Place to share best settings

[sumpm1]

First of all I want to say that Nic, -h, Koepi, umaniac, all of you guys that are involved and doing all of this for us is really cool. I think you all deserve a round of applause and I am becoming more interested and coming and checking it out everyday because I know you guys care about what we want and are trying so hard to make this the best codec it can be.
My suggestion is that we should all have a place to share what our experiences have been with different settings and builds of Xvid. Not a Forum, so no one has to go drudging through hundreds of worthles posts, more like a simple text file that only said what settings for what movie and what the results were, just so we don't all have to experiment on our slow ass machines so much. Maybe later there could also be a log of settings that gave good results for specific movies, that way people could just put these settings in and go. Another idea would be to have all of the stats files for the first pass for all of the movies so that people only had to do the second pass.

[tangent]

I don't know whether the rest of you like the idea, but I've been locking all my I-frames at 2-2. Is this bad?

[Koepi]

@tangent:

Depends on the rest of the settings, on the movie, on what you want to achieve. For me that would be very bad for example.

@sunpm1:
I'm impressed where you get those ideas from *caugh*

We had a stats file collection started when the first public nandub versions appeared. But the people were to stupid to write all necessary data down so that it was impossible to use them.

As you sure read the XviD Options Explained, you know that first and second pass have to be done with exactly the same settings? A first pass is useless if compressability changes between the two passes.

A collection of "best settings" isn't a good idea either, because the interface changes all the time, there is a bigger core-change soon,... So some of the settings will disappear, new will come up, and you start wondering what the "hyperwarp X cc = 3" setting was for in the build from a year ago ;)

I hope you get the idea,

regards,
Koepi

[Emp3r0r]

@Koepi: could the encode dialog disable changing the settings from the first pass to make it less confusing? This makes it obvious to new users (or people who are too ignorant to read your options exlained) what they can and can't do. Just a usability suggestion, great work by the way!

[-h]

Well during 1st pass, most of the controls don't do anything, at all, they're only enabled because it's a pain to enable/disable controls between frames (yes Nic I tried sticking it under WM_COMMAND ;)).

This will be fixed eventually. The only controls that actually change the first pass are:

- Setting credits with fixed quantizers (rate and size don't change the 1st pass at all)
- Setting the motion search precision
- Setting the quantization type
- Setting the min/max keyframe intervals

That's it really, everything else is constant for 1st pass encodes.

-h

[Nic]

(yes Nic I tried sticking it under WM_COMMAND ).

You know its bugging me now :D Its the first thing im going to do after ive done this filter.... :)

-Nic

[-h]

Things just went... wrong. Controls weren't being updated immediately, but lagging behind what the config mode actually was. I played for a while placing uploads and downloads and config_modes all over the place, but it still hated me.

I was wondering though, is there any way the filter can create an internal chain with the overlay mixer? I've gotten a big slowdown on my test box when enabling a couple of the post-processing mods at once, seems it'd be better to use what the video driver already gives us.

The existing code does work quite well at my work though, since the cards don't support overlay :)

-h

[sumpm1]

@Koepi, then maybe one day it would be possible to save the settings for everything to a file so that this file could be loaded and all of the settings will be adjusted for you. Like you said thought this will change from one build to another and new settings will be implemented. So, while the builds are changing quickly wnile xvid is in beta, this isnt very feasable. But when the codec gets closer to being final and people find their favorite build, it would be possible, assuming the build stayed the same for a good while, or people just kept using the same build. Later on though, this could become another cool feature, making Xvid stronger.

[-h]

..maybe one day it would be possible to save the settings for everything to a file so that this file could be loaded and all of the settings will be adjusted for you..

You can dump the registry keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GNU\XviD to achieve this - every codec setting is in there, and existing values are very unlikely to change in the future. All that usually happens, is me adding more and more keys with every new build :)

Actually you might want to delete that registry key and let XviD recreate it - a few of the values in there are not used anymore.

-h

[kastro68]

I'd say we should dump the idea of sharing settings for now, but instead have an ENCODING COMPETITION. That's right folks, this will allow us to determine who is the best at encoding, and the best codec to use in different situations.

Although I don't even think this competition would be feasible because we need incentive for people take part in it...which means we need prizes...which means we need sponsors.

And there is still the problem on how the competition is going to be judged.