x264 and Rhozet Carbon Coder - Newbie question [Archive]

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 12:02

Hi there experts,

I'm trying to get up and running with x264 using Rhozet Carbon Coder.

Does anyone have experience of this set up and if so could you possibly help me out with the following?

I'm currently adding a H.264 Exporter Target, choosing a Raw H.264 Stream Type.

Then switching to the advanced tab and checking the box for 'Use External DLL encoder' which then gives me the extra field to choose the DLL encoder location and I can't figure out where this is?

I've installed the 'x264.998.modified.exe' as well as the Gordian Knot codec pack.

Where am I going wrong?

Thanks :thanks:

Selur

17th October 2008, 13:29

got no experience with Rhozet Carbon Coder but did you ever thought about trying to use a .dll version of x264?

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 14:06

Ah ha, that's maybe where I'm going wrong. Where would I find the .dll version?

TEB

17th October 2008, 15:42

CC uses a mainconcept licensed mpeg4 encoder.
AFAIK one cannot use a external encoder as a target..

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 16:12

The latest version allows for alternative H.264 codecs.

Dark Shikari

17th October 2008, 18:40

The latest version allows for alternative H.264 codecs.Somehow I doubt it can connect to any H.264 encoder known to man, automatically figure out the API, and derive a way to link to it... unless they've had a serious breakthrough in AI research... :p

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 19:15

No, of course not, but I was only talking about x264 in this instance as it's the best alternative to the built in codec.

Dark Shikari

17th October 2008, 19:19

No, of course not, but I was only talking about x264 in this instance as it's the best alternative to the built in codec.Why do you have to use Carbon Coder for that, anyways?

I mean, nevermind the fact that it contains illegally distributed copies of the libav* libraries and that its interface is painfully bad, but can't you just directly encode using x264 or a dedicated x264 frontend? It seems rather roundabout to go through Carbon Coder to do so...

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 19:41

Why do you have to use Carbon Coder for that, anyways?

I mean, nevermind the fact that it contains illegally distributed copies of the libav* libraries and that its interface is painfully bad, but can't you just directly encode using x264 or a dedicated x264 frontend? It seems rather roundabout to go through Carbon Coder to do so...

I only came here for some help, not get into some legal discussion, :eek: but anyhow, I'm using Carbon Coder and Carbon Server as I'm building a highly scaleable solution capable of transcoding to a large number of different output types. x264 forms a small percentage of that output, obviously only if I can get it to work.

I agree the interface is not great but I can assure you it's one of the better ones out of the bunch I evaluated. That said, what may be a good IU to you, may not be a good UI to me.

Out of interest, what application would you consider to have a good, or even great UI?

Dark Shikari

17th October 2008, 19:47

I agree the interface is not great but I can assure you it's one of the better ones out of the bunch I evaluated. That said, what may be a good IU to you, may not be a good UI to me.

Out of interest, what application would you consider to have a good, or even great UI?Unfortunately, "encoding application" and "good UI" seem to often be mutually exclusive ;)

Most of the good Windows UIs are rather format-specific: like MeGUI, which is made primarily for x264 and Xvid.

I've heard that Mediacoder is rather good as a"general-purpose" conversion GUI, and it uses the ffmpeg libraries (and x264) for encoding.

CruNcher

17th October 2008, 20:07

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 20:19

Unfortunately, "encoding application" and "good UI" seem to often be mutually exclusive ;)

I couldn't agree more.

Like many Windows applications the MediaCoder GUI makes my eyes bleed.

I'd love an general purpose transcoding application that had the look and feel of products like Autodesk Smoke, Toxic and combustion.

Even something like the ffmpegX GUI beats the pants off most of the high end transcoders out there.

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 20:32

Jep just look behind Carbon Coder to understand what it is
a GUI which combines alot of (old slow bad quality licensed) 3rd party codec technology and uses libav, i newer understood why people like it the whole interface is a catastrophe usability wise too

yep MediaCoder is definitely more careful designed then this Crap, though MediaCoder doesn't adapt as fast as everything changes (alot of logic errors in the main core) and that is sadly not open source ;)

Once you have your profiles set up, you don't need to use the GUI, Carbon makes a seriously powerful multi-format transcode farm.

If you had to deal with over 1000 hours per day of multi-format source content that needs to be delivered to multiple output formats with multiple profiles, and your SLA required auto-failover and a support person at the other end of a phone line 24/7, what product would you choose?

TEB

17th October 2008, 20:34

Jep just look behind Carbon Coder to understand what it is
a GUI which combines alot of (old slow bad quality licensed) 3rd party codec technology and uses libav, i newer understood why people like it the whole interface is a catastrophe usability wise too

yep MediaCoder is definitely more careful designed then this Crap, though MediaCoder doesn't adapt as fast as everything changes (alot of logic errors in the main core) and that is sadly not open source ;)

Well i dont agree on everything u say there Cruncher.. Ive used and beta-tested Carbon Coder for many years and i infact love the interface.. tho there are many areas where it could have improved... the main area of excellence is support for pro-format, that means codecs and container formats and job handeling with que management..

Tho im using v.3.1 and i have never seen the option to use external codecs for target (source is fine via directshow or avisynth) this is great.. Could u elaborate more on how ?

Dark Shikari

17th October 2008, 20:41

Once you have your profiles set up, you don't need to use the GUI, Carbon makes a seriously powerful multi-format transcode farm.

If you had to deal with over 1000 hours per day of multi-format source content that needs to be delivered to multiple output formats with multiple profiles, and your SLA required auto-failover and a support person at the other end of a phone line 24/7, what product would you choose?I'd choose the one that works, which Carbon Coder (from my experience) isn't. CC is a hacked-together amalgam of various crappy libraries that just happens to work every once in a while if you're lucky.

The places where it chokes will likely be the same places other apps tend to choke (VFR input, etc).

Unfortunately, the only real option for such a setup is CLI as far as I can tell; the GUIs really, really, really suck. Look at what some of the big-name video hosting sites do, like Facebook; they have to get enormous numbers of types of videos in (millions of videos in dozens of formats) and encode them automatically to a couple output formats. They almost all use ffmpeg or a similar setup.

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 21:06

Well i dont agree on everything u say there Cruncher.. Ive used and beta-tested Carbon Coder for many years and i infact love the interface.. tho there are many areas where it could have improved... the main area of excellence is support for pro-format, that means codecs and container formats and job handeling with que management..

Tho im using v.3.1 and i have never seen the option to use external codecs for target (source is fine via directshow or avisynth) this is great.. Could u elaborate more on how ?

I'd choose the one that works, which Carbon Coder (from my experience) isn't. CC is a hacked-together amalgam of various crappy libraries that just happens to work every once in a while if you're lucky.

The places where it chokes will likely be the same places other apps tend to choke (VFR input, etc).

Unfortunately, the only real option for such a setup is CLI as far as I can tell; the GUIs really, really, really suck. Look at what some of the big-name video hosting sites do, like Facebook; they have to get enormous numbers of types of videos in (millions of videos in dozens of formats) and encode them automatically to a couple output formats. They almost all use ffmpeg or a similar setup.

I WISH I could go down that route, however, I have to buy a product and service or have it developed in-house and that is not an option, right now.
My solution does not need to support consumer source formats (even though it could) and ffmpeg or similar could not deal with the pro formats I need to throw at it, AFAIK. (I've never actually tried to be honest..)

Dark Shikari

17th October 2008, 22:15

I WISH I could go down that route, however, I have to buy a product and service or have it developed in-house and that is not an option, right now.
My solution does not need to support consumer source formats (even though it could) and ffmpeg or similar could not deal with the pro formats I need to throw at it, AFAIK. (I've never actually tried to be honest..)"Pro" format seems to be simply a term for "formats that don't work with anything except one proprietary implementation" ;)

The easiest way might be the way I set up things for Criterion Collection; they needed to transcode "Pro formats" (~Quicktime 10-bit formats like r210, v210, etc) to H.264+AAC-in-Flash. What they did is export the films in Compressor to an 8-bit format that mplayer could read through w32codecs, and then once mplayer could read the video getting the input to x264 was trivial.

I also know there's a plugin for Quicktime that allows direct transcoding with x264 on Macs, which seem to be the source of most of these horridly incompatible "pro formats."

audyovydeo

17th October 2008, 22:28

If you had to deal with over 1000 hours per day of multi-format source content that needs to be delivered to multiple output formats with multiple profiles, and your SLA required auto-failover and a support person at the other end of a phone line 24/7, what product would you choose?

... scripting ?
and you feed your data to whatever cmdline encode you choose.
if you're stuck with Windows servers, try Cygwin.
If you'll like it you'll only (wink) have to convince Management that it's production-quality software.

cheers
audyovydeo

The_Dukester

17th October 2008, 23:33

"Pro" format seems to be simply a term for "formats that don't work with anything except one proprietary implementation" ;)

The easiest way might be the way I set up things for Criterion Collection; they needed to transcode "Pro formats" (~Quicktime 10-bit formats like r210, v210, etc) to H.264+AAC-in-Flash. What they did is export the films in Compressor to an 8-bit format that mplayer could read through w32codecs, and then once mplayer could read the video getting the input to x264 was trivial.

I also know there's a plugin for Quicktime that allows direct transcoding with x264 on Macs, which seem to be the source of most of these horridly incompatible "pro formats."

I agree on the Pro format comment but -

On my goodness, what a convoluted workflow for Criterion!

Rhozet reads and deals our 'pro' formats natively, we can drive it via a workflow tool that looks after our DAM, house keeping and reporting as well as all the metadata requirements, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't be bothered to go in to here.

Is it too much to ask from all the FARKing x264 genius geezers out there, how to get the fscking thing to work with Rhozet, without having to be dragged through all the political/technical/religious/right&wrong/ reasons for NOT f**king using the solution I, yes ME, has decided to use after extensive evaluatuion that is for MY particular freeking solution, not Facebooks or Youtubes or ........

Is that too much to ask?

I am happy to take things off on a tangent, but can I just get an answer to my first post? Please?

tre31

18th October 2008, 00:31

Are you sure its actually looking for an external .dll?, codec's that are 'universal' are usually packed in the old style VFW (video for windows) interface/api, which allows any application too interface with them as they use a standard across the board.

x264 VFW anyone? try it, may just be what you were looking for.

edit:
Oh and I agree about using external '.dll' 's, unless the application knew exactly how too interface with a .dll there is no way it would work, and since programmers are all different, they use different methods, nothing would be the same and there would be no way they could make a one size fits all solution ... however VFW IS just that.

The_Dukester

18th October 2008, 00:48

tre31

18th October 2008, 00:56

I'll send you some screen shots on Monday. Jeez I can't believe the process for screen shots in Windows sucks quite so much...

Well too be truthful I'm not actually familiar with the application you are trying too use anyway, but I just recommend you install x264vfw on the machine and see if you can use it as an external codec, generally codec's come packaged with an .inf (install file) .ax (the codec .. sorry cant give a better desc as I'm not sure), and possibly .dll files (the guts that make it all work).

So going by that I'm not sure how you'll get it too work, but thats about as good as you can get, maybe - try reading the manual and contacting your product's support, because they should know exactly what you need too know rather than trying too find out here as what you are after is very specific.

Dark Shikari

18th October 2008, 02:42

Is it too much to ask from all the FARKing x264 genius geezers out there, how to get the fscking thing to work with Rhozet, without having to be dragged through all the political/technical/religious/right&wrong/ reasons for NOT f**king using the solution I, yes ME, has decided to use after extensive evaluatuion that is for MY particular freeking solution, not Facebooks or Youtubes or ........I already answered you in my earlier response: its highly doubtful that x264 will work with Carbon Coder. This is not my fault--this is not x264's fault--this is Carbon Coder's fault. The speculation that its looking for VfW encoders might be accurate, in which case I was wrong. The point being--I answered your question: "how to get the fscking thing to work with Rhozet" right off the bat--yet you still are complaining that I hadn't answered it, as if you were blind to my response.

I then went into other possible solutions and other information after I already told you my answer. You didn't like my first response, so you asked for other information, which I then gave to you--and then you complain about it? :rolleyes:

Also, I opened up the copy of Carbon Coder I have access to and was unable to find the "external DLL" option you are referring to, so I can't test it either. The "export" option does allow an AVI option, which initially appears to use VFW encoders, but it only allows me to pick from a short list, a list which certainly doesn't encompass all the VfW encoders on my system.

kemuri-_9

18th October 2008, 16:27

x264 VFW anyone? try it, may just be what you were looking for.

edit:
Oh and I agree about using external '.dll' 's, unless the application knew exactly how too interface with a .dll there is no way it would work, and since programmers are all different, they use different methods, nothing would be the same and there would be no way they could make a one size fits all solution ... however VFW IS just that.

and yet x264 VFW was never meant for existence as h.264 was never meant to be VFW/AVI compatible.

The_Dukester

18th October 2008, 19:10

Sorry Dark, it had been a very long and and terribly frustrating day!

In order to access the external DLL settings area you need to have selected the 'Advanced' tab on the right of the UI and the choose Raw as the stream type in the profile settings. At least that's how it is in version 3.11.