VidCoder: Alternative HandBrake GUI for Windows [Archive] - Page 20

GZZ

9th November 2014, 16:19

When I have finished encoding a TV episode from a bluray using Vidcoer, I sometime ends of up with several subtitle tracks. The first and default one is the correct (in this case Danish) and then I have Track 2, 3, 4, 5 (without Language set). This is when I play it in vlc player. If I select any of the other subtitle tracks, no subtitles is shown.

If I then open the mkv file in Mkvmerge and save it (no changed made), then only one subtitle track is shown, which is correct. Is this a fault in VidCoder (the same happens if I use the newest Handbrake (0.10 release candidate 1). Also Vidcoder is the newest beta.

RandomEngy

9th November 2014, 16:38

If it's a fault, it sounds like a fault in the HandBrake engine. You should probably ask them about it.

GZZ

9th November 2014, 22:25

If video is cropped, then PGS subtitles is shown wrong. It looks like the subtitles has been resized to the cropped size and then its shown in the middle of the image.

RandomEngy

13th November 2014, 03:24

Released VidCoder 1.5.27 Beta (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/137989):

* Updated to HandBrake SVN 6509.
* Updated translation files.

* Fixed encodes failing when using the default preview folder.

GZZ

18th November 2014, 23:20

Small graphical bug. In the Encoder Details Window, when showing the filesize and it reach 1000 mb. Its showing F-1 mb instead of 1000 mb or 1.0 GB as it does after some time.

RandomEngy

23rd November 2014, 08:18

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have that fixed in the next beta.

CommonMortal

24th November 2014, 08:43

Handbrake released stable version. Does this mean we can have a stable version in Vidcoder too any time soon?
Thank you.

Also, i was always confused with the DAR thing. In Vidcoder i always use "anamorphic none" and always works perfectly. Any chance you can implement this?

RandomEngy

24th November 2014, 23:55

I should have a stable version out within a week. Thanks for the heads up.

As for Anamorphic/DAR, HandBrake has a good article on it:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/AnamorphicGuide

CommonMortal

26th November 2014, 08:04

I should have a stable version out within a week. Thanks for the heads up.

As for Anamorphic/DAR, HandBrake has a good article on it:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/AnamorphicGuide

Thanks. I actualy posted about anamorphic by mistake here. It was intended for another post. I always use "none" in Vidcoder and works perfectly. Never have a problem with it when i use "none".

RandomEngy

27th November 2014, 19:44

Released VidCoder 1.5.28 (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/153582):

It's a stable release!

Updated HandBrake core to 0.10.0. This means a bunch of new features:
* Intel QuickSync video: a hardware-based H.264 encoder for Intel CPUs.
* H.265 encoding with x265.
* VP8 using libvpx.
* libav and FDK AAC encoders. libfaac has been removed due to license issues.
* NLMeans denoise filter for higher-quality denoising.
* OpenCL hardware-assisted BiCubic scaling.
* Burn-in for SRT subtitles.

* Added Encode Details window. Exposes elapsed time, ETA, current and average FPS, running file size, current pass and pass progress.
* Added Rip DVD and Rip Blu-ray AutoPlay actions for Windows: now you can have VidCoder start up and scan a disc when you insert it.
* Added rotation and reflection filters.
* Reworked Basic vs Advanced x264 to be more correct.
* Added option to mark an automatically picked subtitle as Default or Burn-in.
* Reworked audio passthrough: added ability to set a fallback encoder or pass through if the input track format matches the output format.
* Added option to preserve Created and Last Modified times when converting files. In Options -> Advanced.
* Added option to preserve the source folder structure when batch-encoding video files.
* Enabled right-click actions (edit, delete, move to top, move to bottom) on queued items during an encode.
* Added warning dialog with 30-second delay for the automatic shutdown on encode complete.
* Removed single-instance restriction.
* Support for up to 8K resolutions.

Added languages:
* Czech, thanks to KarelStejskal, Ptholemaios and stefanmatta
* Polish, thanks to regis-rtg, Jasiet and OliverAndrews
* Portuguese, thanks to ricardofonseca1977
* Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to tiago1888anos, cauptain, douglasmi, hierra and DjaX
* Russian, thanks to loki26, sailorboris, spoglitch, AlexeiA and dima-110878
* Japanese, thanks to tanashu1, 3rl2r0qh and yoshiyuki

Also included are a ton of other bug fixes.

loninappleton

27th November 2014, 20:04

I will check my recent download for this release number.

Having problems posting to Vidcoder at Codeplex even though Codeplex says my registration is fine and I can login.

I have lurked at the Vidcoder discussion for quite a while. Was unsure about using either Handbrake or Vidcoder.

Then I got this guide posted a while back with sample settings:

http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/guides-tutorials/media-guides/10725-vidcoder-settings-tutorial-high-quality-h-264-x264-mkv-video-encoding.html

There must have been some large changes to Vidcoder over the revisions because the manual string suggested by the
guide is a lot different than what the latest Vidcoder Beta x64 I downloaded will display.

Can someone straighten me out on this? I used the settings by rote since that is as much as I understand.

My goal is smallest possible mkv size ala YIFY.

Perhaps some tutorial tips are available or a more up to date guide?

I need practice and will be patient (or try to.) I see some of my friends from Videohelp on here as well. After lurking at Vidcoder/Codeplex a long time, I'm prepared to be patient for answers.

To sum up is there a current and recommended guide for initial settings for a 1 hour dvd using one of the standard rip tools? Apologies for not backtracking on all 50 posts.

loninappleton

27th November 2014, 21:58

My first mistake. It's not 52 posts, it's 52 pages. But I am reviewing what I can. Please advise if a fresh thread should be started.

I am doing a sample encode with the 1.5.28 in x264 but once again with the configuration in that how-to (shown above) to get used to making adjustments.

My additional question here is can I use Media Info to examine the
audio file. From that, I will want to demux and remux audio as I have done many times using a technique (my thread) given at videohelp.

Will PGC demux or some other program extract audio for processing?

RandomEngy

27th November 2014, 22:30

I would recommend you use the simple x264 settings and don't worry about the advanced tab. Change your Profile and Level if you're worried about player compatibility, otherwise leave them on Automatic. Tweak the quality target to produce a good looking picture, then tweak the Preset to figure out where you want the tradeoff between encode speed and encoding compression level.

Usually when a guide tells you to use a certain advanced encoding string it's worse than the standard x264 presets (which are written by the author of x264, who knows what he's doing).

Not sure about the PGC stuff, I don't usually mess with demuxing.

loninappleton

28th November 2014, 03:38

I am messing about at you say but looking for the magic.

Snakeoil guys and hotshots (who like to use the word "basically" to show off) say in some threads and how- tos that using a command line edit to invoke a single core for a job is an improvement over multicore encoding. Is there anything to that?

Also a real zinger on this small size stuff is encoding time. I wish to maintain a reasonable encoding time-- not four days for a 1080 90 min movie.

The one hour disc I'm using to experiment with settings comes out ok in most instances but does not look like watching it on a 27 in CRT in the old Sony stand alone player. It's smoother yes and that is b/c of no interlace. But it may be my old 19 in. CRT monitor that is simply getting dim and does not show the whites on costumes crisply.

If there is no magic bullet the old system with the bigger file sizes and muxing routine may have to continue.

What I'm seeing in some downloads is very crisp and very small file sizes on things like television episodes which I cannot seem to duplicate. This is the reason for my posts here. Can source play a large role in this? Sources such as streaming video to a hard disk recorder?

I still enjoy pursuing the discussion and have to start someplace.

Currently I have the new 1.5.28 set to 720 as is the DVD source. Can you run through the settings and say (as you did) which to skip?

RandomEngy

28th November 2014, 06:18

Yes, source can play a large role. Videos with low motion and simple scenes (like animation) are easier to compress and result in smaller file sizes. I would recommend skipping the Advanced tab, as I mentioned before, but most of the others have their place, depending on what kind of device you want to play the videos on.

loninappleton

28th November 2014, 09:17

Can most of the file size then be controlled with a smaller bit rate size as controlled by resolution:
changing the input of 720 downward for example and using the Constant Quality slider?

Or, even though few recommend it, should a fixed size be selected rather than Constant Quality?
You have no doubt gone over this a lot at Codeplex but I have mostly been looking at only subject lines just to keep myself aware of it.

x265 is said to give 4 times the compression of 264. Will this discussion now change focus to that?

RandomEngy

28th November 2014, 18:05

No, H.265 is still in early development and there isn't much player support for it. I would recommend using constant quality and letting the encoder worry about file sizes.

loninappleton

28th November 2014, 19:25

Oh. I misunderstood then about the release of 1.5.28 as being the first h265.

If Constant Quality should be used and size not matter I am totally confused about why to upgrade to it instead of the old tools like
AGK wherein you can do the same thing. And the encode time seems about the same: close to the actual runtime of the content.

What is a comparable editing tool in freeware to Virtual Dub Mod for h264? (I maybe should ask outside this thread but one thing leads to another. If so I will start afresh.)

loninappleton

28th November 2014, 22:48

One other thing. Ol' AGK has some tricky business involving the F8 key to find any subtitles.

I am doing another Vidcoder encode from the original dvd and attempting to burn in subtitles just from the menu prompts.

Two rows of Foreign subs were showing. I unticked where it said forced.

One checkmark for Burn In subs at the first line should give me
the subtitles, yes? Unfortunate that these are not marked in any way so I'll have to be surprised with German, French or , worst case, None.

This would be a distinct advantage over AGK. Doom9 has a lot of depth. Maybe someone can help with this.

Przemek_Sperling

29th November 2014, 09:38

Something is wrong with the translation files, at least in some of them. The Polish file does not work at all. The German one works with flying colours. I do not know the rest.

loninappleton

29th November 2014, 10:00

I will make a fresh start on working with the subtitles. On inspection of the dvd, just playing it showed no options for additional languages even though those things came up in the program.

I misrepresented the disc. Had another similar with the subs file
all in a series. Apologies and I'll pose a question with a more reliable source.

CommonMortal

29th November 2014, 23:22

Released VidCoder 1.5.28 (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/153582):

It's a stable release!

Thank you!!!!!! :thanks:

loninappleton

30th November 2014, 04:47

I am back with some progress on subtitles for Vidcoder.

The current disc has three VobSub entries and they are marked legibly as

English
French
German

I want to burn in the English subs.

Which of the several boxes of these VobSub - marked entries
should I select at the English line entry? For a sample run I have only ticked the last box in the line and unchecked anything to do with forced subs.

And I always see that warning about subs overwriting. Does that ever not appear?

loninappleton

30th November 2014, 05:35

An update. I've had to failures in which Vidcoder stops working and the standard Win 7 message issues at about 12 mins of operation and 4% or so.

I have started another attempt with Vidcoder 1.5.27 one of the betas.

loninappleton

30th November 2014, 07:20

another update: 1.5.27 failed at the same point so the problem whatever it is consisyent failure with this subtitling job.

GZZ

1st December 2014, 23:06

cengizhan

2nd December 2014, 17:10

I 1.5.28 calculation ETA isnt working if an item in the queue is removed. I have several movies queued, deleted 5 and started encoding. When its was done with the last movie it still said only 77% done as it still counted for the deleted items.

i thought only i had this situation. at somewhere mine was stuck at 1h40m. but total jobs finished after 4-5 hours.

RandomEngy

4th December 2014, 06:19

Released VidCoder 1.5.29 (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/167158):

* Fixed issue where x265 preset and profile would not be set if switching from x264 with the Advanced tab open.
* Removed Turbo First Pass option for x265 since the arguments for it are unsupported and cause encodes to fail.
* Fixed issue where presets could get a bad tune list and fail on x265 encodes.
* Cleared out Advanced options string when switching from x264 to x265 since the encoder arguments aren't always compatible.
* Updated translations.

Also I'll take a look at that queue ETA thing and the missing languages. Hope to have another update out for those soon.

JohnAStebbins

4th December 2014, 20:05

* Removed Turbo First Pass option for x265 since the arguments for it are unsupported and cause encodes to fail.

Turbo first pass *is* supported. I implemented here when I added 2-pass ABR:
https://trac.handbrake.fr/changeset/6366

Works fine for me in HandBrake's linux GUI.

soneca

4th December 2014, 23:18

@RandomEngy

It would be possible to also add in the encode details window the bitrate level?

RandomEngy

5th December 2014, 02:27

Turbo first pass *is* supported. I implemented here when I added 2-pass ABR:
https://trac.handbrake.fr/changeset/6366

Works fine for me in HandBrake's linux GUI.

Oh, I just saw that it was gone in the Windows GUI and assumed it wasn't supported there. Just tried out the fastfirstpass flag and it works great, plus I don't have to fiddle with any options strings!

It will return in working fashion in 1.5.30.

@soneca

That information isn't available to me, so no.

RandomEngy

5th December 2014, 02:49

I 1.5.28 calculation ETA isnt working if an item in the queue is removed. I have several movies queued, deleted 5 and started encoding. When its was done with the last movie it still said only 77% done as it still counted for the deleted items.
Also, if you select the log, the program will freeze until the log window has filled in all the history it have and it can sometimes take some time.

2 Suggestions for improvement:
1) Remember the last used folder instead of the default one.
2) I normally encode video including the DTSHD sound track. But no matter what I select in my settings it always select the DTS track and not the DTSHD track, so I have to change it before adding it to the queue.

I can't reproduce your issue with the ETA being off. It seems to work fine whether I delete the queue items before or after starting the encode. The video length may have been misread by the core API... can you see if all videos have this behavior or just that one? If you have some repro steps that are independent of the video you choose, can you list them out explicitly?

DIEGO7-5

5th December 2014, 08:09

Hi RandomEngy,

just discovered that the NL-Means Denoiser is no longer working. In the Beta´s, there were presets to choose from (although "Grain" never worked and every encode failed.) Now there is just...nothing.

Maybe you wanto to take a look at that. :thanks:

RandomEngy

6th December 2014, 05:38

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll fix NL-Means in 1.5.30 . Some HandBrake enum values had changed.

CommonMortal

6th December 2014, 20:11

I am still on 1.5.28. I don't know if it's because of new Handbrake or a bug, but i noticed that at the end of the log i no longer get SSIM value.

JohnAStebbins

7th December 2014, 19:33

I am still on 1.5.28. I don't know if it's because of new Handbrake or a bug, but i noticed that at the end of the log i no longer get SSIM value.

PSNR or SSIM metrics are now only displayed in the log if you have the corresponding psnr os ssim x264 tune enabled. Without the appropriate tune enabled, these metrics are not very meaningful, so they were removed for the "normal" case.

RandomEngy

8th December 2014, 05:20

Released VidCoder 1.5.30 (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/169469):

* Re-enabled Turbo First Pass for x265 encodes. (Working this time)

* Fixed missing Russian, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese language files.
* Fixed NL-Means denoiser.

parsifal

8th December 2014, 11:34

Hello guys.

I'm using VidCoder's CLI mode inside a Windows batch file. I can't find any options to specify an .srt subtitle file for muxing in the final result. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Przemek_Sperling

8th December 2014, 17:15

The language files work flawlessly. Thanks!

CommonMortal

9th December 2014, 13:26

PSNR or SSIM metrics are now only displayed in the log if you have the corresponding psnr os ssim x264 tune enabled. Without the appropriate tune enabled, these metrics are not very meaningful, so they were removed for the "normal" case.

I see. Thank you for your reply. Yes, i know SSIM isn't accurate, specially when you have psy-rd and high subme/trellis, that use psy-rd a lot, but i was using it as confirmation. Usually anything above 0.97 was guaranteed to be good. But, not big loss i guess...I can live without it.

jkauff

26th December 2014, 16:34

I've been using Vidcoder successfully for a long time, but no matter what I try in the latest stable version, I get an almost immediate "Fail" message on every source in the queue. I tried reinstalling without no success. Something must be wrong in my install, since no one else is complaining. Latest Handbrake nightlies work fine.

Next step is clearing out the registry entries and reinstalling, because I suspect there's something left over from the betas that's causing the problem with the new stable version. What can I delete without losing my custom presets? Are all the keys fairly easy to find?

mike20021969

26th December 2014, 17:49

Next step is clearing out the registry entries and reinstalling, because I suspect there's something left over from the betas that's causing the problem with the new stable version. What can I delete without losing my custom presets? Are all the keys fairly easy to find?

Your presets are stored in VidCoder's Application Data folder (VidCoder &/or VidCoder-Beta), not the registry.

e.g.
In Windows XP the locations are:
Beta: C:\Documents and Settings\<YOUR NAME>\Application Data\VidCoder-Beta\VidCoder.sqlite
Stable: C:\Documents and Settings\<YOUR NAME>\Application Data\VidCoder\VidCoder.sqlite

jkauff

27th December 2014, 18:48

jkauff

27th December 2014, 19:19

I'm totally frustrated. Cleaned out the registry, re-installed, more failure. Log says VidCoderWorker is failing to load after several tries. Even the old beta's don't work anymore. I don't think anything changed in my system, unless it was a Windows update, but out of the blue VidCoder isn't working.

Maybe I'll try the 32-bit version and see if that works.
UPDATE: Problem solved by letting uninstall also get rid of settings and presets. I lost my presets, but VidCoder is running normally.

I submitted a bug on CodePlex. I'm still curious why something in settings and presets would prevent VidCoderWorker from running.

RandomEngy

2nd January 2015, 06:37

Released VidCoder 1.5.31 (https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/releases/view/573954):

* Fixed up old presets generated in 1.5.28 that were corrupted by a HandBrake enum change. Removed references to HandBrake enum files from the preset structure to prevent future preset issues like this.
* Fixed crash issue with VidCoderCLI and presets with chapters markers.
* Fixed custom denoise not getting passed through to the encoder.
* Fixed SRT files with non-ASCII characters causing encodes to fail.

bmcelvan

8th January 2015, 21:09

This might be a silly question but I can't find the answer anywhere...Does vidcoder have the dtshdma and truehd decoder to properly decode the lossless audio to pcm so when it then encodes to FLAC16 or FLAC24 it remains truly lossless. Every time I use eac3to it says lib can't decode properly and needs a arcsoft decoder and is extracting only the core. In either case that's the lossy part. If I'm converting TrueHD or DTSHDMA to FLAC I want to make sure I'm getting truly lossless to lossless...not lossless to lossy lossless format.

Make sense?

thx

Ben

JohnAStebbins

11th January 2015, 00:18

bmcelvan

12th January 2015, 19:16

Truhd yes
dtshdma not yet. There is a decoder in progress. But progress is slow.

Thanks so much for the info...so if converting audio to FLAC16 or FLAC24 (or any other audio like AC3_5.1_640) from any DTSHDMA source...it will actually be converting from the DTS core, not the HD codec. Thus making all conversions rather pointless from a fidelity point of view?

Thanks again for info