RealVideo 9 Information Thread Discussion

[karl_lillevold]

no, the new High Quality mode (with high complexity too though) will be included in the next milestone build.

[Sirber]

Will it be backward-compatible with decoders?

[karl_lillevold]

yes

[31 Flavas]

Can the next milestone, for that matter the existing milestones, be used by the Helix Producer Plus GUI?

i.e. Can I just copy the new producer.exe and codec folder over the existing ones?

[karl_lillevold]

no, unfortunately, it's not that easy. The most general solution is to use the GUI to create a job file, save it as jobfile.rpjf, then run the new command line producer with producer -j jobfile.rpjf. Before this you can edit the job file and add the options for the new high quality mode.

I have also added reg keys though, for convenient settings of these options without editing the job file.

I think I will also provide instructions for how to plug the new encoder DLL into the old GUI producer, then at least the improved compression efficiency will be availble (with the reg key settings).

[kilg0r3]

Where can I get some info this High Quality mode thing?

[slavickas]

https://helix-producer.helixcommunity.org/specs/Producer9.2/9.2Release/index.htm

[kilg0r3]

i am so goddam lazy sometimes :D

yet, i found only something about the high complexity mode is this synonymous with high quality mode.

Btw is this related to what xvid does with vhq?

@Dark Cracker?
I hope there will be a checkbox for this nice thingy. sorry, couldN#t resist :D

[karl_lillevold]

Even though the custom codec option exists in the current milestone, it does not yet have the intended behavior, and the result is a slower encoder, without all the improvement. This will be included in the next Milestone, at which point I will also publish some details as to the differences between the different numbers above 65. I hope a setting will be included in AutoRV9, but it will also be available with a simple reg key, for backwards compatibility with the GUI Helix Producer and older versions of other tools.

[Sirber]

As soon as the next milestone will be out, zadude will include in in RMFactory.

[Dark-Cracker]

hi,

for sure this option will be added :)
i think i will try to publish a new beta in few days (my exams will be finished soon :) )

Bye.

[kilg0r3]

@Karl
ey! nudge, nudge, ... any dates? .. nudge. 'nowhatImean? nudge, wink, nudge?

[iwod]

The new Producer 9.2 M3 is already out. I have read the whole page and spec but i still can not find anything about this new high quality mode. Can somebody point me to the exact place to read about it.

And dark Cracker, where can i get a 1.3 beta version??

[karl_lillevold]

sorry, not there yet, you have to wait for 9.2 M4.

[Sirber]

@Karl

Can you explain what exactly is that HQ mode? :D

@All

The lastest mplayer can now play RM files, but the seeking doesn't work wet.

[karl_lillevold]

yes, I will let you know when it is available, which will take a couple of weeks, I am afraid. I just spoke with Producer team, and the next Milestone, M4, should be out in about two weeks. It is not this this feature , which I am pretty much done with, that's holding it up, but other work.

I think there will be three new modes, in addition to what has been default until now, in lack of better terms, let's just call them:

Default(0): improved efficiency for high action
High(1) : same as (0) + better mode decisions, better representation of high motion
Higher(2) : same as (1) + very high accuracy motion representation
Highest(3): same as (2) + best possible mode decisions

as you can see, there is some improvement even for the default mode.

(0) same encoding time as before
(1) will take about 2X encoding time compared to default
(2) about 2.8X default
(3) about 3.5X default

The bitstreams will be fully backwards compatible, decoding speed will not be affected.

As always, the improvement will depend on content and bitrate, perhaps in some cases hardly noticable, while some cases, quite impressive. More later.

[iwod]

sorry........... i just reliaze something.... and that is espcially with ainme. Is that sometimes don't change much or even not changing at all for two or 3 secounds. So low framerate is good in this scence. I understand that Rv9 already support variable frame rate. But this apply to the video automatically? And if it is possible have Encoder to decide at what time should the frame rate be...( i.e User defined frame rate @ special time frame.)

And one thing that is good with this new HQ Mode. I have always think that it doesn't really matter if it take a 3+ Ghz and loads of ram to encode to a specfic format. As long as the user are able to watch the end file with a low end system. In this case RV9 has that. And i like it. I hope there is more options and enhancement to be made to the encoder that improve quality ( with higher resources / power to encode ) while staying at the same level amount of resources to decode.

[Sirber]

@Karl

That's great news.

I have a little question: What's the commandline option for audio normalization (not gain) ? You said we could use producer instead of besweet for normalization.

[karl_lillevold]

i am afraid producer does not include normalization, even though this would have been possible with 2-pass encoding. Considering how you can now (or very soon) use AC3 tracks as audio source for producer, normalization would have been useful. However, I do suspect the variation in the gain found by for instance Besweet's normalization feature, is not too great, and based on some experiments, you can use about the same 'dB' number for the audio gain in producer all the time, withou actual normalization. Producer includes a very high quality limiter, in case your gain is a little too high, so this should be no problem, rather an advantage.

[Sirber]

SO I can ask a 12db gain, and producer will "control" the gain to not go beyond the maximum?

Sorry for my english, I just woke up :D

[wing1]

@Karl,

Is there any plan that Real will provide some type of frame capture option like that in BSplayer or Vdub that can export frame/frames to either bmp/png/jpg? The work around with hardware is getting quite old :D

As for quality wise, current 9M3 is doing just fine; However, if 9M4 is promissing to be better, then all the best!

[kilg0r3]

A subtitle question:

The subtitles displayed with smil files are not part of the hardware overlay, and consequentially are not displayed on TV when using matrox' Dvd max feature. Is there any possibility to work around this?

[Sirber]

9.2M4 will kick ass. I saw a preview and it's SO GREAT!!! :D

[iwod]

Sorry Karl, Just ignore my previous post about controlable frame size. As i have ony just discovered i could do it with Avisyth.

Looking forward to to M4.

iwod

[karl_lillevold]

Just to let you know the status for the new Extra High Quality mode. I am still struggling with a very hard to catch bug. :angry: It is so non-reproducible, I can't tell how long it will take either.

[Sirber]

If it's non-reproductible and hard to catch bug, may we have an alpha test? :D

[karl_lillevold]

hey, maybe that's a good idea, considering how until now I have done all the development, optimization, testing and QA all by my lonely self, for this EHQ mode. I could use some help with the testing and QA part :cool: . I did however make great progress today, so hopefully it should be resolved soon.

[31 Flavas]

Originally posted by karl_lillevold

I did however make great progress today, so hopefully it should be resolved soon. Cool beans. Can't wait.

Good luck squishing the bug dead!

[Sirber]

Yeah!

Send it to hell!! :devil:

Can't wait for the next built :D

[karl_lillevold]

bug ( :devil: ) terminated! a misfit compiler setting led to a missing __chkstk() call in a P4 specific function, and the stack mangling that would then sometimes occur, resulted in these instances of sudden death.

The next Producer build that passes BVT should include an EHQ mode that I am quite happy with.. For certain content a quality improvement corresponding to a 30% bitrate reduction can be seen, and this is with a fully backwards compatible bitstream. On average though, and for very high bitrate content, it will be less, but for my current test encodings I can reduce the bits/pixel number quite significantly, and have the result still look very pleasing.

It will be very interesting to get some feedback. Remember though, every improvement is incremental, and it takes some time to adjust to the new mode. For instance, if you previously used such a high bitrate relative to resolution, that no compression artifacts could be seen, using the same bitrate now, you will still see no visual degradation. The improvement then would have been that you could have gotten away with a lower bitrate and still have seen no problems. I know you will ask if it can be made faster, and the answer is that every CPU cycle is spent trying to find more optimal compression parameters, and every CPU intensive function is fully MMX/SSE/SSE2 optimized. I would rather have my computer's 2.4 GHz P4 do that instead of searching for aliens in its free time :)

Will the improvement be worth the slower encoding speed? Well, certainly for me it will, but if your CPU is on the slow side, it may be too much. I have used it enough now to see the improved visual quality. I can now lower the bitrate more without seeing "stuff going on" both in the background and around edges. Of course, being the implementor, it is not possible to get more biased, but I am very happy with the result. More later.

EDIT (typo only)

[slavickas]

cool, any target release date?, btw waht is "very high bitrate content"(tm) :) ?

[The Shemeta]

Great News Karl,

When will be the new Producer build available for download? Can't wait to try it! :D

[Sirber]

Great!

About speed, it would be great to optimize for AMD too, with 3DNOW and 3DNOW2. My Athlon XP can only use MMX and SSE :(.

[iwod]

Originally posted by Sirber
Great!

About speed, it would be great to optimize for AMD too, with 3DNOW and 3DNOW2. My Athlon XP can only use MMX and SSE :(.

I think karl has already answer this question previously. I would like too since i also use AMD CPU. However to my understanding 3D Now should not be much use in this scenerio.

[31 Flavas]

Originally posted by karl_lillevold

It will be very interesting to get some feedback [on the RV9 EHQ improvements]. I'll be anxious to try out your improvements too. Just let me/us know what will need to be added to (or changed in) the .rpjf and if any switches need to be used, when the new milestone is released.

[wing1]

will this change be available in the audience file or project file?

[karl_lillevold]

status update: still waiting for a 'good' build before anything can be posted. No known bugs in the RV9 encoder, but it is a large system, and sometimes unrelated build busters are checked in elsewhere in the system :( Development for other 9.2 features than the codec is still going strong.

In order to enable the extra high quality modes in this 1st version, one can
1) edit job file (insert codecProperties)
2) edit audience files (insert codecProperties)
3) use reg key over-rides (useful for GUI Producer with replaced encoder DLL)
4) When the GUI front-ends are updated, they will likely include these options directly (and autommatically insert the right xml code in the job or audience file)

Details later.

For the final 9.2 release these options will probably also be exposed as a top level command line parameter.

[midiguy]

hello. It's been a whole since I posted here. the new ehq mode looks pretty cool. Question though, how is that jitter thing going? I alhpa tested some DLLs for you a while back, and like I said before, it was greatly improved but not perfect. just wondering how that renderer is coming? (I ask because the nly two things holding me back from using rv9 is the jitter problem in the renderer and the excessive, uncontrollable post-processing.)

[Sirber]

Originally posted by midiguy
and the excessive, uncontrollable post-processing.)

It's not that bad, the PP. I did great encodes with no "excessive" bluring at a variety of bitrates.

[slavickas]

@Karl
is it possible to get/build new dll via cvs?

[karl_lillevold]

no, but another Milestone should be posted shortly, hopefully today or tomorrow :cool:

[karl_lillevold]

You can now get a build of Helix Producer that has RV9-EHQ:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55193

[Valky]

Karl said: "...very often I have to find out information about a RealMedia file. Specifically, I need to know the video resolution, the video bitrate, the VBR buffer, and/or the audio bitrate. Soon, also the number of channels of audio..."

I am not sure if people are familiar with tools like GSpot (doesn't support RM-files..), but yesterday I found similiar very handy software that supports ALSO RM-files!

It's called AVIcodec and you can find this freeware from here: http://avicodec.duby.info/


With this message I hope I didn't hijack anyones thread or step on anyones feet. I just wanted to share this great utility I found and I am sure there are also others who have been looking for this kind of tool. (Personally, I found DC's tool too complicated and there is information I dont need) :)

[DaWolf]

Not bad at all but for rmvb files the analyse tool delivers much more information. The shell extenstion provides more basic information than AVIcodec. Nice tool though.

Ruud

[rakaz]

Karl:

This probably isn't the right place for reporting problems with RealOne, but since you already answered a couple of other questions regarding similar problems I am going to try anyway.

The problem I am experiencing is stuttering video. If I play a rm file (no matter which codec) the video freezes in a couple of seconds. A couple of seconds later the video resumes playback. A couple of seconds later the video freezes again...

All the files I tried are loaded from my local hard drive, so this isn't a bandwidth issue. I've tried old files, new files, the test files from real.com and nothing works, so it looks like it is a player problem and not a movie file problem.

Things I looked at so far:

- Sound keeps playing even if the video freezes.

- RealOne does use a overlay. If I move the window during playback the video area lags a bit behind the player window frame, a clear sign that an overlay is being used.

- MPC also experiences the same problem, with both render types.

- Both RM and MPG files are affected. AVI files are not.

- If I look at the 'Playback Statistics' the 'Current fps' drops to 0 during the freeze. 'Frames Dropped' increases. 'Frames Displayed' also drops to 0% momentarily.

- Changing the 'Video Card Compatibility' setting does affect this problem slightly. Setting it to 'Most reliable' does increase time between freezes and the length of each freeze. The problem does not go away though.

- Changing the 'Sound Card Compatibility' settings does noet affect this problem.

- Downgrading to Real 8 does not solve the problem.

I didn't have these problems before. Only after upgrading my system they started to appear. I use Windows XP. Athlon XP 2200+, nForce 2, geForce 2MX. Latest official drivers.

[karl_lillevold]

@rakaz:
I am sorry, but this problem sounds nothing like anything I have seen before. Could I ask you to check if the CPU usage spikes when the video freezes? If there is a spike, is it possible to use the Task Manager to see which process causes the spike? Do frames drop, or does the video continue where it left off, and then out of sync with audio? If you go to Tools -> Playback statistics, then click on the Streams tab, and select the Video stream in the drop-down box, are any frames reported as dropped? Finally, you mentioned it happens for MPEG. Does it happen for MPEG in any other media player than Real?

Thanks! Also, if you are interested in trying a pre-release version of the video renderer to see if this fixes your problem, pls send me a PM with your e-mail.

[rakaz]

Could I ask you to check if the CPU usage spikes when the video freezes? If there is a spike, is it possible to use the Task Manager to see which process causes the spike?

No spikes. CPU usages around 5% - 10% overall. During a freeze RealOne CPU usages drops from around 5% to 0-1%. At the moment the video starts playing again RealOne CPU usage goes up to around 20% then drop back to normal... at least until the next freeze.

Do frames drop, or does the video continue where it left off, and then out of sync with audio?

I have seen three things happen when the video continues:
- The video suddenly begins playing again at a keyframe and I've just lost all frames during the freeze.
- The video suddenly begins playing at a i-frame and you notice some artifacts on the screen until the next keyframe.
- The video suddenly begins playing out of sync and for a second or so you can see the video is trying to get back into sync (high fps). At the moment it is back in sync it starts playing normal again. This might be important: Not all of the frames that should have been displayed during the freeze will shown. Only the last couple of seconds of the frames that should have been shown are actually shown at a high fps. So most of the frames are lost.

If you go to Tools -> Playback statistics, then click on the Streams tab, and select the Video stream in the drop-down box, are any frames reported as dropped?

What happens is this:
a) the video plays correctly:
Current: is 20fps, Frames Lost: 0, Frames Dropped: 0

b) the video freezes, audio keeps playing
Current: is going down to 0.0fps, Frames Lost: 0, Frames Dropped: 0

c) the video starts playing again
Current: is 0.0fps, Frames Lost: 0, Frames Dropped: 0

d) not more than half a second after the video starts playing
Current: is going up to 20fps, Frames Lost: 0, Frames Dropped: 263

So yes, frames are dropped.

Finally, you mentioned it happens for MPEG. Does it happen for MPEG in any other media player than Real?

It does happen with MPEG, but only when played from RealOne. If I play MPEG files from MPC (for example) everything goes fine.

Thanks! Also, if you are interested in trying a pre-release version of the video renderer to see if this fixes your problem, pls send me a PM with your e-mail.

No problem, if you need more information, or if you would like me to do some specific test I would be glad to help. PM is on the way.

[Sirber]

@Karl

Hi Karl! What's up! I have (again! :() some questions about new features of Producer 9.2. What is the new multi-channel codec? Is it based on cook? What is it's bitrate range?

Thanks for your time and keep the good work!!! :D :D :D

[karl_lillevold]

Lots of things going on, very busy, but thanks for checking in!

I will be writing a post about RA Multi-Channel shortly, its ins and outs, the different codec flavors, and how to encode RA Multi-Channel content, once I have verified how such bitstreams can be played back by the Helix Community (and readers of this forum). It will either be splay, the Helix DNA Client cmd line decoder, and/or with DLL replacements for RealOne V2. Does anyone here have more than two speakers connected to their computer ;) :p ? I don't, only for my home theater setup, but now I may just have to upgrade my computer speakers :D

In the video world, I will be experimenting with an animation mode (variable framerate encoding) for RV9. Whether or not this will actually improve anything, is not at all certain. It is not that easy to tell the difference between noise and just a small part of the animation is being updated.

[31 Flavas]

Originally posted by karl_lillevold

Does anyone here have more than two speakers connected to their computer ;) :p ? I don't, only for my home theater setup, but now I may just have to upgrade my computer speakers :D Yes, I have a 5.1 speaker system. So I can try out any multi-channel you want me to. It goes without saying, i'd also like to try out multi-channel encoding myself, too. :) :D

Edit: changed some verbage.