Announcement of a new Bitrate Viewer

[Emulgator]

Konran, I still remember a mmbforums post where I promised
a bottle of something good to you and you said Veterano...
It is giving time for me and if this Veterano is still the case for you,
you may PM your post address to me and tell me the flavour as well...

[konran]

Oh, big apology and shame on me! I haven't had any posting notifications and therefore I didn't follow this thread as I had lot of other things to do ... so I hope my answers will still be of interest for those who asked...

@JK1974: as in my preliminary posts I wrote that the tool is mainly developed for MPEG-2 as it has low level in-core support for MPEG-2 file structures you should not complain about other stuff than MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. All other formats than those mentioned are supported by the external linked FFMpeg AV libraries. If they don't cover it, bloody bad, but I won't care about it. Up to now I don't support MPEG-4 formats myself by low level file structures as like MPEG-2. There maybe a chance in the future as I just joined the HD and Blu-ray area as an end user and disc authoring guy ... we'll see that later.

Some information for your bitrate questions on AVCHD matter: in case of x264 encoding (which is one of the MPEG-4 derivates) BitrateViewer involves FFMpeg calls only and gets the frame informations from this interface. Each frame read will be evaluated as the real physical binary part that is stored on the disc. So you will see the compressed size calculated as the current bitrate, which should be quite correct. The runtime of a file may differ when FFMpeg returns wrong length encodings for cases of wrong calculated NTSC pulldown 3:2 rates or when you have variable framerates (fps) which never won't be covered correctly. 18 MBit/s (or 24 MBit/s on newer devices) are always peak rate values if given by the manufacturers as it's their goal to figure out a good quality for a device. If compressed to MPEG-4 you will need very special situations to achive such a high peak value. As an example I watched the OSD information on my Dune BD Prime 3.0 Blu-ray player for downsized MKV HDTV stuff which had x264 coding and 720p resolution. The maximum avg bitrate that is shown for reencoding was about 9000 kBit/s and the OSD instant bitrates were somewhere between 3000 kBit/s and 13 MBit/s. So have a try with your camcorder and catch a high speed shot going fast between light/shadow/dark to allow coding a highly-most bitrate peak value ... and see what happens.

@samepaul: yes indeed there are plans to resize the GUI window. In fact this is one of the highest priorities. But due to lack of time as I'm working in other projects (to get my bread on the table of course) there wasn't time left for BitrateViewer. And ... despite of a relatively high amount of downloads for BitrateViewer the feedback is too low to cover it in the moment. Maybe when I need it for MPEG-4 native support...

@canuckerfan: well, I've heard about the q-factor ... but where can I find it in the MPEG-1/2 headers? If I knew I could display it.

@Emulgator: you'll get PM

Cheers all,
Konran

[Blue_MiSfit]

FYI - ffdshow's OSD bitrate info for H.264 is quite broken. QP Visualization works fine, but if you want to do bitrate analysis you need a more dedicated tool.

~MiSfit

[konran]

@JK1974 & Blue_MiSfit: as an idea ... could it possibly be that FFMpeg returns a wrong interlace flag for 1080i50, i.e. I therefore count each frame twice instead of two half frames that have to be combined to one? In this case I could really get a double runtime and conclusively half of the real bitrate...
Can someone verify and/or commit?
@JK1974: could you upload a sample of e.g. 20sec of your 1080i50 footage?

[JK1974]

First of all: Thanks for you reply - even if it is late.
I am gonna search for a short scene that you can use for testing.

[pandy]

Hi,

first of all: Thanks a lot for this great tool. Unfortunately, I have problems here with AVCHD files from Canon HF100 as well as from Panasonic HDC-HS100. The total time seems to be doubled while the Average Bitrate and Peak seems to be only the half of what it should be. The resolution is 1080i50.


Are You sure that those two cameras create 50 frames each made from 1080 lines sended as a 2 fields which give us 100 fields per second?

[AaronCompNetSys]

I just thought I would post up my appreciation for this software, I've needed something like it for a while. I have a couple files that I use to stress test, so here are the results.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Lsykl2SA2ts/TMHMYS87poI/AAAAAAAAM_c/sArN6LfSQQM/s800/untitled.PNG

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Lsykl2SA2ts/TMHMJyavrPI/AAAAAAAAM_U/Iqjt4HNzK2M/s800/untitled.PNG

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Lsykl2SA2ts/TMHL3uvlNII/AAAAAAAAM_M/UAt9Cyyny-k/s800/untitled.PNG

Thank you to the creator.

[audyovydeo]

I've been wondering if - for the developer - it would be trivial to adapt this tool to handle m4a audio files.

I'd love to see graphs to compare neroaac vs quicktime-aac stuff...

cheers
audyovydeo

[konran]

I've been wondering if - for the developer - it would be trivial to adapt this tool to handle m4a audio files.

Target of my development always was - and ever will be - writing a video analysis tool and not more than that. The main reason was to replace a buggy similar tool integrated in DVDlab Pro 2 for my DVD authoring needs. So very sorry for you - having to write an audio tool of your own ;-)

Cheers,
Konran

[audyovydeo]

:-(

thanks for replying !

cheers
audyovydeo

[Mug Funky]

i was wondering about the "seconds" bitrate method.

does it use a sliding window, or just calculate per discrete second?

[AaronCompNetSys]

i was wondering about the "seconds" bitrate method.

does it use a sliding window, or just calculate per discrete second?
I calculates per second, but renders the graph in a sliding window.

[MrScientist]

thanks! just what i was looking for to scan some security video for movement. any chance of being able to resize the window in a future release?

[konran]

@MrScientist: watch out for current version 2.3 of Bitrate Viewer. With Alt-D keyboard command you can switch to double size mode. In this version this is for test purpose only ... but I intend to integrate this feature within a future release (which won't be free anymore) together with some Save As... and Print commands.

[dlnalover94]

very cool, what formats does this support?

[konran]

all fixed framerate video formats that FFMpeg actually supports ... you should have a look at FFMpeg's site.

Have a look at the MPlayer documentation on video codecs (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-libavcodec.html#menc-feat-enc-libavcodec-video-codecs). While BitrateViewer should support most of those because it basically uses libavcodec. Anyway I have only tested a few of them.

[Selur]

btw. an updated version with newer ffmpeg libaries would be nice, since that should allow support for H.265 :)

[NikosD]

+1 for HEVC support of this remarkable app.

[LigH]

I guess that updating libav DLLs won't be easily possible because the used core version (50 / 52) is outdated, and current DLLs would be of a new API version which may not be compatible anymore?

BTW, I tried to send an email to the author.

[NikosD]

A new basic bitrate calculator - CheckBitrate v0.01 - in its very very early stages by rigaya the developer of HW video encoders for AMD, Nvidia, Intel HW (QSVEncC, NVEncC, VCEEncC)

It's a CLI app that you just throw a video file on it and creates automatically a .csv file with the columns:

time, bitrate, bitrate average.

The only thing that you can change is the time interval (default is 1.27s)

And YES, it supports HEVC (!)

You can download it from here:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AKcPpJfIHBiTBk0&id=6BDD4375AC8933C6%214230&cid=6BDD4375AC8933C6

[poisondeathray]

Thanks NikosD,

This shouldn't really be under MPEG2 section, but another useful utility is plotframes, based on ffmpeg, gnuplot but it's CLI . Shows I,B,P frame distrubution. It supports HEVC, and almost anything since it's ffmpeg based using current libraries

https://www.npmjs.com/package/plotframes
https://github.com/rodrigopolo/plotframes

Easy to change the output size of the graph

eg.
plotframes -i input.ext -t "png size 1920,1080" -o outputplot.png

[LigH]

Quite long ago already ... nevertheless, thank you! That will be useful for many.

[GMJCZP]

Thanks, NikosD.
How's this tool compared to MSU VQMT?

[konran]

Thanks for your feedbacks on my BitrateViewer. As some of you mentioned, all newer FFMpeg libraries are incompatible to the 2.3 Windows version of my tool. Since I have moved to iOS and OS X development, I don't have an updated IDE for Windows code development - so I've given up to update the Windows version.

But I have good news for those of you who also use Mac hardware: Today I released a new written BitrateViewer for Mac to Apple's AppStore. The Mac version works even better than the older Windows version. It has a standard GUI and it supports all current FFMpeg video codecs including H.265/HEVC.

You'll find a description on my special homepage http://osx.futurenow-consulting.de.
The AppStore access link to my new app is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bitrateviewer/id1125261664?l=en&ls=1&mt=12

[Biggiesized]

konran,

That's very disappointing to here for us Windows users. Would you ever revisit it down the road or consider an open source Linux release?

Glad to hear you're at least still developing!