Lame attempt to stir up interest in using XviD for HDTV

[trbarry]

I made a clip. :)

In a zip.

www.trbarry.com/Its_All_Here.zip

This is a short part of the CBS trailer before all the CBS HDTV shows. I think it is one of the more detailed HD things you can see on TV now.

Nothing sophisticated but I wanted to show HDTV, encoded at about 4500 mbps XviD internal 2-pass, mpeg quant. It's only about 15 seconds.

This was captured at 1920x1088i -> GreedyHMA -> SimpleResize to 1280x720p @ 24. You will still need a decently fast machine to play it a full resolution and speed. And ac3 to hear it. I have only limited web space so I may replace it in a couple days with one at only 15 fps that more people can play.

Kudos to the XviD guys.

- Tom

[kayman]

how did you cap at those specs what card are using ?

i make svcd of tv shows but want to try xvid at hdtv specs and whant to know what hardware ill need

Alias.1x15.WS.HDTV.SVCD.-.Kayman.TheTube

[trbarry]

I have a WinTV-HD card which I used. But I also just got a HiPix card, not yet installed, but which is probably better.

HiPix just made their driver ap open souce. Search for HiPix on the AV Science HTPC forum for all the folks using it.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/

- Tom

[kayman]

do you have a url for the hardware? i have a dish net reciever and want ot know if it will work with that and how much it will be

thanks

[trbarry]

Uhhhh, help? Nic, Koepi?

I've been displaying the file above using the DivX4 and then (more slowly) the DivX5 filters.

I just downloaded the Xvid installer from Koepi's site and changed the fourcc to xvid. Now it crashes in Zoom Player.

Anybody tried playing any 1280x720 resolution clips with Xvid filter? Can anyone play mine?

Is there a max size buried in it somewhere?

- Tom

[kayman]

i have alot of probs playing it too only this that works is the divx 5 playa 2.0 beta

[trbarry]

Kayman -

I think the HiPix is mostly sold by www.digitalconnection.com though if you are on the dev team there may also be a discount. Retail is probably still $399.

But you can't record from E* unless you have the older Dish 5000 with the modulator card. And I think those are getting hard to find.

- Tom

[trbarry]

BTW, for those who can't play it I made a lower res Divx5 928x528 version, at www.trbarry.com/Its_All_Here_528.zip

That on is only about 2500 mbps, total size about 6 MB, IIRC.

- Tom

[kayman]

well more importantly i have a bell express vu system all thise cards seem to only do record HDTV if you use the coax sat. cable , is there a card the i can come out of my reciever with say svideo or compenent and record hdtv?

[MaTTeR]

Originally posted by trbarry

Anybody tried playing any 1280x720 resolution clips with Xvid filter? Can anyone play mine?
- Tom
Clip played ok on my monitor @1280x960 using BSplayer 0.84 (b480). However, the sound was out of sync though even turning the post processing down all the way. I'll change FourCC to Xvid and see what happens.

[trbarry]

Not that I know of. You can record svideo easy but it's only 480i.

And cards to input component 480i are about $1000 or more (I think).

- Tom

[kayman]

i record at that now 720x480 huffyuv then the marvelous decomb and encode to svcd.

to bad thre isnt a crad to do hdtv via svideo :(

[MaTTeR]

Changing the FourCC over to Xvid definately results in a crash within BSplayer and ZP.

EDIT- The sound was in slow motion also. Very strange.

[ARDA]

I could not play it with Nic's Xvid DS filter (crash too ),no problems with divx.
My thunderbird (1.4) could not play all frames in fullscreen mode
Nice test,Thanks Arda

[MaTTeR]

Trying to access Nic's Xvid DS properties during playback results in a crash using ZP and BSplayer. Also I rendered the file in GraphEdit, an attempt to view the Xvid DS properties resulted in a crash.

Running Dual PIII 850s

[Klumsy]

I downloaded both clips.

The first one was choppy, but played in ZPlayer 2.12 and WMP with both filters.

The second (smaller) one was choppy too, just like the first one.
Using the XviD DSF gave me a green screen with both players but sound played as normal.

Maybe that's too much for my old Athlon700

Edit: Ooop, I just saw, that my XviD installation was kinda screwed up... I don't like that new installer... i want the inf file back :)

now it crashes too with Nic's filter ;)

[trbarry]

The day I first put these out there they released Divx5. Under Divx4 I could display the big one at 23+ fps with smooth sound on my 960x544 screen (866 P3), as long as I used the ZP aspect ratio controls to squeeze it to the correct aspect ratio (I assume that changes the overlay size).

So I was sorta converging on Xvid 720p as a good HDTV archive format.

But once I put up Divx5 then it drops 3-6 fps. I was hoping the Xvid filter with min processing might be faster again.

But maybe there is some hard coded fixed size table that would be easy to change. That would be a much nicer bug than thinking it just crashes when it gets behind a bit.

- Tom

[trbarry]

BTW, I get the impression that post processing was somewhat designed (for both Divx & Xvid) with the idea that video would be upscaled, showing macro blocks more.

I'm not sure it is as needed with a hi rez 1280x720p clip, and it certainly takes too much time on any but the fastest machines at that resolution.

- Tom

[morello12]

Hey, did you see my request for the Mpeg-2 file from Richard's thread? :)

Anyways, to provide more info, both the Xvid decoder (03-05-02) and DivX decoder (4 & 5) play it back for me. Xvid screws up all the colors... everything is dark and kinda green. DivX 5 gets really choppy, and DivX 4 gets only a lil choppy (this is on the 1280 clip).

[trbarry]

Hey, did you see my request for the Mpeg-2 file from Richard's thread?

Yeah, but I can't seem to upload to that link. Please email me instructions or something. (trbarry @ trbarry.com)

I'm surprised you could play the big one with the xvid dsf. Which one?

I used the one in Koepi's install downloaded today. Doesn't that have Nic's filter in it now?

If I ever mangage to stop fighting ftp I'll post a 720 version at only 15 fps. Anybody should be able to play that with the Divx filters and maybe even better with the Xvid ones, if they don't crash on that size. But I don't know about being green...

But before Divx5 I really could display the 720p clip nicely on my 866 P3 using the divx dsf. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;)

- Tom

[trbarry]

I've pretty much narrowed down my Divx5 Windows hanging problems. It can create a clip that will hang windows if you turn on GMC and have a large resolution like 1280x720. So I'll just avoid that.

I posted more details on this
DVN Feedback Forum thread (http://www.divx.com/forums/viewtopic.php?topic=28624&forum=13)

But I'd still rather find a version of the XviD decoder that could handle 720p. I'll keep playing.

- Tom

[avih]

hey, i think u should try an old dsf. say 30-jan-2002 should work fine. it does for me with your 1st file.

[trbarry]

avih -

Thanks, I just now tried that one and also one with a date of about 9:00 this morning.

Both work though neither seems to display my XviD file quite as fast as Divx5. Which in turn was slower than Divx4. This is not a good trend.

But I am determined to be able to display hi rez clips. I guess I'll see if there is a way to turn off any post processing options that might be on.

- Tom

[tfries]

Hi Tom,

I have been playing around the last few days with XVID and some clips from my HiPix. I was using a 1 minute 1080i file with GKnot and DIVX3,4 and XVID. Each was reduced to 688x384, and deinterlaced. At first I tried 1200kB/s which gave a file size around 9.3Mb. There was alot of blocking in each case. At 3000kB/s and XVID, it looks ok and the file size is 22Mb. I am still going to play around with different resolutions.

I am running a test with a 720p file now. The second pass is running. I'll know more tomorrow. I did a full compress of this movie with GKnow and SBC and it actually looks pretty good, unless you look closely for blocking.

I also tried your clip which had a hard time on my work machine. I'll give it a try at home this weekend.

Tom

[trbarry]

We are up against a different set of constraints here than in usual caps & rips. The problem isn't just to save disk space but to find a compromise that looks like good HDTV and yet can still be played on current machines. I think it is very close.

It seems somewhere around the 4-5 mbits range you can make a pretty decent 1280x720p video that still wouldn't be embarassingly bad a few years from now if everybody really had big displays that could show that at full resolutions. But also somewhere arount 4-5 mbits current machines start to lag in performance, causing it to turn into a stuttering slide show.

With better compression (Xvid b-frames?) we will soon probably be able to store 720p in 3-4 instead of 4-6 mbits. And with faster machines or hardware IDCT or motion comp XviD support we would probably be able to display at full speed with little problem. At the high resolutions I'm not sure how much post processing is even needed so there may be some savings there since I guess high resolution macro blocks are smaller to the eye on a big screen.

These data rates already can put a HDTV movie on a $2 XviD DVD-R. We mostly just can't yet play the darn things.

Anybody know how much work has been done optimizing the Xvid player speed yet? Are there still some obvious things that could be done? I've never looked at the code but if it is like DVD2AVI there probably are some parts of it I wouldn't understand easily.

- Tom

[OUTPinged_]

tbarry, dont forget that it is the peak bitrate that matters for decompressing.

this makes things even worse. there were some divx3 encodes where bitrate jumped to 5mbit for a couple of scenes. they couldnt play well with postprocessing at 933 machine. now imagine same with 1024x res.

guess one will need 2+ghz p4 at least to play these sweeties well.

[OUTPinged_]

btw, the 11mb clip looks really blocky even in virtualdub, it looks liek it just doesnt get itself enough bits.

tbarry, could you make higher bitrate encode of that clip?

[macdaddy]

And with faster machines or hardware IDCT or motion comp XviD support we would probably be able to display at full speed with little problem.

Don't the new sigma cards have mpeg4 support, which should work for XviD?

[OUTPinged_]

sure. but have you seen one selling anywhere? does it decode any mpeg4 stream? is its power enough to decode 720p?

[Razor04]

The XCard is not being released till March 28th, so no one has one to sell yet. The website for the card is:

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/xcard.htm

[trbarry]

Outpinged_ -

There are some macro blocks in the CBS graphics even in the 19.3 mpeg2 original. But I introduced some more.

How can I limit the max bit rate? Can a min quant do that?

And how can I turn off all post processing using Nic's DSF? Nothing useful happens if I just right click on the filter.

I think I'm going to first redo the clip in a form more people can play, something like 3.5 mbps, but with only mp3 sound, and decimated to only 15 fps. It's really video source at 30 fps. I cheated by dropping it to 24 just hoping more folks could play it. So in some ways 15 would be smoother anyway. But it would have higher bits/pixel at 3.5 mbps @ 15 fps.

- Tom

[trbarry]

Don't the new sigma cards have mpeg4 support, which should work for XviD?

Razor04, macdaddy -

I asked the question of some guy from Sigma Designs (I think) over on AVS. IIRC the first version of that card will only handle 480 lines, though it can upscale it. But another one is planned.

- Tom

[trbarry]

The file www.trbarry.com/Its_All_Here.zip now contains the same 720p sample using only mp3 sound for more cpu friendly processing. I also dropped the frame rate to only 15 fps so most machines can keep up with it and there are a few more bits / pixel, at the same 4.5 mbps rate.

- Tom