dffshow filter

[athos]

New build is up.

new stuff (and i quote milan):
libavcodec is updated and should decode XviD qpel correctly.

Missing translation strings are handled without crashing cfg dialog (at least
I hope).

Warpsharp is nicer, but slower - I'll try to MMX optimize it

Gradual denoise uses original integer SSE routine.

Framerate doubling by frames averaging (looks quite good, even without scene change
detection) - can be enabled on deinterlace page.

And few others small fixes and enhancements

I'm sorry, but no resizing rewrite nor better black borders control yet.

But in source code you can enable DScaler's filters support -
preliminary and propably not fully correct, but at least I can test
those filters without capture board

[iago]

@athos and milan

A possible bug report: Using the latest (20021029) build (only "XVID" checked in the Codecs tab; "Use XviD" unchecked), I can't decode rips done with Nic's 23/10/02 build using B-frames. All I get is blocks all around. With the 20021014-se build I didn't have this problem. Btw, I'm using ZoomPlayer 2.80.

One more point: when I check both "XVID" and "Use XviD" in the Codecs tab, ZoomPlayer 2.80 crashes (both with 20021014-se and 20021029 builds).

Any help would be appreciated.

best regards,
iago

edit: all the points mentioned above apply to Nic's 29/10/02 build as well.

[easyfab]

Originally posted by iago
@athos and milan

A possible bug report: Using the latest (20021029) build (only "XVID" checked in the Codecs tab; "Use XviD" unchecked), I can't decode rips done with Nic's 23/10/02 build using B-frames. All I get is blocks all around.




+1
All my vids with b-frames are blocky(from differents xvid builds).
I first think it was ZP 2.9 rc1 that i've just install but mplayer 6.4 does the same.
With xvi.dll check it freeze and using nic's decoder all is ok.

[iago]

-> using nic's decoder all is ok.

@easyfab

Yes, I can confirm that. Using Nic's DSF there's no problem with B-frames decoding.

regards,
iago

[wizzzard]

Hello,

I have some strange points with the upgraded de-noise. Before I used the version from the 3rd of October. I see a decrease of picture quality. When I use the same value I have less de-noise (19), so less that it's not a big difference to nothing. When I increase the values I see the de-noise effect, but I have a softening of the picture (which is logical).

Milan, is this possible?

Addition: After some further testing I'm shure that there is in decrease in picture quality with the upgraded de-noise. I use it for DVD's only with a Readeon VE and a Athlon XP 1900+.

[CavalloPazzo]

Enabling padding bug and disabling autodetect in miscellaneus seems to work with Xvid-bframe, even if latest version of ffshow sometimes crash the player. I haven't tested enough to know if it crashes anyway with other streams and without enabling these options.
Edit:
Mplayer 6.4 crashes every time I try to open a second file, and zoomplayer when i try to access directshow property page of the second file I 've opened (ly if I've open property page of the first file too) With zoom player the error message is "access violation at address 024cdab0 in module "ffdshow.ax"" or "access violation at address 024cdab0 in module "USER32.dll".

[Smiff]

when autodetect workarounds is enabled, could you please show which workarounds are in use?

i'm still getting a lot of player crashes from ffdshow when changing files, this makes playlists (zoomplayer is what i use) almost unusable... anyone else?

[Xenoproctologist]

Horrendous luminance flickering when luminance level fix and frame doubling are both enabled.

[WorldBook]

This error occured in earlier version of this FFDSHOW filter. I tried the newest version and this error presists. Here is some detailed information. WHen I try to playback divx 5 content I recieve "an illegal operation error":

YPLAYER executed an invalid instruction in
module FFDSHOW.AX at 0187:0349dbf0.
Registers:
EAX=00ef594c CS=0187 EIP=0349dbf0 EFLGS=00010206
EBX=000000bc SS=018f ESP=0079f624 EBP=0079fa64
ECX=00ef594c DS=018f ESI=00ef594c FS=46a7
EDX=00ef594c ES=018f EDI=028cff48 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
0f 77 8d b5 d4 fb ff ff bf cc cb 52 03 8a 17 47
Stack dump:
0079f7b4 80000000 0079fa94 7ffce570 0079fab8 0066aed8 0079fa94 00000017 0079f7d8 7ff54fb8 0079fa78 7ff2b890 00000003 0079f674 00000001 00000000

I've heard a lot of positive things about the fdfshow filter. I'd love to be able to make it work on my PC. :)

[ookzDVD]

I think the 1010 build is the most stable for me, decoding all most
all divx and xvid with b-frame, etc, without problem.

[WorldBook]

Where can I download the 1010 build from? thanks :)

[ookzDVD]

@WorldBook,

try this link :
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ffdshow/ffdshow-20021010.exe?download

goodluck! ;)

[grahf]

I'm not sure if this artifact has been brought to the ffdshow developers attention before: excuse me if it has. Anyway, with any divx3 (and possibly other mpeg4, not sure) content I seem to get periodic horizontal lines smearing the picture. They slowly fade into view, then disappear, only to return 10-20 seconds later.
A picture of the horizontal lines in png format capped from an anime encode:
picture (http://members.shaw.ca/jeremy.jj/ffdshow_artifacts1.png)

I'm using the Oct 29th build of ffdshow, but previous builds exhibited this too (the last stable build I believe as well). Turning over divx3 decoding to the divx5 decoder filter relieves the problem; so its not the source file(s). fyi I run win2k with a p4 and a geforce4 w/ latest drivers.

I can post more pics if you need them (though the 'grab now' screenshot feature in ffdshow only seems to work sometimes), thanks :D

[bill_baroud]

IDCT
If you see periodically appearing faint horizontal lines in the movie or colors are slightly changing, try to select different IDCT routine


... from the IDCT tab of ffdshow :D
(miscellaneous)

[WorldBook]

@ookzDVD

Thanks for the advice. However, I tried that build. I recieve 2 different error messages it doesn't seem to work. Any other ideas would be appreciated :) Thanks

[grahf]

Originally posted by bill_baroud
... from the IDCT tab of ffdshow :D
(miscellaneous)

Thanks! Changing from Xvid idct seems to fix the problem. Any opinions on the best idct to use? Also is mplayer or Nic's postproc superior? Cheers :D

[Vern Dias]

Are others having these issues or am I doing something wrong here?

FFDSHOW won't work properly with WinDVD4 or CoolDVD. I have issues with the video freezing on a single frame when using either of these players while the audio continues to play.

PowerDVD XP's video decoder output pin won't connect to FFDSHOW's input pin.

Sonic Cineplayer is the only one I have found to work reasonably well, but even it shows a green flash when I hit play.

I have done all my testing with Zoomplayer and I am only playing DVD's.

Thanks in advance.

Vern Dias

[Smiff]

hi, it's very quiet around here, is everything ok? ;)

grahf, i can tell you mplayer's PP uses a lot less CPU time (at least on one of my PCs).

[athos]

Milan has been working on, among other things:
Framerate doubling, as proposed in this (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36361) thread. Currently only the simplest averaging algorithm is implemented, but it is SSE optimzied.
DScaler support
Perspective correction, as requested here (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=616130&group_id=53761&atid=471492)
Fixing the Win98 bugs
More things that I don't remember currently

A new build is expected tomorrow or in a few days.

[Smiff]

hi athos, great news. The loss of ffdshow would be a disaster for my ahem viewing habits ;).

I have one (new?) problem to report - often when leaving the ffdshow config, i find my Win2k shell has crashed (have to restart the windows shell). Anyone else report this? Any ideas what might be happening? no other app i have does this, very strange.

[Smiff]

athos, reading milan's reply to that keystone request, he doesn't seem to have understood correctly. It's the ability to relocate any corner to an arbritary position inside the rectangle, creating a trapezoid type shape. So some kind of linear distortion is applied to the whole image so it is no long rectangular. Hope this makes sense.

edit: here's the first pics google returned:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/Research/Projector/keystone.html

[athos]

Originally posted by Smiff
I have one (new?) problem to report - often when leaving the ffdshow config, i find my Win2k shell has crashed (have to restart the windows shell). Anyone else report this? Any ideas what might be happening? no other app i have does this, very strange.

What build are you using? This might have been fixed:
2002-10-25 08:39 milan_cutka

hopefully fixed cfg dialog crashing with incomplete translations

[athos]

New alpha build up:

ffdshow-20021113.exe
   Download (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ffdshow/ffdshow-20021113.exe?download)

   Notes/ChangeLog (http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=122106)

[Pasqui]

Hi milan,
I just tried athos' new alpha build (ffdshow-20021113.exe) and Nic's Postprocessing does not work anymore. Setting it to level 6 gives me the same result as no postprocessing at all. This was not the case with alpha release ffdshow-20021014-se.exe. Mplayer's PP work properly.

Best regards,

Pasqui.

[NiTroGen]

Originally posted by Smiff
hi athos, great news. The loss of ffdshow would be a disaster for my ahem viewing habits ;).

I have one (new?) problem to report - often when leaving the ffdshow config, i find my Win2k shell has crashed (have to restart the windows shell). Anyone else report this? Any ideas what might be happening? no other app i have does this, very strange.

Do you use DVobSub for viewing subtitles? I have exactly the same problem with my Win2K shell, but only when running ffdshow config AND DVobSub at the same time.

[Smiff]

Originally posted by NiTroGen
Do you use DVobSub for viewing subtitles? I have exactly the same problem with my Win2K shell, but only when running ffdshow config AND DVobSub at the same time.

Yes i do... always have dVobSub loaded. Good question. ffdshow has it's own (not good enough, no offense) subtitle support.. maybe some kind of conflict milan? On a seperate but related note, what kind of colourspace conversion are going on with this setup (ffdshow+dvobsub)?

[gabest]

Could you please test this version of dvobsub together with ffdshow? DVobSub_2.19.exe (http://vobsub.edensrising.com/gettest.php/DVobSub_2.19.exe)

[milan]

I tested DVobSub 2.18 quicky and as it seems, the shell freezes when DVobSub is used together with ffdshow, but only when ffdshow uses some MMX optimized image filter with emms instruction at end. It seems quite strange to me.
But what's more important, DVobSub 2.19 works correctly.

[wotef]

hi, don't know if this is an xvid build or ffdshow issue but bframes decode as if frames are being dropped with koepi's 14th November build and 13th November ffdshow...when ffdshow codecs screen is set to "xvid" and "use xvid" (*packed bitstream unchecked)

the video plays at the correct framerate when xvid is checked but "use xvid" is left unchecked

in every other case, i can't get b-frames to decode properly without a garbled image

[Smiff]

sorry i'm not exactly sure what i was doing to get it to crash... if milan says its ok now, i'd take his word for it :) I will try it as much as possible.

[taylormadearmy]

When I use ffdshow for playback of divx or xvid, I cannot view fullscreen.

When I go to full screen I momentarily get fullscreen then on the next keyframe the video shrinks into the bottom left hand of the screen and plays at 100% size.

This happens whether or not ffdshow is using xvid for playback. I notice on the sourceforge website that someone else is having the same problem.

Any one else seeing this? I get it with at least the last 2 builds on sourceforge.

[KyleK]

now you're mentioning this: I noticed the same weird behaviour on the computer of a friend of mine. He had some quite old graphics Card, ATi Rage32 i believe (im not 100% sure). I figured it was something with his drivers.
I got a ATi Radeon 8500, never saw the thing on my PC.

[Vern Dias]

I have noticed that using the unsharp mask makes pans jerky.

Disabling the unsharp mask restores normal motion to pans.

I am using ffdshow, Sonic Cineplayer 1.5, unsharp mask at 15, but the unsharp mask value doesn't seem to make a difference.

Using a 2 gig P4, processor at 20% to 25%.

Vern Dias

[Chibi Jasmin]

My 2 cents for the black border thing:

DivXG400 black borders are done by really adding black borders to the video, thereby changing resolution (let's say you have 640 x 272 input video with 10% overscan compensation, output video is 704x272 then, whereby the added pixels on left and right are the black borders). AFAIK no resizing process is involved, but unfortunately DivXG400 operates in YUV2 colorspace.

ffdshow "adds" black borders by resizing the video, which I personally think is no good solution (quality loss through image processing, speed impact), if one just wants the borders and nothing else for tv overscan or similar reasons. But ffdshow can operate in yv12 colorspace.

I understood you (milan) want to rewrite black border code. I don't know where your plans are going, but I'd really like to see the best of both worlds (DivXG400 and ffdshow) on this issue combined: ADDING black borders (not resizing) like DivXG400 does and doing this in YV12 colorspace...would that be possible?

[athos]

I have found a couple of bugs too:
* MSMPEG4V3 doesnt seem to work. The picture is screwed, seems every horisontal line has the x offset wrong, the picture is all diagonal. The test file worked with ms decoder, so nothing wrong there.
* TomsMoComp Deinterlacer gives me a solid green image, i tried different "effort" settings.

[wizzzard]

Hello,

I hae a question to the use of DScaler filters.

First I will say that this is a great feature and a great idea of team work.

My questions:

1) I can select a dscaler filter through but how can I select more than one or are all filters in the path automatically selected?

2) In the dscaler filter dialog box is always a checkbox with the filters name. I thought it's to de-activate or activate but it has no effect to check or un-check it. The only way to de-activate the DS-filter is with the main check box. Is this intended or just unfinished?

[milan]

1) I can select a dscaler filter through but how can I select more than one or are all filters in the path automatically selected?


Only one DScaler filter can be active - it's the one selected in the "Filter" combobox. I will remove this limitation and let DScaler filter behave like other ffdshow image filters, but this will require some rewrite, because number of available DScaler filters can vary and ffdshow can't handle this yet.


2) In the dscaler filter dialog box is always a checkbox with the filters name. I thought it's to de-activate or activate but it has no effect to check or un-check it. The only way to de-activate the DS-filter is with the main check box. Is this intended or just unfinished?


This is used by DScaler and turns filter on/off. ffdshow uses it's own checkboxes instead and I'll remove that checkbox from DScaler filter configuration dialog.

BTW I found a bug in ffdshow's DScaler filters handling code and some filters may not work as expected. It's fixed in CVS and now I'm trying to get DScaler deinterlacers working.


TomsMoComp Deinterlacer gives me a solid green image, i tried different "effort" settings.


TomsMoComp deinterlacer is not working yet. trbarry just released yv12 version and I'll try to add it to ffdshow. It seems that ffdshow will have two possibilities to use TomsMoComp: internal YV12 and external DScaler YUY2 plugin.


MSMPEG4V3 doesnt seem to work. The picture is screwed, seems every horisontal line has the x offset wrong, the picture is all diagonal. The test file worked with ms decoder, so nothing wrong there.

I assume the width of picture is not divisable by 16. Try to use ffdshow's internal resizing (expand to next multiply of 16 with method None).


I just tried athos' new alpha build (ffdshow-20021113.exe) and Nic's Postprocessing does not work anymore. Setting it to level 6 gives me the same result as no postprocessing at all. This was not the case with alpha release ffdshow-20021014-se.exe. Mplayer's PP work properly.


It's fixed now. Michael Niedermayer changed libavcodec and mplayer postprocessing routines to use one byte per quantizer and there is now one quantizer for 16x16 block of pixels and not for 8x8 as previous. There is code in ffdshow which converts this array so it can be used by Nic's postprocessing routines, but it was buggy. It's fixed in CVS now.

[kilg0r3]

[Feature Request]

It would be nice to have a noise algo that does not make the makro blocks visible, also with strong settings. at the moment the noise seems to be more dense around the edges of macroblocks.

Noise sliders: 1. Grain size, 2. Movement velocity, 3. Noise contrast.

[Question]

What does the 'Process whole image' switch do?

Thanks and congrats for this great tool!

[milan]

New noise algorithm: I can try to do this or to search if something similar doesn't exists already

Process whole image: after resizing, image may have black borders and this switch makes it possible to decide if following filters should process only picture itself (for example noise - no need to add noise to borders) or black borders too (drawing subtitles).

[kilg0r3]

i see that this is not a high priority issue. anyway, i'd be althemore happy if you could do it, as i can't do it of course. :)

[Chibi Jasmin]

Originally posted by Chibi Jasmin
My 2 cents for the black border thing:

DivXG400 black borders are done by really adding black borders to the video, thereby changing resolution (let's say you have 640 x 272 input video with 10% overscan compensation, output video is 704x272 then, whereby the added pixels on left and right are the black borders). AFAIK no resizing process is involved, but unfortunately DivXG400 operates in YUV2 colorspace.

ffdshow "adds" black borders by resizing the video, which I personally think is no good solution (quality loss through image processing, speed impact), if one just wants the borders and nothing else for tv overscan or similar reasons. But ffdshow can operate in yv12 colorspace.

I understood you (milan) want to rewrite black border code. I don't know where your plans are going, but I'd really like to see the best of both worlds (DivXG400 and ffdshow) on this issue combined: ADDING black borders (not resizing) like DivXG400 does and doing this in YV12 colorspace...would that be possible?

@milan: Maybe you didn't feel like answering this, maybe you overlooked...anyway, I'd still appreciate your input on this one...

[milan]

I'm sorry, but I realy overlooked this post.

I know I promised I'll rework the resizing/aspect/borders, but it was much more interesting for me to add new functionality (DScaler plugins support) than working on something which is in ffdshow already (although not optimal). And I had to fix the most critical bugs to make ffdshow usable on Win9x.

My TODO:
1. get DScaler deinterlacers working (maybe today or tomorrow)
2. release new build (I fixed few bugs)
3. and 4. rewrite resizing and add ability to dynamically load and display image filters - I'm not sure which I'll do first, both of these would be quite difficult.

... and of course fix bugs.

Now you can add black borders by setting output size or aspect ratio and specifying None as resizing method. This is done very fast by just copying old image to new destination rectangle. I know this is propably not what you want, because you cannot spectify exactly how wide the borders should be (in pixels or percents) and the image is always centered.

BTW it would realy make resizing much easier to handle if I would be able to change the size of output video during playback not just when initializing decoding. But I'm afraid it's not possible.

EDIT:
More on dynamic filters loading/displaying: now when there are many useful filters available (DScaler plugins, AVIsynth 2.5 YV12 filters), it's not sufficient to have 10 or more filters hardcoded and always displayed in list. ffdshow has to handle varying number of filters and to display just few of them (user should be able to select them, similar to VirtualDub). Side effect of implementing this correcly would be possibility to add one filter twice or more to processing queue (useful for subtitles). To achieve this quite big rewrite of ffdshow will be needed.

[Chibi Jasmin]

Originally posted by milan
Now you can add black borders by setting output size or aspect ratio and specifying None as resizing method. This is done very fast by just copying old image to new destination rectangle. I know this is propably not what you want, because you cannot spectify exactly how wide the borders should be (in pixels or percents) and the image is always centered.


Hmm...I must have done something wrong last time I tried that...I know some people requested more, but centered image would be sufficient for me...I will try again...maybe I got something wrong...thanx for hinting me again to this...keep up the great work! Of course having an option to automatically add x % or x pixels would still be great :D

UPDATE: Great, I got it too work :-) Must have done something wrong last time...now I got my borders in YV12...just have to adjust the rectangle size by hand now, but works fine...thanx...

[drebel]

Trying to create a bridge with a thread in the forum of Xvid.org ,i have a similar problem with ffdshow 13/11/02 : color bleeding only when "xvid and qpel bug" option is enabled.

I followed some of the suggestions(disabling some or all of the options of my VideoRendener(DirectDraw options)to understand if the problem is caused by my overlay,but no luck...

I own a Geforce2MX which theoretically doesnt have these probs in YUV2 or YV12.I'm attaching a capture of the scene to show what i mean:

Autodetect all alone works fine.Any explanations?
Thx in advance
regards,
george

[MaTTeR]

Hi Milan,

First, let me thank you for this excellent gem we all love and know as ffdshow.

A small request(I hope)...Is it possible to add more options to OSD? Most of us are always doing multiple filter and codec tests and doing this I find the OSD info to be very valuable. I wonder if such things as source FPS, decoding FPS, filename, bitrate and output color space could be added as OSD options. These would be most helpful to tweak addicts:D

One last thing, ffdshow always displays 0% CPU load on all my machines with several different builds and different settings. Is this function not implemented yet? I didn't see mention of it in the documentation or the accurate deblocking explanation. Many thx for all the efforts.

[sekxx]

On my machine ffdshow display CPU usage betwenn 50% (no post processing) and 100% full PP and noise (duron 600 @ 950Mhz).
You must have a very powerfull computer ;)

[MaTTeR]

Originally posted by sekxx
You must have a very powerfull computer ;) Well I might consider that on the dual AMD 1600 PC but I'm seeing 0% CPU load on a single PIII 850 system as well. The third system is a dual PIII 850 running XP(uhg) and it also displays 0%. Perhaps ffdshow is making a call to the Windoze built-in counters which I always disable on all my boxes?? Just thought of that...

[Blight]

The CPU usage is bull, it's never accurate.

For me, playing a 720x576 xvid clip, I get audio desync due to CPU maxing out and yet ffdshow is reported as only using 60% of the CPU. Dropping post processing gets the audio to sync.

Basically, don't trust what you see in this. Oh, and it also means that the auto-postprocessing setting basically doesn't really work.

[athos]

I put up a new _UNOFFICIAL_ alpha build today at http://ffdshow.sekxx.org/ffdshow-20021125-p4.exe
Note that this is from a snapshot taken in the middle of milan's work, therefore some things may be broken. Hence no official alpha yet.

Also note that this build is optimized exclusively for pentium4, and probably doesnt work/works bad on other processors. I wanted to try if targeting a specific processor makes any difference. If you have a P4, give it a try and say what you think. I used -march=pentium4 -mcpu=pentium4 -O3 for gcc and /G7 /O3 /QaxW /QxW for ICL 7.

So, please not that this build is (1) unofficial, hence not on sourceforge, and (2) exclusively for pentium 4.

There will be an official release soon.

[kilg0r3]

this might be of interest. there are some problems with color representation (rainbow effects) with xvid clips when 'use xvid' is not checked.

see here
http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-allgeife8/usexvid-yes.jpg
and here
http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-allgeife8/usexvid-no.jpg

the clip was encoded with bframes only.