How do these x.264 patches work?

[ellesshoo]

I finally solved my <1 fps x.264 encoding rate and am playing around with it. I use MeGUI to do the settings I want. I see these "x.264 patches" and whatnot posted here about "fast me searching" and "AQ" (I have no idea what that means) but from quickly reading it, it sounds like these patches increase the encoding speed at a minimal cost in quality. I'm hampered with a slow rig so I'll take any increase in speed. Would these patches work for the x.264 used by MeGUI? Would you recommend I try them out? Is it easy to revert back to the old x.264 (do I just make a copy of the old one that's in the "tools" folder for safe keeping)? How can these new features be implemented in MeGUI if they require new commands, is there some way to add command line arguments even in MeGUI? Could someone explain which patches might be useful to me, a novice, for ease of use and increasing encoding speed?

I'm sorry if I broke any rules with my questions. To tell you the truth I know next to nothing about some parameters of x.264, I don't know much about CLI usage, basically I suck at this compared to most of yall. Any help is appreciated!

[Dark Shikari]

AQ is commonly used for solving blocking in dark/flat background areas, and the fast-ref-search is a new patch to give a decent speed boost when on slower modes (UMH and lots of reference frames).

You can use these builds with MeGUI, but you have to input the extra commandlines manually, since MeGUI doesn't support them (I think you have to use Zones or something!).

[Sharktooth]

the custom commandline option in megui is under Zones...
yes, i know... we should move it...

[DarkZell666]

x264 patches are text files in a special format that contain modifications to x264's source code.

What's patching ? :
- Getting the original x264 source code
- Getting the patch(es) you want
- Applying the patch(es) to x264's source code with specific tools
- Compiling x264 from the (newly patched) source code.

The process in itself is kinda error prone because it requires manual checking that the patching went ok (I have never done it but that's what I gathered from reading some stuff over here ;)), and compiling x264 needs some extra messing around with mingw (compiler) and msys (CLI building environment, to make it simple). Nothing that can be done in 5 minutes if you do it for the first time :scared:

But Dark Shikari and Sharktooth already provide patched x264 executables in Dark Shikari's new AQ thread, as you seem to have found out already.

You guessed right, keeping the old x264.exe somewhere safe and replacing it by the one(s) they provide is enough, and as Dark Shikari mentions, you can add the custom command line options in MeGUI for using AQ.

Hope this helps :cool:

[Sagekilla]

If you're looking for speed, the fast ref search patch will improve speed with more reference frames at minimal quality loss.

[RipFan]

the custom commandline option in megui is under Zones...
yes, i know... we should move it...
Hello everybody;) i use MeGUI to encode my HD Movies and i want to use fade compensate patch since i have the last x264 KMod, but i don't know where to add the patch, as you know an avs script is creted to encode video, and the pacth does not work in that script.
Where can i add the patch?

:thanks:

[poisondeathray]

Hello everybody;) i use MeGUI to encode my HD Movies and i want to use fade compensate patch since i have the last x264 KMod, but i don't know where to add the patch, as you know an avs script is creted to encode video, and the pacth does not work in that script.
Where can i add the patch?

:thanks:

The patch is already built into the binary

To use it, you would need to use the commandline box. Typical values are 0 to 1.0

eg.

--fade-compensate 0.7


You won't "see" the effect in the script preview, because it affects the encoder, not the avs script which precedes the encoder

[RipFan]

poisondeathray Thanks for you help, i'll try as you say.
Best regards