ffdshow development

[QQ]

yea, i was going to edit my first post, but then i noticed i can't delete my 2nd and 3rd one (read - i thought of it too late).

sorry, im tired..

[codecmax]

Originally posted by Mr.Shine
Yes, there is a problem with overlay in ffdshow, since the first build where the "Use overlay mixer" checkbox started to have 3 states: checked, unchecked and grayed. In checked state, WMP will fail to render the file, the other 2 settings (unchecked and grayed) will disable overlay in WMP (I tried 6.4 only).

There are "cheats" to get it to use overlay, though. Uncheck "Use overlay mixer" in ffdshow and do one of the following: add a filter that installs itself after ffdshow in the directshow chain and allows for enabling overlay (e.g. DivXG400 in Extended Overlay mode - disadvantage is that DivXG400 only supports YUY2, so there will be an unnecessary color space conversion). This should work with any player, including WMP.
use BSPlayer and enable overlay there.
use MPC or ZoomPlayer and specifically tell it to use the Overlay Mixer instead of "System Default".I don't know what happens if you try to use VMR or VMR9, as my display drivers don't support VMR.

Well I tried using VMR9 with zoomplayer and the latest alpha FFDshow.

When I enabled Overlay mixer, whether fully checked or grayed, the result is the same, the sound would play, but there would be no picture.

Of course, not checking the box solved the problem.

The thing is overlay is very important for video playback, most of the videos I have seen are too dark, and the gamma,brightness and contrast controls are very important.

[QQ]

ffdshow includes other controls for processing picture, but yes, problem should be fixed - together with post-processing problem.

[eLupus]

You can't use overlay mixer with VMR9. VMR9 includes its own color controls, it does depend on support from the video card though. It doesn't surprise me that ffdshow will behave erraticly with overlay mixer enabled and when using VMR9.

Try using vmr9 in ZP with overlay mixer disabled, and bring up the color controls. If they work, your videocards driver supports color controls, otherwise you can try updating your drivers. For some stupid reason gamma is however not supported in vmr9, everything else should be though.

Regards
Joakim Plate

[QQ]

overlay mixer doesnt work with VMR7 or Old Renderer (as in MPC) either. It worked fine with all of them prior to some specific alpha which I can't recall now.

[Owen]

Come on people. What is all this fuss about overlay control and VMR9.
If you are using ffdshow, then use "picture properties" to adjust Gamma, Contrast, Brightness, Color etc and leave your overlay or VMR9 adjustments at default.
This works better anyway.
Adjusting overlay controls to fare away from defaults can degrade quality.

Owen

[oddball]

I have noticed that if I set XviD in ffdshow to decode DiVX5.x content I get an exception and the player crashes (Any player). This is no matter if I use Nic's or Koepi's XviD builds or any version of ffdshow that lets you change the decoder from the libavcodec.

Anyone else experienced this? The reason I prefered to use XviD as the decoder was to avoid the greenout bug. I am sure I have seen that occur on DiVX5 material as well as XviD using libavcodec.

[athos]

Good news, I think I solved the gcc/nasm problem. It seems it had something to do with Cygwin. Expect a proper release soon (still no official SF alpha though) unless I run into more problems.

Edit: Well libavcodec compiles with MingW's gcc/nasm dist, but not the rest. The two seems to have problems to coexist, and ffmpeg is written for cygwin. I guess I'll have to wait for an update to cygwin or something for this to work.

[HarryM]

@Milan, @Athos: I have one wish for future versions of ffdshow. Can you add support 'additional black bars' for up, bottom, left, right side separately? Actually only horizontal (left, right together) or vertical bars (up, bottom together) is supported.

I need this for precise vertical centering TV output at ATI Radeon (videos is situated a bit bottom with full TV overscan).

[Pasqui]

Originally posted by athos
ffmpeg is written for cygwin. I guess I'll have to wait for an update to cygwin or something for this to work.

As stated on FFmpeg website (http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC24) , ffmpeg can be compiled with MinGW/Msys. i personnaly did it with success.

Cheers,

Pasqui.

[athos]

ok its not ffmpeg then, but some parts of ffdshow seems to be written for cygwin.

[Blight]

Another issue (not sure with latest version) is that you can't have multiple versions of ffdshow decoding 2 xvid streams from the same media file at the same time.

[Owen]

I have some things for the ffdshow-ffvfw wish list.

1. RGB color correction (Preferably with Contrast, Brightness, Gamma for each RGB channel)

2. The ability to use the same filter more then once in the filter chain. (Could ffdshow be loaded twice to do this?)


Regards,


Owen

[athos]

New release: ffdshow-20031128.exe (http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/ffdshow-20031128.exe)
Changelog: ffdshow-changelog.txt (http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/ffdshow-changelog.txt)

Not much new in the changelog, but I managed to compile libavcodec, mplayer, libmad and libmpeg2 with MinGW/gcc/nasm to take advantage of the assembler stuff.

I could not compile ffvfw. I guess this is because milan is merging ffdshow and ffvfw, so we'll just have to wait until this is finished.

Edit: Updated installer to include ff_libmad.dll

[Soulhunter]

2. The ability to use the same filter more then once in the filter chain. (Could ffdshow be loaded twice to do this?)

Yeah... Ive already requested this, but with no feedback till now ! :(

PS: THX athos for the new release... ;)

Bye

[arno]

I just tried the latest Athos ffdshow release and there are still some things broken:
- Nic's postprocessing doesn't work at all. When used the player just crashes. I think this is broken since May, now.
- The mod16 fix (changelog) doesn't seem to work for a movie of mine: DivX3 with a resolution of 720x405.

[thop]

seems to work ok here, except that mplayer/nic postprocessing seem to have no effect at all, even if i put everything to the MAX.

[Soulhunter]

just tried the latest Athos ffdshow release and there are still some things broken:
And a other thing... ;)

The resizing function seems not to work correctly !!!

When I resize the picture to full screen (ffdshow intern) and use "keep original AR" it only zooms the picture inside the window... :confused:

Means, the size is changed, but I only see a part of it (inside the default window) !!!

Bye

[winman]

This version does not seem to decode the mp4v FourCC from 3ivx splitter...

[BMan]

Originally posted by oddball
I have noticed that if I set XviD in ffdshow to decode DiVX5.x content I get an exception and the player crashes (Any player).
same here, except it also crashes while set to libavcodec...and just with this new build...
i had got a similar problem with the 20030523 build on my old system, but seems to be working on my freshly installed windows now...

guess it's 0523 for me then...

[BoNz1]

athos, I heard milan got h.264 decoding in ffdshow. Would it be possible for you make a new build of ffdshow? I would do it myself but directx9sdk hates me :(

[athos]

Originally posted by BoNz1
athos, I heard milan got h.264 decoding in ffdshow. Would it be possible for you make a new build of ffdshow? I would do it myself but directx9sdk hates me :(

I checked this out from cvs 20031128, latest update to cvs was 20031017. i will make a new build if you tell me how to get h-264 support.

[BoNz1]

Ok, it looks like he hasn't updated the cvs yet so sorry I guess I jumped the gun a little but he did say that it is working so it should be in there soon I would think ;).

[arno]

It seems that since release 20030927, using the gamma-correction of "Picture Properties" causes an immediate crash of ffdshow (or at least the player its using). I think it has something to do with the optimization code used for it which is not compatible with my CPU. I have a Pentium III-500MHz. Athos, could you please have a look at it?

[athos]

I tried with the latest build, and gamma correction works just fine here (have P4). Did you try with the same build? For the build before i used Intels compiler, with which I have had some problems with crashing before (maybe I used some unstable flags or something).

[arno]

Originally posted by athos
I tried with the latest build, and gamma correction works just fine here (have P4). Did you try with the same build? For the build before i used Intels compiler, with which I have had some problems with crashing before (maybe I used some unstable flags or something).

What do you mean by "same build"? To be clear this is what happens
- I tried builds 20030927, 20031028, 20031128 which all don't work with gamma correction enabled on my my P3.
- previous builds ( <= 20030816) seem to work fine however.

p.s. : I reported it before. But are you aware of the fact that Nic's postprocessing is still broken (and now has been since the release of 20030523 ? I've tested this bug on several machines (PIII, K6 & Duron) and all cause an immediate crash of the player.

[athos]

ok, i thought it might have been a problem with the last build. nics pp works for me (doesnt crash, although i have a hard time seeing any difference to no pp, is this what you mean? that it doesnt do anything?). this must be a problem with the code, and not my compile, since all flags are targeted towards Pentium or better architecture, and thus P3 should be no problem.

perhaps we shouldnt draw to many conclusions though, as milan has asked me not to put up any official builds since 200305 for the reason that he doesnt feel it is in a stable state.

[arno]

Originally posted by athos
ok, i thought it might have been a problem with the last build. nics pp works for me (doesnt crash, although i have a hard time seeing any difference to no pp, is this what you mean? that it doesnt do anything?). this must be a problem with the code, and not my compile, since all flags are targeted towards Pentium or better architecture, and thus P3 should be no problem.

perhaps we shouldnt draw to many conclusions though, as milan has asked me not to put up any official builds since 200305 for the reason that he doesnt feel it is in a stable state.

With Nic's PostProcessing enabled it crashes ("This program performed an illegal operation ....") the player (tried with several players). Tested on both Pentium III-500MHz & AMD Duron 1.2GHz.

[sysKin]

Hi everyone,

I have problems decoding xvid dev-api-4 with "packed bitstream" option, when there is more than one b-frame in the row.

In theory, ffdshow decodes all frames and puts them in correct order. In practice, they are not shown with constant framerate. I can't really tell which frame is shown for a fraction of the time and which gets shown longer :( (too fast) but if I use direcshowsource() in avisynth, AVS is able to fix the jerkyness by just showing one frame every 40ms...

I confirmed that all frames are decoded, by opening directshowsource() avs in virtualdubmod.

I tried 20030523 and Athos' 20031028 and got more or less the same result (more or less: the unnoficial new build was always jerky here, but it's much worse with packed bitstream).

I hope one of you can take a look, because XviD 1.0beta can create perfect packed bitstream videos :) and I'd like to use this option :)

Regards,
Radek

[raistlin2k]

I have found a strange decoding bug in FFDShow:

I encoded a chapter of LOTR - The Two Towers using DivX 5.0.5 & XVID 1.0 beta to compare the quality. therefore I used FFDShow as Decoder to have the quality not being different because of different decoders.

Using FFDSHow 2003-05-23 I found a decoding error in the DivX movie. It must be a decoding of FFDShow because using DivX decoder the error is gone.

So I upgraded to FFDShow 2003-11-28. Voila, the error is gone in the DivX encoded avi, BUT IT APPEARS NOW IN THE XVID ENCODED, the same error at the same situation.

Strange!!

Well, I thought, no problem, let's enable XVID as decoder inside FFDSHow, but it seems that the aloha decoder cannot be used inside of FFDshow, it only works by disabling FFDshow completely, but then I have only XVID decoder without any post-processing.

I also tried DivX Decoder for decoding XVID & it works 100%, without any decoding errors, but the DivX Post-processing takes twice CPU-power.

I really hope that FFDShow will be fixed, so I can use it for all my DivX AND my Xvid encoded movies again.

Thanks
Raist

[Danzel]

@raistlin2k

Do you want to tell us what the decoding error is that you saw/got when using ffdshow?
If its a graphical error then perhaps you could try the xvid / simple idct (which ever one isnt selected).

Danzel.

[raistlin2k]

@Danzel

It's a graphical error, appearing in a zoom-out in chapter 30 of the LOTR -The two towers- DVD.

as already mentioned ,Selecting XVID IDCT in FFDSHow 28/11/2003 doesn't work, the player crashes. In FFDSHow 3/1/2003 the "Use XVID" is even greyed out, although XVID is installed properly, playback using only XVID (wthout ffdshow) works.

Perhaps the XVID decoder has changed in 1.0 beta so it doesn't work anymore inside ffdshow?

Raist

[Vern Dias]

More info on the broken gamma in the picture properties on several of the latest builds:

It is only broken when the Luninance Offset is not set to "0". In other words, you can't use both luminance offset and gamma at the same time.

Leaving either one set to default allows the other to be used.

Vern Dias

[dimzon]

Bug found at resize feature!

Seems like FFDShow does'nt keep original aspect ratio!
When I use 20030523 bild it work's fine!
I have 720*304 video
I set resize to 800*600 (my VideoCard does'nt work properly when width not mod 32)
Under 20030523 i got nice LETTERBOXED (black zones ot top and bottom) image with width scaled to 800 and video height is scaled proportionaly original aspect ratio (no aspect ratio changed)

Under last athos bild i got scaled to 800*600 image with aspect ratio changed to 4:3 (no letterboxing)

sorry for my poor english

[arno]

Originally posted by arno
With Nic's PostProcessing enabled it crashes ("This program performed an illegal operation ....") the player (tried with several players). Tested on both Pentium III-500MHz & AMD Duron 1.2GHz.

Dear Athos,

I did some additional testing: Completely removed ffdshow, removed registry keys, clean install of November 2003 build of ffdshow & only enabled postprocessing & checked Nic's. This is what happens with various settings:
- It works (no crash) when I (via "Custom) enable ALL postprocess settings except "Chroma Dering".

- The odd thing is when I use automatic quality control, it only does NOT crash when the slider is in the minimum setting (0, no postprocessing), it doesn't crash. The previous finding would suggest that it should work up to slider setting 6 (which doesn't enable chroma dering, which is enabled only with setting 7).

- It also works when I initially configure ffdshow to use mplayer postprocessing (or no postproc), and during movie play change it (back) to Nic's.

- It doesn't happen with *every* DivX movies. About 50% of my movies seems to suffer from this issue. The other part just runs fine. Although I'm unable to find out what the working/non-working movies have in common.

I'm puzzled, but I hope you can (finally) figure out what causes this problem and fix it.

[dimzon]

Originally posted by arno

- It doesn't happen with *every* DivX movies. About 50% of my movies seems to suffer from this issue. The other part just runs fine. Although I'm unable to find out what the working/non-working movies have in common.

Seems like DivX 5.0.5 with B-frames and GMC

[arno]

Originally posted by dimzon
Seems like DivX 5.0.5 with B-frames and GMC

Nope. Seems mostly DivX3.11 movies that cause the problem. And maybe even *exclusivly* DivX3.11 (no probs with DivX5 & XviD), although I'm not sure (yet).

[dimzon]

Originally posted by arno
Nope. Seems mostly DivX3.11 movies that cause the problem. And maybe even *exclusivly* DivX3.11 (no probs with DivX5 & XviD), although I'm not sure (yet).
Hmm. In my case it will never crush on DivX3.11
Maybe becoze I use not last ffdshow build (i use 200305xx)
I have huge DivX collection at home and I can test it more carefully at weekend.

I will try to do that,if I will find problem AVI and I will send the part of AVI and ffdshow settings to test issue...

sorry for my poor english, i'm russian...

[dimzon]

Originally posted by dimzon
Bug found at resize feature!

Seems like FFDShow does'nt keep original aspect ratio!


http://dimzon541.narod.ru/resize-bug.zip - screenshots (only 80K)

[dapipa]

hi!i've noticed that resizing bug a long time ago:ffdshow20030523 is the last build which keeps correct aspect ratio when resizing,at least on my computer:-(interesting is,when i set the aspect ratio manually to the value shown left of(i think)KEEP ORIGINAL ASPECT RATIO radio button,resizing works correctly...p.s.well,i'm not the only one:it isn't working on dimzon's computer too,but i didn't noticed his post before:-)

[dimzon]

Originally posted by dapipa
it isn't working on dimzon's computer too,but i didn't noticed his post before:-)
it is'n working at both my PC (at office and at home)

[arno]

Originally posted by arno
With Nic's PostProcessing enabled it crashes ("This program performed an illegal operation ....") the player (tried with several players). Tested on both Pentium III-500MHz & AMD Duron 1.2GHz.

I turns out that the Nic's PostProcessing crash-bug can only be triggered with BSPlayer somehow. I was confused because the gamma-correction crash-bug intervened my investigation.

I used MediaPlayer 6.4 for testing and this seems to work fine. Although I'm not sure whether to blame BSPlayer or ffdshow. It always used to work with BS Player (& older ffdshow versions), so for now I'm pointing the finger at ffdshow.

Athos, could you look into this issue with this new information (-> try to reproduce the bug yourself with BS Player?).

[dimzon]

Originally posted by arno
I used MediaPlayer 6.4 for testing and this seems to work fine. Although I'm not sure whether to blame BSPlayer or ffdshow. It always used to work with BS Player (& older ffdshow versions), so for now I'm pointing the finger at ffdshow.

Seem's like not exatly BSPlayer but YV12 color space...

[mikeson]

@milan:

As sysKin mentioned in previous page, is there a possibility you would implement decoding 'packed bitstream' in ffdshow? It would be really usefull IMHO. :)

BTW thanks for your great work! ;)

[LigH]

Just to remind you...

The "orange-blue" bug was not yet fixed, although Milan told me he though he found the reason (must have something to do with fixed rounding bugs during the development from DivX 5.0.1/2 towards 5.0.3++). The increasing color displacement during P frames (reset on each I frame) only occur when decoding material encoded with DivX versions up to 5.0.2 as far as we found out.

[bond]

@milan

1) it seems the latest ffdshow build from athos doesnt register the "mp4v" 4cc anymore (it still registers "MP4V")!
because of that ffdshow currently doesnt work with .mp4 files!

2) btw. it would be great if you could also add the NDIG 4cc, which is the official 4cc of the nero digital mpeg-4 codec!

3) shitowax from 3ivx reported that the video decoder also register the PCM mediatypes

[bond]

aspect ratio

atm first mpeg-4 codecs (3ivx and xvid) offer the possibility to store a par in the mpeg-4 bitstream

there are two different possibilities to play this stored ar in a correct way in dshow:
1) use the nero video decoder filter (which comes with aheads tools)
2) with the 3ivx decoder after doing the following:
*) mux the 3ivx/xvid output avi with the 3ivx dshow muxer to .mp4
*) remux the video stream with the 3ivx dshow splitter to .avi
*) play the resulting .avi with the correct ar with the 3ivx dshow video decoder

would be great if ffdshow could also supports this :)

[midiboy]

Hi guys !

I really hope you can help or at least explain the problems I am having with ffdshow.

I have experienced major stuttering on file playback on my system which I could not get rid of, not even with reclock. My system is not too slow for mpeg4 playback, it consists of the following components:

Asus P4P800 Deluxe board, latest BIOS
Hyperthreading on ( tried without too )
P42.6C @ 3.2 Ghz ( tried without overclocking too )
Matrox P650 videocard
Sim2 HT300+ projector on second DVI
2x512MB DDR 400 RAM
2x Hitachi SATA harddiscs
Maudio 1010LT audiocard, SPDIF to receiver, latest driver

Windows XP SR1, all patches installed
Dirext X 9.0b
Zoom Player Pro 3.2 (using Overlay Mixer btw.)
Windvd 4.5 filters
elecard demux
ffdshow ( tried last "offical" and all the silent releases since)
AC3 Filter
reclock 1.2 ( tried earlier versions also )

Projector is able to natively display at 48, 50 and 60Hz, without upconverting to 60Hz so with reclock it should be able to achieve absolutely stutterfree playback.

However, it never worked. It sometimes works for a few minutes or seconds but sooner or later, major stuttering appears.

After trying everything else I could think of ( like disconnecting USB devices, reinstalling Windows with only above setup, etc. ) I deinstalled ffdshow and instead installed the 3ivx decoders from this site: 3ivx site (http://www.3ivx.com/download/index.html)

Guess what, stuttering disappeared immediately and completely. Now, I reinstalled ffdshow and the stuttering appeared again. I then deactivated all the codecs in the ffdshow setup and my system was again stutterfree.

Just as a sidenote: i have not (!) enabled any of the processing features of ffdshow, not one. The only thing I had ffdshow installed for was for it´s decoding abilities so the argument that my system is too weak and therefore stutters isn´t viable.

As I said, I have tried a lot of ffdshow versions. Even the official builds, like the 20030424 build caused stuttering, as did the latest silent releases.

Can anyone explain this please or even better, make ffdshow perform stutterfree ?? :cool:

Another problem, that only appeared after the 20030424 build and which I wrote about earlier in this thread is still there with the latest silent build by the way.

With the 20030424 build, video will correctly appear on both monitors of my videocard. With all the builds since, ffdshow will freeze Zoom player when video is opened directly on the second monitor. It works ok if the video opens on the first monitor and is being dragged to the second afterwards. Very strange, but reproducable each and every time not only on my Matrox card but also on an ATI Radeon card I had earlier.

Anyway, ffdshow is nice and free and all but I cannot use it if those bugs are not corrected.

Thanks for your help !
Alex

[oddball]

Oi Milan. How close are we to another official release? It's been over 6 months already. :)

[BlindWanderer]

first i would like to apologies for some of my noobish bug reports on SF (as i was a noob when i posted them).

what i would like to see is the ability to chain the ffdshow-audio and ffdshow-video together for avisynth scripts, so you can in fact do real avisynth script editing in ffdshow.

Also a little bug(?) i noticed in the avisynth part of ffdshow. avisynth isn't told the total number of frames even when ffdshow knows the number. (currently it reports the same number every time).

I happily await the next silent release in January.