VSS Codec and H264

[gino25]

there is a new beta 3 preview here

http://www.vsofts.com/codec/h264_download_beta3.html


who do test this ?

bye

[Ramirez]

Hey thx :), gonna test it ASAP; I hope they've fixed this "hang on key-frame insertion" thing.

[Sirber]

I just hope decoding is fast!

Ok.. it's not a codec. it's a console encoder like throea.

[stax76]

I would also be interested in a Microsoft vs Real comparison because Micosoft codec is VFW compatible

Edit: sorry wanted to post in the real vs xvid topic

[Ramirez]

Sirber what should we do with that stuff?,are these guys from Vanguard Soft joking or what?:devil: :p

[Sirber]

I think they want to slave us all. :scared:

lol

It's like a technology demo. It's still not in a VFW format. It will be soon. H264 bases changed so they have to recode it.

[deXtoRious]

Does anyone knows of a release date for the VFW version? Also, has anyone tried to compare the quality between h.264 and VSS H264?

[Sirber]

@deXtoRious

Usualy I receive a mail with a new beta from VSS is released. I havent for this one.

About VSS and h.264, I like more VSS, it's more lamer frendly ;)

[deXtoRious]

Agreed. I could freely encode clips with VSS (~1.5fps) and watch them. I couln't run h.264 at all and from what I heard, it's ~10 times slower... But is there a difference in quality?

[Sirber]

I don't know... it's based on the same code.

[deXtoRious]

Possibly VSS traded some part of quality for speed... It's just a theory, though, and I hope it's wrong.

[Sirber]

For speed vs quality, at slow it's like h.264. At normal and up, the motion estimation engine is tweaked for speed instead of quality.

[deXtoRious]

Understood, thanks. I'll test some clips with both settings to see if there is any visible difference.

[Sirber]

I don't use H264 yet, my 2000+ can't decompress it in realtime tor 720x and 640x rez at 24FPS. :(

[deXtoRious]

That's strange, my 2000+ can't either...:D Just convert it to HuffYuv and THEN watch it... So don't make clips long, 500 frames are more than enough.

[Sirber]

I made a test with a anime in 640x480, Vampire Princess Miyu, and at the same bitrate (350kbps), The one in H264, the rain was better but the ovreal quality was better in RV9.

That's why I'm a RV9 Nerd :D

[deXtoRious]

I made a test with Resident Evil trailer at 800kbps with XVID, 3IVX, VSS H264 and DIVX5. 3ivx and divx5 were quite similar, xvid was slightly better, but many artifacts still remained. H264 was true DVD quality.

[Sirber]

What about RV9?????

[deXtoRious]

I didn't use RV9 then. And now I don't have that trailer anymore. I'll do a new test as soon as I find a decent high motion trailer of some kind...

[alexcyn]

Originally posted by deXtoRious
Does anyone knows of a release date for the VFW version? Also, has anyone tried to compare the quality between h.264 and VSS H264?
We plan to release VFW & DirectShow for Beta3 next week. Beta3 has better compression and conforms to newest H.264 JM 6.1 verification model.

Regarding quality - our tests show that decoder is about 1.5-2 times faster than reference software. Encoder performance depends on compression mode:
- In slow mode (full conformance with JM) encoder is ~1.5 times faster than reference (same compression ratio);
- In normal mode (using some VSS patented algorithms) encoder is 3-4 times faster than reference (compression is 2-3% worse);
- In fast mode (normal mode plus some algorithms simplification) encoder is up to 7 times faster than reference (compression is ~5-8% worse);
= Alexei Doilnitsyn, VSS Inc. =

[gino25]

thank you to all developer.

bye

[Sirber]

@alexcyn

Hi

That's great news! I have a question: Will the decoder support 780x480 @24FPS on a 1 GHz machine?

[scorchED]

great news!

[Selur]

Cool, can't wait to test the new beta :)

"decoder is about 1.5-2 times faster than reference software"
So it should decode fine with my Athlon XP 2000+ :D

Cu Selur

[Sirber]

Now that we'll have a great video codec, I need to find a great audio codec that can encode at 32kbps and 64kbps with great quality. RealAudio is good but don't work with OGM/AVI.

[CompuKid101]

Originally posted by Sirber
Now that we'll have a great video codec, I need to find a great audio codec that can encode at 32kbps and 64kbps with great quality. RealAudio is good but don't work with OGM/AVI.

RealAudio is NOT good. OGG is the best out there... even more so with low bitrate audio. :)

Try encoding with a -1 quality for REALLY low bitrate! :D

[Sirber]

Encode a song at 64kbps with Vorbis. Encode the same song with Real Audio. The one in RealAudio will be better. Try at 32kbps too. Vorbis can't compete with RealAudio.

You don't trust me? Look here

http://ekei.com/audio/

Try things before posting :devil:

[Selur]

Okay, this is all going kind of offtopic, but:

"Vorbis can't compete with RealAudio."
at least with such low bitrates ;)

Sirber, did you try wma?
(As far as I remember it wasn't so bad at low datarates, but I can't remember to well,.. Normally I encode my DVD on 2 CDs ;) )

Has anyone tested how aac competes at low bitrates? (<64kBit)

Cu Selur

[fellip_nectar]

"Vorbis can't compete with RealAudio"

More correctly, Vorbis RC3 coudn't compete with Real Audio

Look at the date - March 2002 - These tests were conducted before Vorbis 1.0 came out, a release which IIRC included optimization for lower bitrates.

However IMHO Vorbis 1.0 sounds better than Real at 64kbps

[Sirber]

I tryed Vorbis 1.0 vs RealAudio (cook) and RealAudio sounds more natural with more high-freq.

WMA @64kbps sounds like Vorbis @64 some times, like for rain and wind.

[Assault]

Sorry this is going OT
@ Sirber
I want to try Real Audio with some songs but I don't know which program I could use for my test. Can you recommend anything?

Regards
Assault

[Sirber]

OT or not, here's the answer.

One day, God himself told me that I need Helix Producer to encode Real content. So the quest for the Helix Encoder began.

There is a movie about that:

Monty Python and the Helix Grail

:D

[unmei]

VSS is a nice codec but not exceptional. Contrary h dot 264 seems to be able to produce really ass-kicking results (i made a clip at 500kbit 720x576 that looks comparable to 1200kbit+ Xvid to me ) but it is faaaaaar from usable because of the speed and it seems to have the same motion detection problem as the VSS one, only less prominent.

a bit weird question :
is it possible h dot 264 gets slower the more frames you feed ? With 15 frames i get 1.5 frames a minute, with 50 frames i get a single frame every 5 minutes :s - could it bee that it tries to expand the search range over the entire clip for some weird reason (nevertheless i've set it to 8 frames) - hmm, not really important it's testing joy only, but would be interesting if anyone experienced the same anomaly (VSS is not affected, only h dot)

@selur
about AAC: im not into audio atm i just use cbr lame mp3, but a year ago i tried to figure out what is good in which bitrate range, and back then AAC seems only targeted at 160+ kbit, below 128 it produced results even worse than mp3 at the same bitrate - but well time passes and this results might really be outdated...

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by unmei

a bit weird question :
is it possible h dot 264 gets slower the more frames you feed ? With 15 frames i get 1.5 frames a minute, with 50 frames i get a single frame every 5 minutes :s - could it bee that it tries to expand the search range over the entire clip for some weird reason (nevertheless i've set it to 8 frames) - hmm, not really important it's testing joy only, but would be interesting if anyone experienced the same anomaly (VSS is not affected, only h dot)


This can be because multiple reference frames, but 5 is the maximum, so the encoding can progressively slowing in the first 5 frames, but after that the speed remains constant.

BTW, h.264 is really superior to all alternatives, just a proper implementation is not exist yet. It needs some time.

[PerCIVaL]

In the new beta (jm61 spec), it seems the quantizer values have been changed. Using a quantizer of 30 for P-frames (31 for I) I'm getting an average bitrate of 19000 kbit/s.

Or am I doing something wrong?

[Sirber]

Do you like movies on 35 CDs? :p

[PerCIVaL]

Lol, maybe they're planning on inventing a 30gb cd-r along the final release ;-)

at quantizers I/P 31/30 this is what I get.

Frame Bit/pic QP SnrY SnrU SnrV Time(ms) Frm/Fld

0(I) 705672 31 31.7192 31.6530 31.6438 3047 FRM
1(P) 727840 30 31.5367 30.2833 30.3291 4547 FRM 432
2(P) 728296 30 31.5749 30.3381 30.3385 5156 FRM 432
3(P) 732968 30 31.5696 30.3234 30.3328 5750 FRM 432
4(P) 730872 30 31.5593 30.2697 30.2970 6359 FRM 432
5(P) 733160 30 31.5594 30.3364 30.2724 6985 FRM 432
6(P) 733400 30 31.5454 30.2739 30.3138 7015 FRM 432
7(P) 733624 30 31.5544 30.3065 30.2912 7344 FRM 432
8(P) 729664 30 31.5724 30.3238 30.3085 7219 FRM 432
9(P) 727928 30 31.5587 30.3097 30.2716 7172 FRM 432

notice the ~700000 bit/frame.

But I repeat it's very much possible that I'm doing something wrong/stupid here.

[Selur]

They propably just changed the scaling of the quantizers,.. ;)
Quantizer 1 in Xvid != Quantizer 1 in h264 != Quantizer 1 in hdot264 ....

They all use differend scaling e.g. choose a range from 1-32 or 1-250 ...

So don't look at the quantizers, look at the resulting size and quality. I know this makes comparing harder, but hey none of the codec is a final, so this is the way it is kind of ment to be :)

Cu Selur

[vinkes]

Originally posted by Sirber
I tryed Vorbis 1.0 vs RealAudio (cook) and RealAudio sounds more natural with more high-freq.

WMA @64kbps sounds like Vorbis @64 some times, like for rain and wind.

<offtopic>

Hi sirber,

I saw your discussion about ogg vorbis and aac, perhaps you should look at this:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=33110&highlight=ogg+vorbis


Regards

[Sirber]

I made LOTR:EE at 64kbps and it's DVD quality :) I made few films like the matrix at 64kbps with vorbis, and in the Bar, I can't hear the music, it's just plain, raw noise.

[gino25]

what day the new beta3 will be released?

[Sirber]

Originally posted by vinkes
<offtopic>

Hi sirber,

I saw your discussion about ogg vorbis and aac, perhaps you should look at this:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=33110&highlight=ogg+vorbis


Regards

By now I know where to find things :p. Read all the tread before posting sutch(?) things. What I said was kinda related to H264, whitch is a excellent low-bitrate video codec, because we need also a low-bitrate audio codec to use with. Don't tell me that MP3@32kps and Vorbis@32kbps are good... :devil:

@gino25

I don't know. Sometimes, they work fast, sometimes not. Beta3 seems the second choice.

[vinkes]

Hi Sirber,

I didn't mean to say that aac is a bad audio-codec, I'm just trying to say that I like vorbis more than aac. Just because you like aac and I like vorbis, that doesn't mean that any of us is right or wrong.
And please don't tell me to real all the threads, I did. My low post-count doesn't mean I'm a noob.


Regards,

[Sirber]

Originally posted by vinkes
Hi Sirber,

I didn't mean to say that aac is a bad audio-codec, I'm just trying to say that I like vorbis more than aac. Just because you like aac and I like vorbis, that doesn't mean that any of us is right or wrong.
And please don't tell me to real all the threads, I did. My low post-count doesn't mean I'm a noob.


Regards,

If you say that I like ACC, it because you didn't read THIS tread. I said I like Real Audio. BTW there is no aac codec...

[vinkes]

@ Sirber,

You're right, there is no aac codec. I mixed it up with ra audio.
Al the time I was talking about ra audio, not the aac.
(stupid me)


Regards,

[Sirber]

No prob :)

I have a question: Did you ever try RealAudio?

[Doom9]

I just got word from the developers.. beta3 won't be out this week.

[Sirber]

:(

That's bad news...

[gino25]

:( :( :( :( :(

[Selur]

No,....:(