stutters. I have tried different FPS, but either have video that stutters, or video that runs to fast. I have tried the audio from the DVD version and it also runs slow compared to the video.

Anyone else run into this type of problem? Or alternatively had success with this title and/or config using a different approach than TMPGEnc?

Try setting the fps to 24.

[BLKMGK]

Have you guys read through this (http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=13783) thread? They mention some tolls I've not heard of yet and am curious as to opinions so far as workflow etc.

Right now I've gotten pretty comfortable with leaving my movies uncompressed but as my disk needs grow I might be forced to compress a few heh. Eac3to has really been a big help!

Anyway, just wondered if these tools offered any benefit. H264info and VC1conv were the ones that sounded possibly interesting - maybe just to give info about files. I've got them but not had a chance to take them for a spin yet.

Looks like we will be focusing on Blu-Ray soon <sigh> A local store is advertising bare drives for $175 or so, not dual format unfortunatly...

[BLKMGK]

Okay, I just did this back to back with Eac3to and am confused - why is it that an EAC3 file converted to FLAC is 1.77Gigs but when converted to AC3 it's only 455megs? Isn't FLAC lossless compression? Am I losing something with AC3?

[Tegeril]

Okay, I just did this back to back with Eac3to and am confused - why is it that an EAC3 file converted to FLAC is 1.77Gigs but when converted to AC3 it's only 455megs? Isn't FLAC lossless compression? Am I losing something with AC3?

AC3 is lossy.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Okay, I just did this back to back with Eac3to and am confused - why is it that an EAC3 file converted to FLAC is 1.77Gigs but when converted to AC3 it's only 455megs? Isn't FLAC lossless compression? Am I losing something with AC3?


FLAC is lossless, so it will be bigger than AC3 or EAC3, both of which are lossy.

AC3 is plenty good though. If you're paranoid, use the max bitrate of 640kbit. I personally use 448, though many DVD movies use 384. (all for 5.1ch of course). An EAC3 source is pretty high quality, and AC3 / EAC3 transcoding with Aften isn't too destructive - to my ears anyway.

~MiSfit

[Tegeril]

Yeah, you've gotta be someone special to hear problems with eac3to converted sound at 640kbit ac3.

[BLKMGK]

Thanks! For some reason I thought that this was a simple format change - apparently not! Big difference in file size to say the least, my AC3 was 640 BTW, wasn't sure what it defaulted to if not specified so I always specify 640.

An odd thing last night - watching Chronicals of Riddick that I converted but didn't transcode I was seeing red, blue and occasionally some white bars on the screen in dark scenes - of which there are a ton! I do not know if it was my player, XBMC on Linux, or if it was the movie itself. I'll try to find something else to play it on to test but it sure was a bummer to see that. Otherwise looked damned good though! Any ideas other than the player software as to what might have caused this?

[Iskondi]

Hey guys,

Wanted to thank all of you for your assistance. I've finally got the process down taking HD DVD's and backing them up to DIVX. My ultimate goal was to play them back on my Xbox 360 and man oh man do they look and sound beautiful! However, I've run into two odd problems.

1. Every 6 minutes the video glitches then comes back. This happens with all videos that I have converted to Divx.

2. Every hour or so it kicks me out saying it cannot play the file because it isn't supported, if I click ok and go out of videos, come right back and click on the file again it will continue where it left off without issue.

Anyone else run into these types of issues with playback on the Xbox 360?

Thanks in advance,

Iskondi

[beameup]

Are you running Vista? Your symptoms sound a lot like the problems with media center on Vista; however these problems existed for non-hd material as well.

[Iskondi]

No, I'm running Windows XP. I should have mentioned that the way I'm playing them back on the 360 is using a USB HD.

I formatted a large USB drive into the Mac file system and then put the HD movies on that drive, connected it directly to the 360 and that's what I'm seeing. *Sigh*

It's very very odd...

Iskondi

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'm guessing your movie has bitrate spikes. You might want to try reducing the average bitrate, or maybe using MeGUI and its xbox360 profiles.

~MiSfit

[Iskondi]

Hmmm, is there a way I could tell if there are bitrate spikes? It's happening for all the movies I've encoded although the "time" it takes to happen is different for each of the. Every 6 minutes for one, every 4 for another and every 8 for yet another.

I'd been encoding with Virtual Dub using DIVX(6000)/AC3(448) I wouldn't have thought that would have any issues playing back on the 360.

I also tested playback by streaming from the PC to the Xbox as opposed to playing from it being directly connected and it continued to occur at the same time frame. (Which supports your "spike" theory, but exactly every 6 minutes?)

Another odd thing that it did was that roughly every 45-50 mins it would glitch saying it was unable to play the file and quit out. If I backed out of the video menu and then back to it, I could click resume and it would continue to play from the point where it glitched! (So obviously it was fine, and this occurred when directly connected via USB so I doubt that it was a streaming issue)

I'm trying to re-encode using Xvid to see if that has any affect and another encode using WMV (but my god that seems to take a lot longer to encode)

If anyone has encoded to DIVX/AC3 for playback on the 360 and it's functional for them, please share any settings/configuration that you think might help out. (I am playing back 1080P as well and haven't tried doing 720P instead...)

Thanks!

Iskondi

[BLKMGK]

Okay, in the spirit of giving back and of knowing not everyone will read 20+ pages to figure this out I've posted how I'm processing video successfully using X.264. My thanks to the many patient folks in this thread that helped me along!

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135361

[Blue_MiSfit]

Not to be a dork, but it's actually x264, not X.264.

The standard is MPEG-4 Part 10 - Advanced Visual Coding (AVC) or H.264 for short.

x264 is an implementation of the standard :)

~MiSfit

[BLKMGK]

Heh, dork! Fixing it now :P

[BLKMGK]

am curious - anyone looking at DVDFab Platinum (http://www.dvdfab.com/dvd-fab-platinum.htm)? This thing claims to do it all in one package including H.264 encoding. I'm not completely sure yet how it handles the various surround sound formats but on the surface this looks like it might be the one-size fits all tool many of us are looking for.

Thoughts? What are the downsides aside from cost?:confused:

Edit: NVM!

Gah! Okay, I was looking at this -> http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm which has their "HD" software. However I'd been assured that it had all the features I wanted by someone I know and since that one page talked about HD and I saw screenshots elsewhere noting H.264 support.....

Well, I downloaded their Platinum software. It "supports" HD-DVD to the point that it will rip the disk to your HDD. That's about it, no compression, no changing formats, nothing but the same thing you get copying files with AnyDVD installed. I'm going to chat with my associate tomorrow but as of right now it looks like utter crap. Sorry guys, with a quick look I thought this would work but digging deeper it sucks too.

[BLKMGK]

Got hold of a Blue-Ray player and now have my first Blu-Ray disk. This is going to take some getting used to and it looks like file sizes may be even bigger - lovely. You guys getting into BR now? Going to start researching, fun fun.

[Tegeril]

Is anyone doing anything specific/special for movies that are already AVC and not VC1?

[Sephiroth0000]

Is anyone doing anything specific/special for movies that are already AVC and not VC1?


Whats your process? If using Graphedit then Cyberlink AVC/.264 Decoder is good. It comes with Cyberlink PowerDVD (HD/BLU)

[BLKMGK]

To date I've seen one maybe two movies in H.264 and everything else in VC-1. What movies are you seeing in anything else?

BluRay slow going, yet to have a successful encode and it is taking ages.

[Tegeril]

I haven't actually attempted one of the AVC HDDVDs yet (using graphedit), been skirting around them in order to not deal with the issue as long as possible. Would I just need Haali + Cyberlink in the graph? Anyway, ones that are include:

Babel
Lucky # Slevin
Mozart - Die Zauberflote
Stardust
Transformers

My other issue is DTS audio:

Manchurian Candidate

Not sure what to do about not having Surcode =\

[Blue_MiSfit]

Easy. Haali + ffdshow will work just fine as long as you enable h.264 decoding.

If you have CoreAVC, so much the better.

It's very straighforward. I've done it many times on my H.264 discs (which are now utterly worthless.... grrr...)

~MiSfit

[Tegeril]

As for ffdshow and coreavc differences. Would CoreAVC be superior due to speed or quality? I tend to be pretty thrilled with ffdshow on a regular basis, but haven't really used it in HD encoding much.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Speed. Last I checked CoreAVC was still faster than ffdshow.

The less CPU cycles your decoder takes, the more are available to AviSynth and your encoder! Not that it makes a real difference - decoding H.264 pales in comparison to encoding 1080p.

You can do one in real time with a modest dual core CPU - provided you have an optimized decoder. The other runs at only a few frames per second on the same CPU. Get the picture?

They're both H.264 compliant, so the output should be bit identical, provided they're both set to output YV12, which is likely and desired.

~MiSfit

[primerump]

Firstly, i would like to thank all the ppl here for their work on HD/BLU transcoding.. good job guys..... however, I'm having problems with frame rates..

1) I have most of the "usual" tools that have been mentioned here and I see different tools reporting different frame rates on the same file... !!.. I'm not sure why they do.. , but this causes frame judder, audio out of sync etc..

2) Is there any SURE way to identify the REAL frame rate on both HD and BLU ??..

3) what in your opinion is the "best" codec format for maximum compression.. VC1, H264 , MPEG4 ... ?

4) I have at the moment a pinnacle showcenter 200.. i'ts not the best solution, but does work.., that and my projector have a limit of 720p.. so I ask what is best for it ? xvid or divx or other ??

5) My workflow

anydvd rip to disk then...

HD_DVD

EVO > eac3to > mkv > mediacoder ( 2 pass xvid 8000kb/s)

BLURAY

TSremux > nero recode > mediacoder ( 2 pas xvid 8000kb/s )


I tried Riverpast, it works but frame rate is reported as 29.97
and encode is "jumpy".. after eac3to i got 23.97.. !!! and clean video.. !

Any thoughts on using nero ??.. i would like to used something else.. nero crashes on my system too often..

my system is stable with any other software.. only nero crashes!!


any thoughts???

thank you gentlemen..

[BLKMGK]

For BD you may want to follow this conversation -> http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=14452

Frankly at this point I've yet to get a 100% perfect encode but I've gotten close. Not sure what's falling down for me. For encoding I'm using meGUI and usually x264 although XVID looks damned nice too. The AVIsynth script the Vdub tool mentioned allows me to import M2TS into meGUI with no problem but it seems a bit simplistic - more work needed IMO. eac3to will be working towards handling BD stuff a bit more, not sure how far madshi is going to take it yet. IMO the BD stuff seems a bit immature, xport seems pretty sparse as compared to eac3to for instance. Rest assured though, I'm trying to figure it out - especially since AnyDVD now rips BD+ encoded files :D

[xlr231]

I am using DVDFab HD to rip my HD DVDs to the hard drive. Then I use evodemux to try to demux the audio and video. When I open the EVO file it reads the file for a minute and then I get the following in the status field:

.
Opening file Feature1.EVO
Reading...
File size: 11426 Mbytes.
Done.

Reading HVA00001.VTI
12 VTS_EVOB_ATRs found.
12 VTS_EVOBIs found.
Done.

It doesn't find any audio or video streams.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Am I missing a step to decrypt the files off the disk?

Thanks

[BLKMGK]

I *think* that HDDVDFAB no longer works on newer DVD and hasn't been updated. You might want to see if that DVD is one of the ones with new keys. Slysoft's product might be worth looking into...

[calmike79]

message topic: E-AC3 to AAC

Hello, this is my first post here and I'd like to get someone's input if I could.

I've been spending a couple weeks scouring the googles to figure out how to back up my HD DVDs to a small high quality format. I've got all the video stuff down ok, but I'm having a persistent problem on the audio side I can't figure out.

Per threads such as this one http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=134272 I've been trying to use eac3to to convert to .WAV and using neroenc / megui to go to aac. Well two problems: 1), the resulting AAC file is clearly at least 5x too small and the sound is unlistenable, and 2) i can't seem to open the WAV file to test it. (indeed I get an error along th elines of "the following pin(s) failed to find a connectible filter: [ACM Wrapper::Output]

I have a lot of movies to back up and would rather save the space by going to 256k AAC instead of 448+ AC3, especially since I'm only using a 2.1 speaker setup. So far I've been forced to encode to 640k AC3 and then to 256k AAC using megui but I'd imagine this is not the best way quality wise to get there!

ffmpeg maybe? (couldn't figure out how to locate the AAC decoder through the command line).

Oh, and incidentally, does anyone know if you can extract subs with eac3to? Thanks

[Greif]

I don't belive you can extract subs... yet...

you can with EVOdemux but i'm not sure how to.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I dont think there are any tools *yet* to process HD-DVD / BluRay subs.

IIRC EVODemux is a bit depricated at this point, and isn't being updated. Don't quote me on that. eac3to seems to fulfill all its roles, and do them better!

As for DDP -> AAC, I think you're on the right track. Your problem may lie in bit depth / sample rate or something along those lines. Take a look at the WAVs that eac3to creates using foobar2000 or something, and give us that info. Maybe madishi would be interested in integeating support for CT-AAC or Nero AAC into eac3to ;)

~MiSfit

~MiSfit

[BLKMGK]

eac3to could be used to lower the bitrate of the AC3, Madshi may also be working on subs but it's not in there now and I don't think he has committed as to when he might have it done. You might find some help for handling HD-DVD here -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135361 BluRay, FWIW, is a PITA :(

[laserfan]

I dont think there are any tools *yet* to process HD-DVD / BluRay subs.:confused:

For HD DVD I use EvoDemux, SupRip, and Subtitle Workshop.

I heard that xportpgs is used for BD but haven't used that.

[calmike79]

:confused:

For HD DVD I use EvoDemux, SupRip, and Subtitle Workshop.

I heard that xportpgs is used for BD but haven't used that.

I'm avoiding BD as long as I can. That's a whole other project and expense I'm not too motivated to dive into yet, especially with the draconian BD firmware v2 coming up (imagine... $400 players with end-of-year planned obsolescence. You "get" what you "pay" for huh?) /rant

FWIW, looks like loading DVD subs from random sites produces pixelated subs w/my x264 HD DVD rips. I'll eventually have to spend the time to learn suprip etc.

So no ideas on E-AC3 direct to AAC (or at least w/a lossless codec in between? FLAC seems useless, and WAV >8gb seems to produce corrupted headers or wtf knows)

[BLKMGK]

Suggest posting in the eac3to thread, Madshi is the goto guy for audio conversion on these things it seems. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966&goto=newpost

[calmike79]

I have a question on the video side... if there's a more active forum let me know please!

So, my video stuff hasn't been perfect either. The two that didn't work for me were Babel and The Kingdom. The only thing those two have in common that I could see was framerates > 23.9xx (i.e. 29.x and 25.0 fps respectively).

The problem seemed to be that the video was playing faster than the audio. I googled around in the case of Kingdom, and while 25 seemed indeed the actual framerate (i.e. nothing going haywire with the avisynth script editor in megui that I could tell), I tried to force it to a 23.976 framerate per mkvmerge as a shot in the dark, but the resulting video would barely play. Any tips? Grazie...

[BLKMGK]

I've just ripped The Kingdom from HD-DVD but not played it back. I will check it and post back if I see problems. What are you using to see framerates other than playback? Will MKinfo do it? Not got easy access to the file this minute but will later tonight.

My process is eac3to to a mkv container, through meGUI for an x264 compression, then mkvmerge the video with the ac3 from eac3to.