View Full Version : Canopus ProCoder


WarpEnterprises
22nd September 2002, 22:57
At the german forum (http://www.dvd-svcd-forum.de/) this encoder is discussed quite in detail.
Now I think it would be interesting if someone here around did some tests.
Here are some results (hope I sum up correctly):

+ better quality than any other encoder, at least for some sources (truly interlaced video), using "Mastering Quality" and with relative low bitrates.
This can be so pronounced, that it is impossible to get the quality for standard SVCD bitrate and DV-interlaced source with another encoder even by tweaking/tuning matrices,... !

- quite slow (slower than TMPG@Highest), some users even reported a steady decline of the speed throughout the video to very low values

- the setting which produces the best quality ("field structure") is quite incompatible on standalone players

- no direct Avisynth possible

- quite expensive

° few settings, may be a little TOO few (e.g. there is no MIN-bitrate, no luminance range, no real GOP,...)

° some stream parameters (quant scale, scan order, frame type) are not fixed with the same encode settings but change depending on the video content (-> difficult to analyse)

° the quality is of course not achieved by miracles but at least partly by a sophisticated pre-filtering, which causes a slight blurring but VERY few macroblocks or mosquito noise.

° the program has a nice GUI but is by far not so universal as TMPG

ronnylov
24th September 2002, 16:13
I have done some tests but not encoded to VCD or SVCD. I encoded to DVD half D1 with settings that also could be used for XSVCD (352x576 PAL, max bitrate 3100, average 2200).

The results was the best I have seen yet. Better than TMPGEnc and CCE! The picture quality is softer than TMPGEnc but there is no macroblocks and it does high motion scenes very good at low bitrates. Highly recommended encoder! But the downside is the price. But there is a free demo version available for testing...

The bad thing is that there is no minimum bitrate setting when encoding VBR. That can cause problems on standalone players to playback as SVCD. I noticed valleys down to around 300 kbit/s in bitrateviewer and some players have problems below 1150 kbit/s. But you may still get nice results in CBR mode!

However the VBR-files worked well on DVD-R!