Windows Media 9 Series is released now

[fluor]

Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

"Compared to xvid, you should be able to get the same quality at roughly half the size, assuming similar encoding params are used for both (no fair testing one in CBR and other in VBR for example). I say "roughly" since your preference for compression artifacts may be different than mine. But you should always be able to beat it in efficiency. "
- amir, worker at microsoft, as he told us about the WM9 in September 2002.

(source: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41109 )

Well, doom9, somebody should check this codec out. And give us the important final judgement:

Will it fit a 3CD XVID-encoded movie on a 2CD WM9 Encoded Movie like Microsoft brags about? (yeh yeh, i know they say half the size, but nobody believe in that eh? ;)

[bond]

the encoder is still only for winxp and 2000! thats why i love m$ :mad:
thank god that there is Nic's WM9 Encoder (http://nic.dnsalias.com/WM9Enc.html)

[BoNz1]

Huh? There is a version for XP and then another for 98SE, Me, and 2000.
EDIT: Oops, sorry you are right it is for XP and 2000.

[rjamorim]

Originally posted by fluor
(yeh yeh, i know they say half the size, but nobody believe in that eh? ;)

Well, that really shouldn't be believed about audio, for sure. WMA9@64 is surely worse than MP3@128, although MS claims otherwise.

[bond]

Originally posted by rjamorim
WMA9@64 is surely worse than MP3@128, although MS claims otherwise. [/B]what about wma9@96 or 128 compared to MP3@128?

[rjamorim you have pm :) ]

[fluor]

Damn i tried this encoding utility. Try converting a file, but it just crashes (or i end up in windows xp desktop again). strange.

I really do think that Microsoft should fix this. All that nice codec programming, and then they destroy it all by hiring some looser to make the Encoding utility.

[Nic]

@flour: does my little encoding utility mess up too? if you follow the readme.txt right it should work fine, but shout me if there are problems because I havent had chance to test it 100%...

-Nic

[bond]

The Media Player has at least one bug: after pushing the small "open file" button my system freezes and the only way to get out is to reboot

@Nic
did you already check any changes in the codecs?

[fluor]

nic, no it was the windows media encoding program.
1. I open Start Menu\Programs\Windows Media\Windows Media Encoder
2. select the convert a file
3. doubleclick on one file

oh now i did not get a crash. now it just said something about error in 0x000 (some hex address). stupid program

[Nic]

@fluor: hopefully mine will work for you...

@bond: ill check tomorrow, but I updated the codec pretty recently. Ill see if the SDK has been updated any further.

-Nic

[rjamorim]

Originally posted by bond
what about wma9@96 or 128 compared to MP3@128?

Neither can archive transparency (the so-called "CD-quality") on most samples, that's for sure.

Then, it's more of a matter to decide which kind of artifact can you stand better. I personally can stand MP3's artifacts better, but I admit there may be some anti-MS bias there.

Besides, keep in mind that MS can play dirty here. They can say, "well, our MP3 samples at 128kbps sound surely worse than WMA at 64", but they 'forget' to mention that their samples were encoded with MP3 dist10 code (reference code, terrible quality). I never saw clarified anywhere what MP3 encoder they used for their tests (although I must admit I didn't search much either).

It's a problem with open standards, like MP3 (and AAC). There are both excellent encoders (Lame, FhG) and terrible encoders (Xing, Blade, SoloH, Cannamp, 8hz, SCMPX, Plugger...)

[rjamorim you have pm :) ]

I noticed. I'll see what can I do, and reply. :)
Thanks for the suggestion.

Regards;

R.

[RadicalEd]

Oh ho, impressive :O
The new encoder only shuts down every time I try to open a source file to encode.
:\... I can't get this encoder to work for crap. I was hoping the final release would work, but I get errors and shut downs every time I try to open something. Guess I'm using Nic's from now on.

[Sirber]

@doom9

Will you do a codec comparison with that new one? :D Personaly I don,t think I'll ever use WMV9, 1st it's M$, 2nd it's still M$. :)

[Jon Ingram]

WMA9@64 is surely worse than MP3@128, although MS claims otherwise.

Indeed. In fact, WMA@64 is sometimes surprisingly good, but more frequently really really awful, as demonstrated in ff123's recent comprehensive 64kbit/s listening test (http://ff123.net/64test/results.html):

http://ff123.net/64test/overall.gif

Note of course that this is WMA8, not WMA9, but I haven't noticed any significant improvement in audio quality. Perhaps there has been, in which case I am happy to be enlightened.

[LeonMcNichol]

Yes, this program crashes when you try to load an avi or mpg file. Once you select it, it crashes and gives you the send/don't send then and reloads the program. The only file you can load is asf, but what's the point of encoding a low res like that again? I'll have to give Nic's a try.

[Psymaster]

I've tried with Nic's and i can't get that to work either. And I'm using XP pro, too.:confused:

[temporance]

I was sceptical about installing WM9. Worried that it might mess with video/audio setups, ripping capability and report OS details back to M$. Now I have it installed my PC is doing strange things. Whenever I go to play online content, it tries to access 192.168.1.1 which is the IP of my Linksys router. Fortunately my router is password protected so it can't do anything to it. No online content plays.

Does anyone have any more information about the spyware / policeware nature of WM9? Is is safe to install?

[Nic]

Updated my encoder to the latest SDK release...
@Psymaster: what happens when you try to encode? did you install the codec off my site? did you read the readme.txt carefully? Cheers for any info.

-Nic

[oRBIT]

I've tried encoding some music for quite awhile with WMA9 beta on my XP machine and I think the audio quality is very good compared to mp3. And you who has tried the 64kbps mode, have you really activated the vbr?

[Rumata]

Originally posted by Nic
Updated my encoder to the latest SDK release...

Did you update your download page ?

[Psymaster]

Originally posted by Nic
Updated my encoder to the latest SDK release...
@Psymaster: what happens when you try to encode? did you install the codec off my site? did you read the readme.txt carefully? Cheers for any info.

-Nic


Not yet, I'm downloading now, I had the older packages, the codecs I installed was from the pack that was without DRM but it didn't work for me, as the codecs didn't show up in your encoding proggy.

[Tom Servo]

Originally posted by fluor
Will it fit a 3CD XVID-encoded movie on a 2CD WM9 Encoded Movie like Microsoft brags about? (yeh yeh, i know they say half the size, but nobody believe in that eh? ;) [/B]

Well I encoded a 15min snippet of Oceans 11 to WM9 yesterday to make a quality check, and the bitrate is around 1704kbit (so that the movie fills 2 CDs. Movie is +/- 112mins). Using WMV9 Bitrate(Peak) at 1504kbit with 2704kbit peak (nosepulled number) and 192kbit WMA9Pro. I will try to get a few screenshots of it. The ringing reduced a lot between RC and Final.

[Nic]

@rumata: yes? Whats makes you say that? it should read version 0.97b

-Nic

[Tom Servo]

Here are a few shots, in lossless PNG. I hope it doesnt blow my webservers traffic cap (dunno how much peeps read this subforum)

http://www.tomservo.cc/wm/1.png (300KB)
http://www.tomservo.cc/wm/2.png (330KB)
http://www.tomservo.cc/wm/3.png (205KB)
http://www.tomservo.cc/wm/4.png (295KB)
http://www.tomservo.cc/wm/5.png (160KB)

--edit: I tried to include a shot of his suit in the casino, it got a nice pattern. The snippet was encoded using the non-square pixel setting. So the video is actually still full 720x576 (PAL).

[Psymaster]

@Nic: I got the latest stuff from your page and I have no problems encoding scripts now...

I encoded a 10 minute clip and the quality is rather good... I would love to do a whole movie with sound and everything but it is so slow... Any chance it's caused by your app and not the codec itself?

[somebodeez]

Originally posted by temporance
I was sceptical about installing WM9. Worried that it might mess with video/audio setups, ripping capability and report OS details back to M$. .......Now I have it installed my PC is doing strange things.
Does anyone have any more information about the spyware / policeware nature of WM9? Is is safe to install?

I've heard some bad things about WMP9 that concerned me so I am not touching it until I know more about it.

[Rumata]

Originally posted by Nic
@rumata: yes? Whats makes you say that? it should read version 0.97b

-Nic
It does now. Probably an outdated proxy problem.

[Nic]

@rumata: Cool, that sometimes happens.

@psymaster: Unfortunatly not, there may be a way to speed it up, but at the cost of quality unfortunatly. Windows Media encoding has always been slow in comparison to DivX... :( nothing I can do...

Cheers,
-Nic

[karl_lillevold]

Originally posted by Nic
@psymaster: Unfortunatly not, there may be a way to speed it up, but at the cost of quality unfortunatly. Windows Media encoding has always been slow in comparison to DivX... :( nothing I can do...

Sorry, can't help myself, after all of Amir's comments about RV9.

...and WMV9 (MP@ML) is very slow compared to RV9, compressing a 50 second 640x480 clip *) 1-pass CBR 750 kbps for video, takes 50 seconds with RV9 on a dual 2.4 GHz P4. With WM9 Gold it takes 2:10, that's almost 3X. *) 23.976 fps part of the Cell trailer.

..however, I am happy to admit XviD beat us both in terms of encoding speed, coming in at 32 seconds. (Very High Motion Search, H.263 quant, no quarter pel, no GMC, ffdshow w. full post processing playback)

Quality wise (you know my bias of course, so run your own tests with your own clips and settings, instead of beating me up :) ), I would have to classify RV9 coming out best, WMV9 a little better than XviD, but visually pretty close due to its similar problems with ringing and blockiness. When you run your tests, make sure you check resulting file size for bitrate overspending...


This is with GUI encoders, preview output video, no filters, no resizing, and uncompressed I420 or IYUV input format, which if not already WM9's native format, should take neglible time to convert. If this is not correct, I will be happy to re-run the test, with the source converted to what is the fastest input format.

[midiguy]

my beef with RV9 is that you have no control over real player's post-processing!! sometimes if it *thinks* that there are a lot of artifacts, it blurs the image to HELL! I really can't tell how good/bad RV9 is until we get control of the PP.

[Jorgosch]

A word or two about the security side of things:

After installing, WM9 presented me with a choice of options that first blew me away because they sounded so well behaved?
Do you want to send your ID via the player? ... No
Do you want to use cookies? ... No
Did I want to have my privacy protected in various other ways? ... Sure!

Wow, I thought, MS is really learning and trying not to get bad publicity anymore.
Well, you wish... after finishing the installation process it tried to connect to a MS server. OK, that was probably the language packs it wanted to download for my Multilingual OS. Did it ask for confirmation? Nope.

Luckily, I have a firewall. Connection not allowed.
Then it wanted to connect to a different site. And another. Well, those are a lot of updates which are not included in the 9 MB download package... and somehow you forgot to tell us, Steve, that you secretly installed Digital Rights Management onto my computer. And left out an un-install routine (well, at least it created a rollback point).

After the program wouldn't be silent on my line, even though I had EVERYTHING humanly possible disabled in the options, I rolled back to my previous installation.

OK, the media player 9 DOES use VERY little CPU time, but somehow I don't see a lot of differences to version 8. Anyway, more reasons than not to get rid of it.

And while we're at it, please visit this site and be solidary against Microsoft's Big Brother plans:

http://www.againsttcpa.com

[Assault]

I don't like the quality of wma9 very much. It's definately worse than ogg vorbis.

Regards
Assault

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Jorgosch
A word or two about the security side of things:
Luckily, I have a firewall. Connection not allowed.
Then it wanted to connect to a different site. And another. Well, those are a lot of updates which are not included in the 9 MB download package... and somehow you forgot to tell us, Steve, that you secretly installed Digital Rights Management onto my computer. And left out an un-install routine (well, at least it created a rollback point).

Thanks for telling us. Anybody else to confirm ??

[fluor]

Please keep to the subject about VIDEO. Do NOT discuss Audio for now please.

As for tests, I still think none of you have given any interesting information. None of you have tried 2pass avg. bitrates around 700-970kbit/sec.

Keep resolution around 592x240, 512x224 or 576x320

[brutallo2002]

Thank You Jorgosch for the DRM scoop - this is the main reason I won't install WMP9!

Newbie Question: After installing WMP9, how exactly did you know that your box had DRM on it?

Thanks again.
:)

[sam_b]

I think that when a video and audio codec cannot be separated, a bad audio codec is a valid reason not to use the video codec surely, and therefore relevant?

[pcdvdguy]

According to Microsoft's product page, WM9-playback is supposed to exploit DXVA hardware (DirectX VideoAcceleration) on "next generation video cards", if possible.

So does anyone know which VGAs, if any, support WM9-video hardware acceleration? Playing MPEG-2 1920x1080i 30fps (HDTV) clips on my old Celeron-850MHz + ATI Radeon was a breeze with ATIDVD 4.1. With Divx5 (or XVid), I can barely squeeze on 1280x720 24fps (baseline),
or only 720x480 24fps (q-pel + GMC + B-frames!)

Also of note, www.s3graphics.com is claiming their upcoming GPU can accelerate MPEG-4 video decoding through its programmable video-engine. Neither NVidia (GeforceFX) nor ATI (Radeon9500/9700) make any specific claim when it comes to MPEG-4 playback.

[trbarry]

Hardware accelerated HDTV playback in something besides MPEG2 is a real issue for me too. But I'm not aware of any.

- Tom

[Dali Lama]

Has anyone noticed that when encoding in WME9 that the frame rate is like 3-5fps on playback?

This is really weird as I specifically set the video frame rate to 24 or 30fps. I am encoding an anime. I wonder if the encoder is trying to throw away duplicates like Dup or something like Real Player 9 does.

Whatever its doing, its doing it really wrong though :)

Dali

[Dali Lama]

Tom and pcdvdguy, I think ATI's media player has MPEG-4 acceleration. Something like the old ATI ALL-IN-WONDER Pro even has it I believe.

Why do I say this. My friends Celeron 766 can playback your "Its_All_Here" clip Tom?? Although he can't if he doesn't use the ATI Player that comes with the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER Pro graphics card.

Something to look into...

Dali

[Tom Servo]

As I understand it, future cards will support full WMV9 decoding thru DXVA. The talk has been that the NV30 would support it already. So now we just need someone to buy such a card and test it. lol

[thijs]

Would such a card also be able to do WMV9 encoding as this would probably significantly speed up encoding time?
Wouldn't it be great to be able to do real-time HDTV capturing in WMV9?

[NeVeRLiFt]

I do 320x240 wmv9 capture's using iuVCR and they look pretty good.
1min is 3-6.5mb and most 2hr movies captured this way are 500-700mb and look very good on my TV. Hi-resolution capture with wmv9 will need hardware support or alot faster CPU's ;)

[pcdvdguy]

http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2003/4599.html

Well it looks like Divx.com and ati.com have
announced a strategic plan to use the
Radeon9500/9700's hardware to improve Divx5
playback speed and picture-quality.

The press release makes it sound like they're
doing some kind of proprietary interface
(non-DXVA), otherwise why wouldn't the Divx
codec already support DXVA?

[jonny]

If i'm not wrong even the 9000 have some general postprocessing capabilities... it would be cool if codecs or players start using this.

[jotte_ct]

Can someone help me?
Previously I used WMEncoder (beta) to make some movies from my digital camera. I used to play them with Zoom player.
Now I installed WMPlayer 9 and when I'm trying to play those avi, the playback it's actinge like protected... the image is blinking like a stroboscope...sh** .
So, with M$ technology you are going to protect your content so well that even you can't play it anymore? Or encode with M$ and play with other players? or get rid of M$? ;-)

Thank you.

[amirm]

Commenting on encoding speed. We have 6 different WMV "complexity" settings. Lowest setting I believe is 8X faster than the slowest one and results in 20% picture qaulity loss. In our encoder, you see this option under Tools->Options-Performance (for file encoding).

At the fastest setting, you should be able to get pretty high performance. We are able to encode in real-time on dual 1.7 GHz P4.

Needless to say, if you want the best quality, move the slider to the other extreme ("better quality").

I am not sure if Nic has implmented this setting into his encoder or not. But it is there in the SDK and Encoder.

Amir
Microsoft

[CruNcher]

@ amir
I am not sure if Nic has implmented this setting into his encoder or not. But it is there in the SDK and Encoder.

hmm don't think so i made a test between wm9 (nics wm9encoder) and xvid (avs2avi) both clips have the same filesize but the WM9 looks crapy even after PP tries to smooth it you can see the extreme texture disalignment

[The Belgain]

Right. I would like to test WMV9, but the encoder doesn't accept anything as input. It crashes on mpg (VCD-res MPEG-1) files, as well as on avi's, and doesn't accept avs either. Is this a known bug/feature?

[Baalthazaar]

ATI's implementation of hardware video acceleration is VideoShader. From what I understand it aplies post-processing to an image by means of the pixel shaders on the chip. The driver CD that the Radeon 9700 shipped with should have a special edition of Realplayer that will support this feature, but it is only used on STREAMING media, so if you play an Mpeg or avi file it is unaffected.

No other media players have this feature implemented yet (that I know of) and it appears that S3 and Nvidia will each champion their own hardware solutions for video effects. Whether each of these methods are proprietary or incorporated into the DX9 spec I don't know.

A demo of this effect can be downloaded from the developer section of ATI's website along with source code, here: http://www.ati.com/developer/indexsc.html
Just look for the 'videoshader' demo. The demo lets you apply some effects to video such as fades, zooms, ripples, and color variants - nothing very useful, though you can see the potential. It requires a Radeon 9500/9700, though I believe ATI claimed some time ago that the 9000 would also be capable of these effects in time.
(sorry for the off topic)

[Nic]

@amir:
Sorry for being an idiot, lol, but I looked for that setting in the SDK recently and must have completely missed it because I didn't see it. im mainly using the wmgenprofile example in the sdk to build the encoding setting profiles, its definitely not included in there.

Ill look for it properly soon, but if you remember or come across the function/parameter/constant let me know :) You may want to get the devs to add it to wmgenprofile as many will use that as a building block (oh, and get them to change from using a DWORD to hold the fps value, 29.97 & 23.976 are too common not to)

Im currently comparing WMV & Quicktime for a client, guess which ones coming out best in quality & then guess which one the client is going to use....

Cheers,
-Nic

[CruNcher]

@ amirm
to be fair i did another test and converted the mpeg2 stream to a huffyuv video and encoded it with XviD (VirtualDubMod) 1 pass quantizer of 2 with chroma me,qpel and b-frames activated came out @ 5,79 MB (6.078.464 bytes) (speed was much faster 10 fps encoding) ok so good picture quality is awesome then i used Wm9Encoder with extreme better quality slider full to the right

Input Clip
Colorspace: YUY2
Frames : 1500
Resolution: 576x240 16:9

Settings i used

Video encoding mode: CBR
Audience : 956 Kbps
Video Codec : Windows Media Video 9
Video bit rate : 947 Kbps
Video Size : Same as video input
Frame Rate : 25 Fps
Key Frame : 5
Image quality : 90

Filesize WMV9 image quality 90 : 5,81 MB (6.098.376 bytes)
Filesize WMV9 image quality 100: 5,95 MB (6.250.376 bytes)

The picture is from the 90 quality encode raising image quality to 100 made a bigger file but quality was the same

here is my result attached if i did something wrong in comparesion please tell me on the left side is the XviD frame on the right side the WMV9 frame

[amirm]

@CruNcher

I don't see the enclosures so I can't comment on the quality. But do have some questions on the encoding.

Did you use VBR for Xvid? If so, why did you select CBR for for WMV?

If you did use CBR, the quality setting is not the same as VBR mode. The quality setting simply tells the coded whether it should drop frames if it can not maintain the quality level or not.

Does the keyframe distance of 5 seconds match what you used for Xvid?

Amir
Microsoft

[Dali Lama]

@amirm

I would like to report a bug in the command line prompts for WME 9. If I use the command prompt to encode with a custom profile, the quality settings are all messed up.

If I put video quality vbr = 90 the size is bigger than at 75?

If I use quality of 10, the video is using 10Mb/s and using the pro codec?

I think the values are in reverse or something.

The Audio quality settings also seem weird. For instance, Quality = 90 produces 192 CBR 1-Pass?

These problems are not present in the encoding app.

Thanks for your help,

Dali

P.S. Is there some tech. info about what each quality setting is really doing. Like at quality will WME switch to Pro and what quantizer is each using or what range...does it use quantizers?

[ReTroAcTive]

doesnt seem to want to work with win98. something with the codecs. it doesnt even show any video codecs in your encoder and crashes if i try to start an encode. it only shows divx;-) audio and it can encode audio with it.
so i think your encoder will work, just not the wm9 codecs.

[CruNcher]

@amirm
i think this compare is valid the XviD 1-pass Quantizer 2 does only one pass and is exactly the same as 1-pass CBR @ a bitrate of 806kbps to reach that same filesize in WMV9 CBR i had to increase the bitrate to 947kbps in the WMV9encoder how comes that this differs ?
now i did also a VBR @ 806kbps came out @ 5,92 MB (6.218.376 bytes) as u said do you think you want the compared pic side by side posted so a 1-pass XviD CBR 806kbps against a WMV9 Bit Rate VBR which does 2-pass and doesn't reach the Quality of a 1 pass XviD CBR which filesize is even lower and the picture sharper as you can see above @ the same bitrate posted ?

Slowly i beginn to think strange about WMV9 amirm sorry

ok 3rd round started now on low bitrates 419kbps WMV9 wins the race
so as it looks like it was mainly optimized for Internet Broadcasting that could explain why it's not so good in high bitrates at all if it would be possible to turn off that PP filter it would be better to compare

[zambelli]

Originally posted by Jorgosch
A word or two about the security side of things:

Luckily, I have a firewall. Connection not allowed.
Then it wanted to connect to a different site. And another. Well, those are a lot of updates which are not included in the 9 MB download package... and somehow you forgot to tell us, Steve, that you secretly installed Digital Rights Management onto my computer. And left out an un-install routine (well, at least it created a rollback point).



This is completely misleading information. DRM support has been a part of WMP ever since version 7. And notice that DRM was always supported, never forced in any shape or form. If you want to use it, you can. If you don't want to copy protect your music, you can easily disable it. Why does everyone go berserk every time DRM is even mentioned? How come merely having the option of DRM is suddenly considered a disadvantage?

As for the connecting to external websites, WMP is merely trying to connect to windowsmedia.com in order to display its Media Guide, which happens to be the default pane upon first launch. If you don't want WMP connecting to the Internet at all, you can simply select File | Work Offline and your firewall will not be bothered again. Furthermore, as you noticed, WMP9 is full of customizable privacy options. There is nothing spyware about it. Everything that even closely resembles a privacy hazzard is disabled by default.

Everything that WMP9 needs to operate is included in the install package. No other updates are necessary and nothing is ever downloaded behind the user's back. The only thing that WMP9 ever attempts to download is metadata for your CDs and media files, and even that can be disabled (although it's no different than all the programs which use CDDB).

As for the uninstall procedure, notice that WMP9 for XP is a system update for WMP8, thus making it more difficult to implement a add/remove type of uninstall procedure. WMP9 for Win98 & Win2000 does actually have a typical uninstall procedure.

[The Belgain]

Right, slight problem to do with installing the Windows Media 9 Series Codec Install Package. I try to install it (on Win2k SP3), and it says install completed successfully, but the package still appears as uninstalled in windows update, and WM9 files don't play.

Also, when trying to play DivX files with wma audio, WMP comes up with a dialog asking me wether I want to install the necessary codecs and I slect OK. They get installed and the file plays fine (with audio). However when I next play the file it asks me to install them again.

Does anyone else have these problems and what are the solutions?

[zambelli]

The WMA audio codec that is commonly associated with encoded clips is actually a hacked MS codec, also known as DivX ;-) Audio. Because it is essentially a modified MS codec, WMP thinks that the correct WMA codec is missing and it attempts to download it. When it downloads it (probably the same WMA codec that is already on the system), it attempts to play the audio - and the audio does play. However, next time you play the file, the same thing happens again.

There are two solutions to this problem:
1) install the DivX audio codec on your machine
2) stop using DivX audio. Its quality sucks.

As for WM9 codecs, it's actually unnecessary to install them on any machine with WMP7 or WMP8 because those players will automatically download WM9 codecs whenever you attempt to play any WM9 encoded media files. However, if you are trying to play WM9 files with WMP6.4, it won't work because WMP6.4 doesn't support WM9 files.