VP6 Codec Released! (was: this one is for doom9)

[C0mPr355]

http://www.on2.com/

:)

VP6 out today. enjoy.

:cool:

[Atamido]

Free for personal use - download it now (http://www.on2.com/vp6.php3#download)

[Sirber]

don't work for me with VdubMod :(

[haibane]

i got the codec.....
just encoded a short clip with 2-pass at slightly low bitrate.......
the quality is decent........
doing a longer encode to compare with xvid........
does anyone konw the difference between simpple and advanced profile?
they have the same options...........
in their help file i didn't find anything about this differnece........
Their setting file is kind of confusing.....
there is no load button, so if i click on a setting file, then it will be load.......
so before i figure it out, when i try to save my new settings, i always click on the old settings then press save, thus end up loading up the old setting.

@Sirber
it works perfectly fine on my computer with virtualdubmod. it doesn't give error messages when some setting is wrong. So, maybe u have choosed the wrong setting? Or that it doesn't load with virtualdubmod at all.

[Sirber]

just encoded a short clip with 2-pass at slightly low bitrate.......For me, low bitrate means 250kbps. Can you be more explicit (no pictures please!!!) :D

[stax76]

I made a plugin for DVX 3.52b if someone want to
test it with DVX. In the main menu go to
Extras -> Plugin Editor, paste the code below in
there, select VB as compiler and click on compile
and restart DVX

Actually this is C# syntax but it seems I introduced
a bug so VB has to be selected to compile C# and C#
has to be selected to compile VB


using DVX;
using System;

public class Plugin : DVX.Plugin
{
public Plugin()
{
if ( ! OOP.s.GetBool("VP6Added"))
{
OOP.s.Codecs.Add(new Codec.VideoCodec2("On2 VP6 Advanced Profile", "",
"vp61", "0x31367076,0,10000,0", 2, 2, Root.ClassesRoot));
OOP.s.SetBool("VP6Added", true);
}
}

public override string PluginDescription
{
get
{
return "VP6 Advanced Profile Plugin";
}
}
}


can somebody tell me which settings I have to use, I tested
the presets below and the result was extremely crappy

VP6 Advanced Profile
Two Pass - First Pass
Two Pass - Second Pass - Best Quality

[haibane]

it depends on the complexity of the clip.
without filter the clip would use about 60-70MB for xvid api3 when using a quant2 at 3 130 100.
i used vp6 at 20MB, so it's slightly low bitrate......
BTW, it seems the this codec will focus bitrate on the non-backround object in the video when bitrate is not enough biterate to spend(100-200kps ish).......
it will blur the backround alot.......
but i still need more time to observe.........

the encoding speed is almost identical to xvid with vhq4........
but first pass is faster.......

update:
I finished encoding vp6 at a normal bitrate, size similar to an xvid file of 75% size of a first pass. Overall, the vp6 looks more grainy than xvid, but keeps less details than xvid does. with the encoding setting i'm using right now, vp6 looks worse than xvid to my eye. But people who perfer more grainy picture might like it.

the vp6 setting i'm using:
Two Pass - Second Pass - Good Quality
KF interval 240
auto KF
undershoot 90
min quant 2
max quant 12<<with defaulf 56, it looks really crappy, guess i could tweak it higher to see what happens.
no resampling
variaty: 80 40 400

[Ramirez]

One thing I don't understand, why is so hard to implement even basic bitrate control?

@compr335: ?

[stax76]

there is a bitrate control, it's under the listbox of the codecs in VDM but I'm not sure if it works very well

[Ramirez]

Doesn't works, already tried that, no effect whatsoever ()

[Tommy Carrot]

Ehh, best quality mode is not too fast on the second pass... A 4 min. long test sequence takes about 90 min. on my athlonXP 1700+

I think "good quality" is good enough for me...

[haibane]

Originally posted by Dolemite
there is a bitrate control, it's under the listbox of the codecs in VDM but I'm not sure if it works very well

that works pretty well on my computer for my 2-pass encode....
isn't that's the only place to put in the bitrate for the codec?

[Tommy Carrot]

It's hard to make a direct comparison with xvid, because it cannot do constant quality encode, so the quality is very variable even on 2-pass. Some scenes are better/more detailed (than xvid), but some are very blurry.

The only way to do it if minQ=maxQ, but this is not too comfortable.

[Sirber]

Can anyone post a sample?

[bond]

edited the thread title as this one is not only for doom9 ;)

C0mPr355,
as rule 9) says plz always use a title that describes the content of your posts
thanks :)

[bond]

Better video quality than Windows Media 9, Real 9, and H.264
muhaha
ok, lets start testing :D

[Doom9]

Better video quality than Windows Media 9, Real 9, and H.264looks like they're begging for another codec comparison. Maybe I can get some use out of my overpowered, overheavy company notebook (who puts a 2.8GHz P4 into a Notebook? What about a nice low power Pentium M so that when summer returns I can site outside surfing the net for hours without having any cables around to strangle myself) after all.. Now where is XviD 1.0 (or at least a "ready for public consumption" DEV-API 4.0 build)?

[bond]

Originally posted by Ramirez
One thing I don't understand, why is so hard to implement even basic bitrate control?hm, i think that there is a bug, cause what i read from the guide .doc they seem to expect that there is a "target datarate you specify in your processing utility"
this is of course possible in vdm but with no effect (as ramirez already wrote), in fact they also mention vd as example for a video processing utility...

another bug i saw is that you are not able to load an old first pass file (*.fpf) again, as this should be possible under "settings"

i find this spatial resampling feature very interesting as it seems to lower the size of difficult frames (and upsizes these frames again during playback)
temporal resampling seems to only result in dropped frames (shouldnt be used for dvd-backups imho)

anyways, all in all it doesnt make any sense to use this codec if you are not able to hit a target filesize atm...

[Tommy Carrot]

In the select compression window in virtualdub, there is a 'use target data rate' option. Most codec has internal bitrate option, but few other use that. But be aware it's kbyte, not kbit!

I don't use VirtualdubMod, but i think it works the same way.

EDIT: it works here, with Virtualdub.

[SeeMoreDigital]

I've been using the VP6 codec with MPEGmediator 1.5!

I've been using a 26.3MB 42sec THX test file that appears on the PAL StarWars 2 DVD as a source.

My first 1pass VP6 encode came out at just 804KB. (inc audio at 56kbps). Which means that the video size is only around 500KB... I was amazed that I could still see an image!

I'm going to try and find a way of generating 2pass VBR files but I would really like to know how to set the video bitrate?

Cheers

[stax76]

I was able to adjust the quality be adjusting the max quantizer:

40 = 850 KB crappy
35 = 1.05 MB good
30 = 1.22 MB even better

source was rather hard to compress

like the docu suggests I enabled Spatial Resampling to up 20/ down 35, also I increased the max datarate to the highest possible value 1000

using 2 pass good quality is maybe 30% slower than DivX standard but gave _much_ better results

But be aware it's kbyte, not kbit!

did you get the expected size and did you use CBR or VBR end usage?

edit: I tested to use kbyte/s, it did not work here :( , so using a max quant < 40 seem to be the best method to adjust the data rate

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by Dolemite


did you get the expected size and did you use CBR or VBR end usage?


Yes, with 2-pass vbr, it was quite close to the given bitrate. But maybe it was just luck. :D

Note: i've used Virtualdub on win98se platform. As i've gathered here, the ratecontrol doesn't work with VirtualdubMod. Is it true?

[superdump]

I've found that if you actually set your own first pass file when setting it up the rate control in vdubmod does actually work on the second pass.

I set it to 105 kbytes/s and it's currently at 106 averaged over approximately 6000 frames so I'd say it's doing quite well.

2-Pass First Pass and then Second Pass Best Quality:

VBR, Progressive, Noise Reduction 0, Auto Keyframe, Max Frames Btw Keys 120 (default), Undershoot 90%, Adjust quantiser - Min 4, Max 56, Temporal Resampling - Down Watermark % 20.

Basically I used the Two Pass First Pass settings file they've included and then changed it to VBR, set my own first pass file and that's about it I think. It seems to be working just fine although it's a bit slow in best quality mode. :-)

[C0mPr355]

Gentlemen I will attempt to reply to your questions in a concise manner. However, know that it is going to take time to get used to the codec. One thing however is that Virtual Dub Mod has not been supported in our test proceedures. Meaning that I will look into this bug, but Virtual Dub should be used instead. I cannot guarantee that something will work in a "modded" app.

As far as the datarate control goes you can play around with it. And you can hit what you want to hit. Try this out for a bit:

-default has auto keyframes generated at 120. Change this to 360.
-When doing two pass encoding, playing around with the min and max Q can help to alleviate some tough areas.
-under start>settings>control panel>VP6 decoder settings.
* this area lets you select how the decode will be handled.
As you can see the "approximate film grain" is highlighted. For those of you who do not want a bit of noise in the clip you can turn this off. There are also other settings in there such as "deinterlace interlaced material" etc.

more to come...but please be patient and take time to learn the codec. I will help as best as possible.

[trbarry]

i find this spatial resampling feature very interesting as it seems to lower the size of difficult frames (and upsizes these frames again during playback)

Hey, this is an interesting feature that I've been lobbying about for some time now. If done cleverly I suspect it could be a bit better than merely overquantizing. I guess I'll go try this thing on a short HDTV clip.

- Tom

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by trbarry Hey, this is an interesting feature that I've been lobbying about for some time now. If done cleverly I suspect it could be a bit better than merely overquantizing. I guess I'll go try this thing on a short HDTV clip. ... yes, pretty interesting indeed. Would be cool if it could be combined with XviD, or any other codec, eh ? :sigh: ....

[trbarry]

Can't download. Get:

"Cannot write to the database. Please contact support@on2.com."

- Tom

[SeeMoreDigital]

It's here Tom

http://www.on2.com/vp6.php3#download

Cheers

[trbarry]

SeeMoreDigital -

Thanks, got it.

- Tom

[trbarry]

Well, I did a quick test and had sort of mixed results. I encoded 30 seconds of an HDTV football clip at 1280x720 30 FPS. I used 4 mbps (500 KBps) CBR.

The reason I often use CBR is that encoding HDTV resolutions is a lot like streaming. That is, the playback speed is often the limiting factor.

I didn't add any audio since on that test clip (and most) I just have ac3 audio and I was using vdub instead of vdubmod. That's obviously something I'll have to address since I usually use vdubmod to cut out commercials from both the video and audio.

Anyway, the results weren't too bad, pretty detailed but very grainy for a video camera source. From my experiance with Xvid & WM9 a bit rate of 4 mbps for this fast action HDTV material would be just pushing it a bit, just what I wanted. I thought VP6 did okay here.

But it would not play at 30 FPS using Zoom Player on my 2.4 Ghz P4. I was getting only about 21 FPS. Xvid and probably WM9 would have been able to handle this.

The first thing I do in these cases is try to turn off any post processing. I tried to do this in ZP by right clicking Filter Prperties and bringing up the VP6 options. VP6 seemed determined to have post processing on, including deinterlacing my progressive clip and adding grain.

Any attempt to turn these off would cause a divide by zero exception when I hit Apply or Done.

Anybody know how to turn these off? Say, a reg entry or two?

- Tom

[slavickas]

Originally posted by trbarry

...
Anybody know how to turn these off? Say, a reg entry or two?

- Tom

like C0mPr355 said have u tried in control panel, or can try this


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\On2 Technologies\Direct Show Decoder Settings]
"strPostProcessingLevel"="0"
"strDeinterlace"="0"
"strAddNoise"="0"
"strBlackLevel"="0"
"strWhiteLevel"="0"

[Sagittaire]

"Their website claims that VP6 is the best video codec on the market today, offering better image quality and faster decoding performance than WMV9, RV9, H.264 and Quicktime MPEG-4"

It's a good codec but I don't agree with that ... :devil:

[SeeMoreDigital]

I would love to spend more time testing it but I can't stand the fact I can't easily enter a 'bitrate speed' for two passes!

However, I've generated quite a few low bitrate 1pass CBR VP6 encodes. And then tried to match the file size by creating comparable DivX 5.1.1 beta and XviD encodes.... And VP6 does look very good indeed!

I think my brain cells must be dying but I would really love to know how to create 2pass VP6 files with MPEGmediator 1.5. So can anybody else find a way?

If there are any takers, I'll do a knowledge swap and let you know how to create 2pass DivX and WMV9 VCM files, using MPEGmediator. To the nearest MB!

Cheers

[The People's Elbow]

I think the real deal about overall good looking encodes is to be found in the "two pass section datarate".
Some hints:
- set variability to 100 to get pure vbr without motion compensation or the sort of algorhythm on2 is using for that kinda stuff

- the real use of min section is questionable, try 0 as a value to disable it...

- max section should be as high as u like it - it restricts the absolut maximum bitrate used in the video, compared to the average bitrate. If you want VBR go for a very high value

- at the left side: undershoot is a matter of how the file size prediction in this codec works, which i can't tell right now - short clip worked well though

- adjust quantizer should be marked, at least i had to do this, to get the datarate control in vdub to work. manipulating them is a matter of taste - again, but default values should work fine i guess

just sharing my first thoughts about this new toy, mabye much is crap, but if my informations could "enlighten" someone it had its use ;)

greetz,

Elbow!

[trbarry]

like C0mPr355 said have u tried in control panel, or can try this

Okay, that works. C0mpr355's post was right above mine but I never saw it. Stupid me. I should learn to always hit Reload before replying to a long page. In penance I'm actually sitting down to read all the doc I didn't find on the first try. Apparently I did a few things wrong.

But this codec still seems to have promise. :)

- Tom

[Blight]

The only division by zero I got is if the Gabest AVI Splitter filter is installed, I'm guessing there's some incompatibility with it somehow. The microsoft splitter seems to work ok.

I'll add association for the VP6 extension (even though it's only a renamed AVI file) and customized media profiles for VP6 in the final version of ZP 3.2.

[trbarry]

Blight -

Actually I was running an almost clean install of Win/Me on my dev/test system, built as a nuke & pave. I put it up only a couple days ago. But I've installed vdub, vdubmod, Avisynth, Xvid, VP6, and of course ZP. One of them might have provided the filter. Or Win/Me may just be TOO clean. I haven't installed any patches yet.

PM me if there is something you want me to check in graphedit or something. Otherwise if no one else has problems with ZP & VP6 I guess we can assume it's just me for some reason.

- Tom

[bond]

ok i also had time to test it now:

matrix clip (same as doom9 uses for his tests)
650kbit/s (81kbyte/s) -> setting the byterate in vdm works fine -> target was missed by ~20kbit/s

settings:
- advanced profile (wtf is the difference to simple?)
- two pass - best quality (very/too slow!!!)
- 200 Keyframes
- Min 4, Max 35 (will try 30 too as dolemite suggested)
- disabled temporal (-> no dropped frames)
- rest as described in the .doc for this bitrate range

results (compared to latest dev-api3 xvid (koepi) and divx5.1 in avscompare):
- most important thing to meantion about vp6 imo is it's very fine crispness, which i like very much
- rock stable walls (better than xvid and divx5) although sometimes details are missed, which isnt that seeable though
- low motion: sometimes good, sometimes bad
an example were vp6 did a great job is the scene where neo is using his mobile phone (many details, comparable to xvid)
wierd, but in the scene where neo is talking to trinity in front of the weapon shelf there are as good as no details!
perhaps this is caused by the spatial resampling feature, will test it without that too
- high motion: also as good as no details, comparable to rv9 in high-mo (perhaps caused by SR too)

all-in-all vp6's crispness does a really great job! people who like hvs_good for xvid know what i mean, but vp6's crispness is much finer and better than the one from hvs_good or divx5 imo
if the problems i described are really caused by SR i would absolutely recommend not to use it for dvd-backups, if SR is not the reason i would simply not use vp6 at all...
very important: note that i used "two pass - best quality" which is so slow that i definitely will never use it for dvd-backups, so to say i cant say atm if "two pass - good quality" also gives that good results as i got now!!!

is vp6 mpeg-4 compatible?

[sillKotscha]

Originally posted by bond

settings:
- advanced profile (wtf is the difference to simple?)

read (german) here... (http://heise.de/newsticker/data/vza-29.10.03-000/)

cheers Sill

[Tommy Carrot]

You know what's funny? I've made a little test with rududu and VP6, and rududu was clearly more detailed. I don't know if this is true in most cases, but i found it surprising, considering that VP6 is better than WMV9 and h.264. :)

The VP6 used 2-pass, good quality, vbr, no resampling, and the bitrate was 950 kbps. Maybe 'best quality' gives an additional quality incrementation, but it's too slow.

[Redmist]

I just tested a 96min movie (resized to 576x312 with 160kb audio) on one 700MB CD encoded at maximum quality VBR i.e. slowest. It was going to take 24hours to complete the second pass! (Athlon 1900+) Anyhow I cancelled it about 1/3 of the way through and checked out the video quality. In a word, breathtaking! Blew Xvid and DivX 5 out of the water (I'd done the same movie with both codecs) Artifacts were almost completely non-existant and those that were there were very unobtrusive. But oh what a price - 24hrs to encode a movie!

I tried a few clips at normal speed and the results were similar to Xvid i.e. a bit grainy. VP6 was maybe slightly more pleasing but it's very subjective.

Who knows? This might be the codec of the future - when we've all got 8GHz PCs. :rolleyes:

[C0mPr355]

With regards to the Spatial Resampling...I would recommend not using it unless you have a really low bitrate encode and cannot hit the datarate correctly. Because of the dyncamic downscaling of the image during compression, the image may appear to have detail missing or jagged edges along sharp lines. That is the price you pay for downscaling and then playing back at the intended res. Temporal resampling however can be used to better increase the quality at any bitrate.

As far as the slowness of compression for best quality, this is another thing that we need to work on.

[Razorblade2000]

So is it MPEG4 standard?
I'd like to test the codec because it seems to be nice for my standalone MPEG4 player (99?... was really cheap for such a nice thing to play with)...
ATM I am encoding in Linux, so I can't do a short VP6 + MP3 avi sample to test :-(

[Sharktooth]

Uhm. I think its not mpeg4 compliant but im not sure.

[SeeMoreDigital]

I have tried some VP6 encodes with my Xcard!

I tried Sigma's Xmedia player but it would not even let me input the file. So then I tried the Xcard with the JovePlayer GUI and although the file ran, all I got was audio!

So no joy I'm afraid...

Cheers

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by Razorblade2000
So is it MPEG4 standard?
I'd like to test the codec because it seems to be nice for my standalone MPEG4 player (99?... was really cheap for such a nice thing to play with)...
ATM I am encoding in Linux, so I can't do a short VP6 + MP3 avi sample to test :-(

I don't remember anyone claiming VP6 is mpeg4 compatible. Why did you think that?

[C0mPr355]

no vp6 is not mpeg4 compatible.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Tommy Carrot
I don't remember anyone claiming VP6 is mpeg4 compatible. Why did you think that? Actually, Bond asked the question Tommy!

Cheers

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
Actually, Bond asked the question Tommy!

Cheers

My bad, sorry.

[Blight]

I think the whole point of VP6 is that they write their own code so that they don't have to pay royalty for any external patents.

That would make it their own closed format (like WMV9?)

It does irk me that they rename AVI files to .VP6, I mean, it's an AVI file... if you rename it to VP6, it implies that you're using your own file format, which you're not... annoying.

Also, someone contact gabest and tell him this format doesn't work with his AVI Splitter properly.

[aicjofs]

It does irk me that they rename AVI files to .VP6, I mean, it's an AVI file... if you rename it to VP6, it implies that you're using your own file format, which you're not... annoying.

You remember the .divx extension? I agree though.

Hey SeeMoreDigital, fancy seeing you here. How was the VP6 codec in Jove player with software decoding. Did it work. I created 2 VP6 encodes for codec comparisons, haven't had time to test it on Jove yet.

I like this codec but think it is best used if you want to save space, otherwise my personal opinion is that DIVX or XVID are still better solutions for overall quality when compared with encoding time. I couldn't really notice a large differnce between the three at low bitrates and the encode time were neglegible.

[shlezman]

I'd like to share some of my impression of VP6
I like to do my tests with QCIF sources for several reasons :
1. It's MUCH faster
2. It amplifies the artifacts
3. Cleaner sources
4. Harder to control the bitrate
5. In high bitrates most codecs look good (some better)
enough apologies :rolleyes:

The VP6 Rate control isnt much accurate 3%-5% overshoots.
The artifacts look more MPEGish then WMV/RM9/H.264
VP6 is better then any MPEG4 compliant (or semi-compliant) codec, with finer details and good object extraction.
VP6 is slower then any codec (except H.264)
Any claim of On2 that VP6 is better then WMV/RM9/H.264 is a fantasy.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by aicjofs
... Hey SeeMoreDigital, fancy seeing you here. How was the VP6 codec in Jove player with software decoding. Did it work. I created 2 VP6 encodes for codec comparisons, haven't had time to test it on Jove yet. Hi aicjofs.

I'm sorry to report that 'it's a bust' on my PC! An 800MHz P3 is just not quick enough for 'forced' software decoding with the Xcard and JovePlayer (JP) - So it looks like a new motherboard and faster processor for me.... Xmas, is a comming!!!

I recieved an email from JP saying that WMV9 VCM.avi files will be supported in the next release. And that some of the issues users had with RV9.rmvb files (and hopefully their audio streams) will be resolved too! I've managed to watch RV9 files via a friends 2.8/P4 PC (with Xcard and JP) and they looked great when fed to the TV!

Maybe I should uplink an low bitrate VP6 file to JP, so this format can be included in a future release too!

Cheers

[Sagittaire]

Perfectly of were agreement with shlezman. The comparative test with the WMV9 an VP6 reached in CBR 1 pass ...? http://www.on2.com/pdf/vp6_white_paper.pdf



October 21, 2003 15

To Build The Test Clips For Windows Media
1. Downloaded the video compression manager from Microsoft.
2. Using VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/), we opened a raw clip and selected
Windows Media 9 as our compressor. (We also ran the same file through Windows
Media Encoder using settings similar to those used above to insure that we get the same
results with their standard encoder. We did get the same results.)
3. We opened the configure screen and selected the following options:
On the first tab, we did progressive frames. We did no resizing or cropping.
Advantages of TrueMotion VP6 Technology
On the Compression tab, we set:
§ Method = One-Pass CBR. ( We found that for these short clips two-pass provided
worse PSNR results.)
§ Bit Rate = We changed this parameter for each point in the graph.
§ Buffer Size = 5000 milliseconds
§ Smoother Motion - Sharper Image = 0 ( with it set at higher numbers we frequently
got frame drops which resulted in frames with a very poor PSNR. With the number at
0 we got every frame encoded and a much better PSNR number)
§ Decoder Complexity - Complex
§ Performance - All the way to the right towards Better Quality
§ Key Frame Interval - 99999. The clips used for testing are short we didn’t want
either codec to throw unnecessary keyframes.
4. Compressed the file.
5. Opened the file we just created in VirtualDub and selected compressor uncompressed.
6. Saved the file as a raw RGB file.
7. Ran the peaksnr.exe program on the file comparing it to the raw file.
8. Recorded the PSNR we got and the file size and plotted a point in the graph.


Moreover to have the best possible PSNR one needs desactiver Post-Processing of the WMV9 which is regulated to the maximum by defaut setting and which degrades much quality and the PSNR in weak bitrates.

The VP6 is a good codec but according to my test he is inferior compared with the other codec (XviD Devapi4, DivX 5.10, WMV9, RV9 EHQ)

[MemeX]

I have been playing around with a little 320x240 clip for a while, trying div3 fast/low motion, DivX5, XviD and yesterday with VP6. It's only 91 seconds and has a few still and "normal moving around people and pans", no audio, fairly clean source. I wanted to see how much I could compress this clip and it would look awful, but watchable and the subtitles properly readable. The size i was trying to hit was about 2.4mb.

VP6 really performed best imho and it was even 350kbs smaller then the rest, took a bit of tweeking to get the size up from 700kb on the first encode. It likes to blur things to avoid blocks, but at the same time keep details at "important" places, its pretty clever.

Compered to the DivX/XviD competitioners it had less blocks and about same detail and a lot less banding and smiring. Personaly I was very pleased with VP6 at this low bitrate I dont know about high-bitrate though.

MemeX

the only ridicules thing is that the audio would
be quite big compered to the video size

[Sirber]

can you try also with RV9 please?

[Sagittaire]

Here is RV9 EHQ vs VP6 VBR Best Quality

http://jfl1974.free.fr/Video/RV9-715.rar
http://jfl1974.free.fr/Video/VP6-715.rar

LOTR Trailer 640*272 715 Kbps 165 sec (compressibility 40% with XviD quant2)

[The People's Elbow]

I have some comments...
it is obvious that you did sth. very wrong with the advanced settings in vp6, because the quality fluctuation is much too high. Plz post the settings, either, and I'll keep on commenting... rv9 looks just like its supposed to do... no clear artifacts, but sometimes very noticable smearing. There are scenes in which vp6 looks better though the overall appearance is worse due to the variance of quality.

EDIT: With pp and noise enabled even this vp6 clip is sort of competitable.

greet,
Elbow!

[Human_USB]

I get great Anime encodings with VP6. I used VMD 1.5.4.1 (Build 2178) with VP6 Anvanced Profile. Here is a list of what I did;

Good Quality Fast Encoding

Target Daterate 100
Noise Reduction 0
Autokeyframe ON
Max Frames Btw Keys 320
Undershoot 90
Adjusted Quantizer ON
Minimum 1
Maximum 15
Temporal Resampling ON
Down watermark 20
Spatial Resampling ON
Down watermark 35
Up watermark 20


Out of this I got a 138 MB avi. If you wish to try it use RahXephon DVD 1 episode 2.

[trbarry]

I still have not done any really scientific testing but I think for my purposes of making 1280x720p @30 HDTV clips this codec is more or less competitive with either Xvid or WM9.

However I'm still concerned with the playback speed, decoder complexity. It seems to play faster than WM9 but not as good as Xvid. So I think I could only use it for 720p@24 clips on my current machine.

The playback performance is one of the reasons I've stuck with Xvid over WM9 so far. But once hardware HDTV players come out then I guess all bets are off and I may switch to whatever arrives first.

- Tom

[Sagittaire]

@ trbarry

For playperformance use this reg for desactived the PP of WMV9. With 0 value playperformance is very good and quality is better ...
http://jfl1974.free.fr/Video/PP-WMV9.reg


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Scrunch]
"Force Post Process Mode"=dword:00000000


@ All

Here my profil for VP6 codec.
http://jfl1974.free.fr/Video/Two%20Pass%20-%20First%20Pass%20-%20Perso.vps
http://jfl1974.free.fr/Video/Two%20Pass%20-%20Second%20Pass%20-%20Local%20File%-%20Perso.vps

[C0mPr355]

Originally posted by Blight
I think the whole point of VP6 is that they write their own code so that they don't have to pay royalty for any external patents.

That would make it their own closed format (like WMV9?)

It does irk me that they rename AVI files to .VP6, I mean, it's an AVI file... if you rename it to VP6, it implies that you're using your own file format, which you're not... annoying.

Also, someone contact gabest and tell him this format doesn't work with his AVI Splitter properly.

There is no reason why you cannot save your file as an avi. It does not have to be saved as .vp6. That is only on our website.

[Atamido]

Originally posted by C0mPr355
There is no reason why you cannot save your file as an avi. It does not have to be saved as .vp6. That is only on our website. Shouldn't you be saving it as MKV? :p

[The People's Elbow]

@Sagittaire:
Would you mind to try the lotr trailer with the following settings from the "advanced" tab?

- undershoot: sth. between "90" and "100" depends on your bitrate setting to match rv9
- adjust quantizers marked and set to min: "1" and max: "32"
- no temporal or spatial resampling
- variability: "90"
- min section: "0"
- max section: "1000"

I'm eager to know what the trailer would look like with those settings (best quality setting... though I know it's damn slow ;) )

greetz,
Elbow

[C0mPr355]

one more thing...

-for all of you compressing in VD or whatever app. please make sure that that application's form of autokeyframing is disabled with the use of 9999. In other words, VD has its own "target datarate" and "force keyframe every" dialogue box before you go into the configure menu of a codec. Set the "force keyframe every" to 9999 to ensure that VP6 is the only thing generating the keyframe list.

-"adjust quantizer" should be checked if you want the rate control to work properly. If it is not checked then the compressor will run in a fixed quantizer mode using the maximum value entered into the fields. If you uncheck the box and the highest value between the min and max is 4 then the compressor will compress everything at 4. If you want a range then highlight the box and enter two diff quant values. Lower values = better quality but harder to hit the datarate, higher values = worse quality but easier to hit datarate. Of course if your datarate is something in the area of 4Mbs or something high it really shouldnt matter all that much how low you bring the quantizer.

-remember that higher datarate clips SHOULD NOT be using spatial resampling. The reason for this is that the clip has been downsampled in order to hit the datarate and then played back upsampled. Think about taking a really nice picture at 320x240 and then playing it back at 1024x768...it would look pretty jagged and not very pleasing. SR is recommended for lower bitrate encodes such as 56K or low bandwith.

-For short clips the pre-buffer, optimal buffer, and max buffer settings will affect datarate. For CBR the data rate control attempts to insure that the buffers will never run empty provided that the connection is able to support the specified bitrate. If you set a 4 second pre-buffer and then code a 10 second clip it is possible, therefore, to significantly overshoot the target rate. On a 10 minute clip, however, an overshoot of 4 seconds worth of data is negligable.

- VBR and two pass are not specifically made for short clips (i.e a few seconds) as the VBR works on a scene by scene basis. On longer clips they should get close to the target avg bitrate unless the max Q is set too low.

- If you wish to do a two pass encode of a movie I would recommend that a 38-40 Q be set. Again do not select spatial resampling or temporal resampling.

[trbarry]

Of course if your datarate is something in the area of 4Mbs or something high it really shouldnt matter all that much how low you bring the quantizer.

ComPR355 -

Assume you mean that for DVD resolutions. For my 1280x720x30 tests I don't think 4 mbps would be considered all that high, even for VP6. With HDTV there's probably some expection it will be viewed sitting < 3.5 screen heights from a large hi-rez display and any artifacts will be more visible.


-remember that higher datarate clips SHOULD NOT be using spatial resampling. The reason for this is that the clip has been downsampled in order to hit the datarate and then played back upsampled. Think about taking a really nice picture at 320x240 and then playing it back at 1024x768...it would look pretty jagged and not very pleasing. SR is recommended for lower bitrate encodes such as 56K or low bandwith.

Can you say by what ratio the clip is internally downsized when needed? 1/4 rez?

When I'd previously considered things like this I thought I could drive it off the quantizers that would otherwise be used, say start to downscale when the quants would otherwise be > 7-10 or so, at least as used in MPEG. The idea would be for things like my HDTV football clip where sometimes the needed bit rate goes through the roof when you do a fast pan over crowds. To me that would be a good candidate for spacial resampling, even at otherwise high bit rates.

Maybe it turns out that's not best but could you describe a bit more how the values for spacial resampling are used? It seems to be driven off buffer usage instead of quants but I'm afraid I don't really understand exactly how.

- Tom

[Human_USB]

Well..... I think I found a problem. When I mux VP6 into a OGM with a srt file, the SRT file will not play. I muxed the same SRT into a OGM with a XVID file and it played, so the SRT is good. Can other people please test this.


*EDIT*
I get the same problem with MKVs too.

-Thanks
Jason

[Kast]

I'm very impressed by this codec. I encoded Lion King at 1650 Kbps one pass with Divx and then at 170 Kbytes (min 3 max 30) with VP6. Final sizes were 1015MB for VP6 and 1150 for Divx. In high motion scenes DivX simply could not be compared to VP6. I mean after the high motion scenes and the following seconds everything was pixelated with Divx. On the contrary with VP6 there was nothing! (i loaded the same avs file for both) The time with VP6 was 3 hours more but on the other hand who cares for three lousy hours when i'm encoding for 9 hours? ;)

[Sirber]

you should try 2 pass VBR, you'll get the best of both codecs then.

[Bulletproof]

I must be doing something wrong here since there are a considerable amount of people saying that VP6 is impressive. I tried it today and it gave me absolutely horrible results. I tried the One-Pass Best Quality option and set quantizers to 2-31 and left the other options off. I left the keyframe options to their defaults. The result that I got was really blurry and resembles a WMV9 or RV9 encode. I did try forcing to quantizer 2 and that made it look ok but it of course made the filesize huge and didnt offer any advantage over xvid, and the video still looked slightly blurry.

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
I must be doing something wrong here since there are a considerable amount of people saying that VP6 is impressive. I tried it today and it gave me absolutely horrible results. I tried the One-Pass Best Quality option and set quantizers to 2-31 and left the other options off. I left the keyframe options to their defaults. The result that I got was really blurry and resembles a WMV9 or RV9 encode. I did try forcing to quantizer 2 and that made it look ok but it of course made the filesize huge and didnt offer any advantage over xvid, and the video still looked slightly blurry.

Yupp, i also wasn't too impressed. There is simply no way to ensure that the quality is the same at all scene. It's constantly changing, somewhere better, but somewhere horrible. I would't say it's significantly better than mpeg4.

[Prettz]

Originally posted by MemeX
I have been playing around with a little 320x240 clip for a while, trying div3 fast/low motion, DivX5, XviD and yesterday with VP6.
Err, why would you use divx3 fast/low motion? Divx3 cannot even be called a real codec unless you use something like Nandub SBC. Comparing anything to the fast/low motion codecs is a waste of time.

[Kast]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
I must be doing something wrong here since there are a considerable amount of people saying that VP6 is impressive. I tried it today and it gave me absolutely horrible results. I tried the One-Pass Best Quality option and set quantizers to 2-31 and left the other options off. I left the keyframe options to their defaults. The result that I got was really blurry and resembles a WMV9 or RV9 encode. I did try forcing to quantizer 2 and that made it look ok but it of course made the filesize huge and didnt offer any advantage over xvid, and the video still looked slightly blurry.

Max keyframes to 360 maybe? It's C0mPr355's suggestion and it worked fine with me. Sirber you won't even imagine how long does it take on my computer to do 2 pass encoding. I wish I could...

[Enigmax]

FANTASTIC!
"The Two Towers" in a single CD and resolution 640 x 256.
I have used VP6 Advanced profile, with byterate of 60 KBytes per second (480 kbps). Forced activated Keyframe and a value of 360. The rest of defaults. Nothing to activate resampling.

The result is very similar to the same codification made with DivX for 2 CD whit 1000 kbps.

O.K. :)

Greetins

[Sagittaire]

.... ????!!!!

[Ramirez]

The result is very similar to the same codification made with DivX for 2 CD whit 1000 kbps.

Are you sure about that? , it's strange because my last VP6 encoding attempt turned out as a complete disaster: 850KBPS.720x329 (I've deleted this smearing \blocking blurng mess: /24 hours of encoding time) however now I'm taking into account a few valuable pointers given by compr355 and other members so I'm starting another encoding session (I hope it'll be way better then my first one. :P )

[Enigmax]

VP6 surpasses to other codecs in compressibility.
It works to little bitrate far better that DivX or XviD.
In High o normal bitrates, I prefer to XviD.

Greetings

[MemeX]

I have a question regarding VP6 and smartphone support. As VP6 seems perform well on high compression it might be well suited for playback on smartphones like the nokia series 60 mobile phones.

Would it be easy to make a VP6 player for the phones? it might be interesting for streaming videos in the futur..

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Enigmax
VP6 surpasses to other codecs in compressibility.
It works to little bitrate far better that DivX or XviD.
In High o normal bitrates, I prefer to XviD... There's no doubt that VP6 generates very impressive looking encodes at 'constant' low bitrate speeds. Which is what it was designed for!

However, I've generated quite a few 2pass VBR encode tests using VR6 (as have many other forum members) and when compared to say RV9, it does not come close!

To my eyes VP6 produces very visible blocking. Even the VP6 versus WMV9 encodes (and the VP6 only Xmen trailer) that are available for download on the VP6 website show this to be the case. And whoever generated the WMV9 encodes, could not have done a better job of making them look bad!

Cheers

[MemeX]

Originally posted by Sirber
can you try also with RV9 please?

sorry to have taken this long, its rather by chance that I was able to make an encode with RV9 to compere it to VP6.

The quality was also impressing, for example the white subtitles were nicely readable and a little cleaner around the edges then with VP6. I did notice that the impression of faces were a little flat with RV9 tho. VP6 had a little more lets call it noise for now, which made the faces look more human and natural..then at other times RV9 gives a better overall impression. I also noticed a pumping effect of keyframes on VP6, but that might be because of my settings, force keyframe every 120 was probably the default back then instead of 9999.

i further investigated my source file, its a tv capture so its not as clean as a dvd source which both codecs had to fight with a little so I used a little noise reduction from the codecs' settings. I can't remember the exact settings for VP6 i used but it was probably what the vphelpfile on their website suggested and then changed the quants to hit my filesize.

DivX/XviD performed rather bad on this file, as i mentioned before and i think that VP6 is definatly competible to them at least on lower bitrates from my "little" experince and the price is attractive for home users ;)

MemeX

[Blueseb]

I encoded anime for my first test with vp6, advanced profile two passes. accidentally I leaved empty the target data rate field. the result was a full episode (about 23min, 640x480) compressed in 16MB !!! and the video is still good to watch (it has a lot of blockness of course, but the only fact it is watchable it's a miracle).
I mean: I'm talking of 0.016 BPP per frame, 95 kbit/sec, in xvid this should have been a 9% of the first pass size but I think it is not even possible to do with it. If I didn't saw it I wouldn't believe.

Maybe this codec sucks on high bitrate or with normal movie stuff, I dunno; but at extreme low bitrate it's impressive.

Worth to mention the encode time (1st+2nd) took ~20 hours on a duron900 :p does anyody cares??? ;)

[C0mPr355]

-a quick note to some of you that are compressing with non-multiples of 16 resolutions: Try using multiples of 16 for a better output :D

-and about the difference between 60 and 61. Basically 60 is designed to run a little bit faster (with slight downgrade in quality) as opposed to Vp61 which is more processor intensive, better looking, and slower on playback.

For the two pass encoding results I would recommend tweaking the percantages of min and max datarate variablilty.

And yes please use a auto-keyframe generation of 360 rather than 120. And make sure that this is set in the configure dialogue box of Virtual Dub NOT in the original datarate/keyframe dialogue box that virtual dub has.

[C0mPr355]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
There's no doubt that VP6 generates very impressive looking encodes at 'constant' low bitrate speeds. Which is what it was designed for!

However, I've generated quite a few 2pass VBR encode tests using VR6 (as have many other forum members) and when compared to say RV9, it does not come close!

-Please give specs of all these encodes.

To my eyes VP6 produces very visible blocking. Even the VP6 versus WMV9 encodes (and the VP6 only Xmen trailer) that are available for download on the VP6 website show this to be the case. And whoever generated the WMV9 encodes, could not have done a better job of making them look bad!

-If you are seeing the blockyness then perhaps the deblocker is not on or has been turned off. Windows media, when the deblocker is not on, looks rather blocky as well. I am not saying that one is better than the other I am simply stating a fact. Also of note, the Xmen trailer that is up there right now was not encoded with the newest vp6 codec that we have released to you. That one is about three months old.

-As far as the WMV encodes, perhaps you are not getting ( as stated above) the deblocker for WMP. When creating the encodes of those clips (football, cheerleader, etc)...they were done with default style settings. No third party tool was used, only Windows Media Encoder. Perhaps this may be why they do not look so good (or the blocking issue above). If you can get a better result from the stock WME then please post your complete encode parameters.

I am curios. <---mi enternet splleing is teh gud. :D



Cheers

[Ramirez]

Well, my impression on VP6 so far (that's might change) I wouldn't recommend it for a DVD backup ATM, I agree with SMD, this codec simply producing none satisfactory blocky and most of the time blurred output. (No, I don't think that artifacts hiding Post-filter is the answer :rolleyes: )

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, I dunno (any suggestions are welcome) I've used very clean source for my test encodes and I tried various settings.

My last encoding settings as follows:

Source: Ghost-Ship /duration: 1:26:58
Rez: 720:396
Bitrate: 825KBPS

Codec Settings
VP6 Advanced
2 Pass -VBR
AutoKey: ON/ 360
Undershoot: 90
Adjust Quant: ON
Min-4 /Max: 32
Temp R: OFF
Spatial R: OFF
Variability: 90/ Min: 0 Max: 1000

BTW: same movie encoded with Xvid (same bitrate, rez), looks simply great. ;)

[Sirber]

What about RV9? ;) (No flaming please, it was a joke :D)

[SSIXS]

My first impression of VP6...looks pretty darn good for my use. I spend quite a bit of time away from home for work and I take DVD backups with me as not to damage or lose the originals. Since these are just backups, I dont get all wrapped up in having the most pristine "DVD quality" but I still want em to look good. I dont like to spend what little time I have at home trying to figure out the "optimum settings" for each and every movie. As a rule (due to time constraints) I generally do single pass encodes...set it up just before I goto bed and have it ready to burn when I get up. I took my latest dvd purchase and made a couple test encodes with VP6 facing off against divx 5x, wmv9 and xvid. I must say, using single-pass CBR, VP6 came out looking great compared to the others...wasnt quite as blocky or blurred and handles fast motion sequences quite a bit better.

Source: My Science Project/duration: 1:34:29
Rez: 640:272
Bitrate: 88 Kilobytes/second

Codec Settings
VP6 Advanced
1 Pass - Best Quality - CBR
AutoKey: ON/ 360
Undershoot: 90
Adjust Quant: ON
Min-4 /Max: 20
Temp R: OFF
Spatial R: OFF
Peak Bitrate: 100
Prebuffer: 4
Optimal Buffer: 5
Max Buffer: 6

I just wanted to thank On2 and all the folks that had a hand in the releasing of this codec to us home users. Keep up the good work !

Derek

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by Ramirez
Well, my impression on VP6 so far (that's might change) I wouldn't recommend it for a DVD backup ATM, I agree with SMD, this codec simply producing none satisfactory blocky and most of the time blurred output.

Exactly this is my experience. For higher bitrates, this codec doesn't compete well against xvid or divx. But for low bitrates (<400 kbps), it's indeed much better. Too bad i never encode at those bitrates.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by C0mPr355
... Please give specs of all these encodes. Well, the test I think you will be interested in is my 'video only' StarWars 2 Chapter 41 test. Which is 377.24 seconds long and consists of 9431 frames!

Over this past year I have used this source to test just about all the codecs currently available. Using just about every available setting!

My goal, as with all my tests, is to generate 720x576 'anamorphic frame' and 640x272 'crop and resize frame' encodes.

The encodes are generated using 1pass CBR and 2pass VBR settings. And must be no greater in file size than 28.5MB

By following this standard proceedure I am then able to compare any new encode against any of my other encodes.

I noticed that your 'cheer leader' WMV9 encode has an image pixel frame size of 352x240. Can you confirm if this was done in one pass or two. The same goes for your VP6 encode?

I'm not knocking the codec. As I said before I think it generates very impressive looking encodes at 'constant' low bitrate speeds. Much better than DivX and WMV9, it's even very close to RV9 in this regard. But not RV9 EHQ!

Hovever, I have found that when generating 2pass VBR encodes it's a very different story!

If you would like me to send you a CD-R with some of my test files on it, please PM me with you details.

Cheers

[Sirber]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
I'm not knocking the codec. As I said before I think it generates very impressive looking encodes at 'constant' low bitrate speeds. Much better than DivX and WMV9, it's even very close to RV9 in this regard. But not RV9 EHQ!Nice :D All I wanted to know :cool:

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Sirber
Nice :D All I wanted to know :cool: Yes.....

Whenever I post a comment about RV9, I swear I can hear you cheering from Canada. Which is quite a distance from Nottinghamshire, England!

Did I tell you, that I can now view RV9 .rmvb and WMV9 .avi and .wmv encodes on my TV via my Xcard with JovePlayer..... very nice!

My favourite is still 2pass VBR DivX though!

Cheers

[C0mPr355]

I understood that you were not knocking things...just merely giving your feedback. No need to worry. Like I said I was just curious that's all.

The vp6 cheer encode was done in single pass many moons ago (back in june or earlier I believe). The wmv encode was done in 2-pass encode.

**VP6 is our first codec with two pass in it...and as such we are new to this whole arena. In that respect we would love to get feedback on how to improve said codec in the two pass mode. So please keep the feedback constructive and well thought out...not just "my results suck, or my results are crappy..." Tell us what would make two pass better.

and SMD I will get in touch with you via PM :D

[MemeX]

Originally posted by Prettz
Err, why would you use divx3 fast/low motion? Divx3 cannot even be called a real codec unless you use something like Nandub SBC. Comparing anything to the fast/low motion codecs is a waste of time. I was talking about the nandub SBC.

[hanz_giebenrath]

whats the matter guys?..no more tests and experiences? ;)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by hanz_giebenrath
whats the matter guys?..no more tests and experiences? ;) Hi Hanz. Welcome to the forum.

You will find more posts about VP6 if you look in this thread -

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64789

Cheers

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hi C0mPr355,

Can I ask you, if any 'goals' have been discussed for this codec yet - other than streaming to cell phones/PDA's?

Personally, I think it would be great to see the codec appear in hardware players (once VBR lives up to the CBR performance)!

And are there any thoughts about using other containers apart from AVI?

Cheers

[C0mPr355]

SeeMore,

Our press releases pretty much speak for themselves on our goals for the company (other than getting everyone to try out the codec ). We have worked with several things other than PDAs over the past couple of years, mainly settop box integration for things such as digital cable etc.

I would love to see this in more hardware as well as that would mean that we could compete a little better with higher end companies like microsoft, real, etc.

It is hard to compete when you are relatively new and a small fish in the sea :D But we will keep pushing to get our codec better and better.

As far as containers are concerned I believe that we will be sticking with the avi format for now, and use the .vp6 for specific projects that relate to our truecast player. Avi, however, seems to be the most valid format for our uses right now though.

[GIR]

Just found this interesting article on The Register: "China unveils 'DVD killer' video disk format" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/34097.html) China using VP6 for EVD!

EVD uses On2's latest video codec, VP6, which offers "better image quality and faster decoding performance than Windows Media 9, Real 9, H.264 and QuickTime MPEG-4," the company - formerly known as The Duck Corporation - claims.

[Sirber]

that's funny. "better image quality". LOL!!!

(personnal opinion)

[Tommy Carrot]

They said exactly the same about VP4. I think the marketing guys didn't try their own codec. :D

[SeeMoreDigital]

DAvenger has started a thread about the same subject here too: -

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=401824#post401824

Cheers

[SeeMoreDigital]

For all those who may have missed it.

In response to a question posted by Sagitaire, below is a statement from On2Tech regarding 2pass VBR encoding with VP6: -
Originally posted by On2Tech
Please be patient with us. We'll have a new codec for you to try shortly. The overall Quality and SSIM, and VQM measurements you got were bad for VP6 due to a set of bugs in the VP6 two pass compressor. I'm sorry we released it with these bugs. Unfortunately our own tests weren't adequete in the two pass arena. Your compressions revealed what our own tests failed to. Thanks.

The measurements I posted were with an almost fixed codec ( not the one you can download on On2's site). On the Harry Potter clip I got results that are better than real. My audience file in rmfactory only differed from yours in that I shot for 600000 instead of 580000). If you like I'll try again with 580000. ( I copied the audience file from your last compression test), though its kind of a moot point. My numbers won't mean much until everyone can verify them (probably after our thanksgiving break).

Visibly the results with the fixed codec were massively better than the version you produced. I'd like to post the clip, but company policy means we can't distribute anything that we don't have explicit rights to use "even trailers"..

In your version VP6 produced a couple of really terrible sections ( because we missed a keyframe, and didn't clamp q enough). You can check your VP6 clip for yourself. Open it up in Virtual dub and watch for the K that indicates keyframes. You'll find 20 or so missed keyframes.

You'll also see that our two pass datarate control wasn't very two pass. Due to another bug we effectively ended up shooting for a much flatter datarate. This meant that the PSNR was spikey which is bad for overall PSNR.

Note: You would have gotten somewhat better results out of VP6 by using a max quantizer of 15 instead of 40; but you shouldn't have to know that. The two pass compressor should handle things like that. Plus the other bugs (missing keyframes, and keyframes that were 10 db better and 20 times the size of subsequent frames etc) still would have resulted in VP6 encodings that were sub par and noticeably worse than Real.

NOTE: The effect of these bugs was very material dependent. A full movie wouldn't have had nearly as many missed keyframes ( the bug had to do with how close they were together). Plus big Keyframes don't hurt so much when their spread apart.

Again Thank you for including VP6 in your comparison! We now have a better codec because you did.
I'm sure glad there is an official explanation as to why the 2pass encodes that I, and others had generated did not live up to expectations!

I think it's fair to say that once this anomaly is corrected. On2's codec will be outstanding.

Cheers

[Bandung]

Not too many people in this forum are interested in low bandwidth encoding (ie for streaming or for playback on PDA's like pocket pc 200x). But with the quality that VP6 produces for low bandwidth, it is an ideal decoder for PDA players. A port of the VP3 codec was done for the Pocket MVP player. My question is this, are you ON2Tech interested in assisting with or producing a port of your VP6 decoder to this player as well?

[Bulletproof]

I tried some more testing with the codec and came to a similar conclusion. It seems no matter how high you set the datarate, the quality will not match to that of other MPEG-4 codecs. I have found that it will still drop details even when trying a "almost lossless" datarate. Also, when using the decoder most people probably set it to use "Best PSNR" or "Automatic", this just uses a whole bunch of post-processing, you just have to use "Fastest" setting which will totally disable the post-processing (which still shows loss of detail at high datarates vs MPEG-4). I will say though that the codec works pretty well at bitrates of ~300kbps, how well it stacks up against other lowbitrate encoders is another story and out of my interest.

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
I tried some more testing with the codec and came to a similar conclusion. It seems no matter how high you set the datarate, the quality will not match to that of other MPEG-4 codecs. I have found that it will still drop details even when trying a "almost lossless" datarate. Also, when using the decoder most people probably set it to use "Best PSNR" or "Automatic", this just uses a whole bunch of post-processing, you just have to use "Fastest" setting which will totally disable the post-processing (which still shows loss of detail at high datarates vs MPEG-4). I will say though that the codec works pretty well at bitrates of ~300kbps, how well it stacks up against other lowbitrate encoders is another story and out of my interest.

VP6 has no loop filter; with no deblocking at all VP6 loses about .5 db psnr and looks blocky. The deblocker invariable adds to the quality of output. The deblocker is the only post processing that is on with Best-psnr selected.

As to loss of detail: Can you please post an example clip along with settings you used? Its possible the bugs listed with the two pass compressor are hurting your tests as well. I'd suggest you try lowering the max quantizer parameter and try clips with keyframes that are typically further away than 16 frames ( the bug I suggested) until we repost.

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bandung
Not too many people in this forum are interested in low bandwidth encoding (ie for streaming or for playback on PDA's like pocket pc 200x). But with the quality that VP6 produces for low bandwidth, it is an ideal decoder for PDA players. A port of the VP3 codec was done for the Pocket MVP player. My question is this, are you ON2Tech interested in assisting with or producing a port of your VP6 decoder to this player as well?

I'll bet we are. I'll pass the information on to others in the company and get back to you via private message...

[Bulletproof]

Originally posted by On2Tech
VP6 has no loop filter; with no deblocking at all VP6 loses about .5 db psnr and looks blocky. The deblocker invariable adds to the quality of output. The deblocker is the only post processing that is on with Best-psnr selected.

As to loss of detail: Can you please post an example clip along with settings you used? Its possible the bugs listed with the two pass compressor are hurting your tests as well. I'd suggest you try lowering the max quantizer parameter and try clips with keyframes that are typically further away than 16 frames ( the bug I suggested) until we repost.

I don't have the video readily available that I used for the test right now, but I'll describe it to you. Basically it was a scene where the camera was panning and chasing the front view of a car, while in the background there was very tall grass blowing in the wind. The original video was in very good quality and was downsized to 640x352 (25fps) using Neutral Bicubic mode. I set the datarate to 200k/s and set the minimum and maximum quantizers to 2, none of the extra options were selected. I also did the encode with the keyframes at 120 and 250 frames apart. One pass best quality mode was selected. When viewing the encode the tall grass in the background had its detail significantly decreased and the video looked overall blurry. When I set the video to Best PSNR or Automatic it would make the grass look like a giant green splotch. When trying the video in XviD with none of the extra settings, just plain vanilla XviD at quantizer 2, you can just see that the video overall looks more like the original and the grass looked sharp and overall the video was sharper. Now this wasn't a test for compression, this was just to see overall how much detail was retained.

I have also noticed that with VP6 the quantizers can be bought much further up with less degradation. I noticed that setting the minimum quantizer to 10 is nothing like XviD's quantizer 10. The temporal resampling may be helpful for 60fps video where the eye cannot easily notice the frame drops, and the spatial resampler sometimes works well, however I really couldn't get total control over those two options because I haven't studied them enough to really understand how they work.

To be fair I will post up screenshots for visual comparison when the newer build is out. Personally I do not trust PSNR, especially with two examples that I have expierenced: The video simply does not look better with "Better PSNR" selected when decoding, and when I had made a special quantizer matrix for XviD it actually makes the PSNR drop, but upon visual inspection there is an obvious increase in detail.

[Sagittaire]

@ Bulletproof

Try with SSIM or VQM ... there are psycho video quality test ...

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
I don't have the video readily available that I used for the test right now, but I'll describe it to you. Basically it was a scene where the camera was panning and chasing the front view of a car, while in the background there was very tall grass blowing in the wind. The original video was in very good quality and was downsized to 640x352 (25fps) using Neutral Bicubic mode. I set the datarate to 200k/s and set the minimum and maximum quantizers to 2, none of the extra options were selected. I also did the encode with the keyframes at 120 and 250 frames apart. One pass best quality mode was selected. When viewing the encode the tall grass in the background had its detail significantly decreased and the video looked overall blurry. When I set the video to Best PSNR or Automatic it would make the grass look like a giant green splotch. When trying the video in XviD with none of the extra settings, just plain vanilla XviD at quantizer 2, you can just see that the video overall looks more like the original and the grass looked sharp and overall the video was sharper. Now this wasn't a test for compression, this was just to see overall how much detail was retained.

I have also noticed that with VP6 the quantizers can be bought much further up with less degradation. I noticed that setting the minimum quantizer to 10 is nothing like XviD's quantizer 10. The temporal resampling may be helpful for 60fps video where the eye cannot easily notice the frame drops, and the spatial resampler sometimes works well, however I really couldn't get total control over those two options because I haven't studied them enough to really understand how they work.

To be fair I will post up screenshots for visual comparison when the newer build is out. Personally I do not trust PSNR, especially with two examples that I have expierenced: The video simply does not look better with "Better PSNR" selected when decoding, and when I had made a special quantizer matrix for XviD it actually makes the PSNR drop, but upon visual inspection there is an obvious increase in detail.

I'd appreciate anything you can show, at Q's of 2 VP6 should have excellent quality, and the deblocker should be basically off ( even without the best PSNR setting). So what you are describing sounds very odd. I'll double check the code next week and repost.

[slavickas]

2 On2Tech:
can you give more details about differences between profiles, i encoded few videos at constant quantizer and files are nearly identical in size, i thought vp61 should be at least few percents better

and second q, one guy on winamp forum asked is any chance of encoding vp6 on k6-2, he said vp6 encoding requires sse(i have duron so can't comment on this)

[Jaques]

I am anxiously awaiting the fix for VP6, but in the meantime I'll ask a question. Are you going to do any optimizations for x86-64?

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by slavickas
2 On2Tech:
can you give more details about differences between profiles, i encoded few videos at constant quantizer and files are nearly identical in size, i thought vp61 should be at least few percents better

and second q, one guy on winamp forum asked is any chance of encoding vp6 on k6-2, he said vp6 encoding requires sse(i have duron so can't comment on this)

VP60 is basically a slightly simplified version of the VP61 bitstream. It shuts off quarter pixel motion estimation, a couple of prediction filters, and adaptive subpixel motion estimation. Other than that it is identical to VP61. The effect is major on some lower-res sharp clips, but on full d1 movies (or higher) its hard to see a big difference.

VP6 should work on any intel clone processor ( there is a fallback c implementation of every function). We have optimized VP6 for use on mmx machines, p3 machines and p4 machines. This means that we ahve 4 versions of a lot of functions. If anyone finds a machine it won't work on please let us know....

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Jaques
I am anxiously awaiting the fix for VP6, but in the meantime I'll ask a question. Are you going to do any optimizations for x86-64?

Its not high on our current to do list but this may change if a paying customer requests us to do so.

However, we have done some work on newer Intel machines ( we got some help in this arena from Intel). Ie. our next release will probably support things like hyperthreading, and prescott instructions.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hi On2Tech,

With regard to the comments you made about 2 pass encoding!

Do you have a date planned for an updated version of the codec?

Cheers

[Bulletproof]

On2Tech, do you know if changing the decoding method within control panel reflects what is used during the decoding process in VirtualDub? Cause it seems like when you view a file in VirtualDub that the deblocker is always on and this may have been what messed up my visual testing. On another note, I've been looking frame-to-frame using VirtualDub and noticed that in the VP6 video that some colors are completely dropped or totally off that don't represent the original video. Now it isn't very drastic, but you can definitely tell that some colors are gone from the video. Again, I'm just testing here and it's possible the decoder isn't working the way I want it to in VirtualDub, maybe the deblocker is blurring out the color.

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
On2Tech, do you know if changing the decoding method within control panel reflects what is used during the decoding process in VirtualDub? Cause it seems like when you view a file in VirtualDub that the deblocker is always on and this may have been what messed up my visual testing. On another note, I've been looking frame-to-frame using VirtualDub and noticed that in the VP6 video that some colors are completely dropped or totally off that don't represent the original video. Now it isn't very drastic, but you can definitely tell that some colors are gone from the video. Again, I'm just testing here and it's possible the decoder isn't working the way I want it to in VirtualDub, maybe the deblocker is blurring out the color.

Virtualdub uses the vfw codec instead of the directshow codec. The vfw codec doesn't use the settings dialog instead it uses registry entries found under :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ON2 Technologies\VFW Encoder/Decoder Settings\VP61

create two strings ( if they don't exist already)

strCPUFree = set to 0 to disable auto detection of what post processing to use and to enable the next setting

strPostProcessingLevel = set to 0 for nothing and to 4 for deblocking but no deringing (best psnr)

As to the color's I'm a bit at a loss. Most of our comparisons show we are far better in U and V than other codecs. In fact we may actually have gotten better quality by spending fewer bits on U and V than we do now.

Its also possible that our internal color conversion from YV12 to RGB24 is inaccurate or that it doesn't match the color conversion used to get it into YUV color space ( if any ).

[Bulletproof]

EDIT: Seems like images wont show up without clicking on the links, I posted images the same way in XviD forum and they show. Maybe a special rule for this part of the forum?

Ok that registry setting definitely helped. I can definitely say now that VP6 is a competitor now. I did a quick test with XviD 1.0 and VP6. Here's the settings:

Video Data
----------
640x480 29.970 FPS, 2:40.72 Duration


VP6 Settings
------------
Data Rate: 168 KB/s
Key Frame Interval: 999999
One Pass - Best Quality
Local File Playback (VBR)
Noise Reduction: 0
Auto Keyframe: ON
Max. Frames between keyframes: 300

Undershoot: 100%
Adjust Quantizer: 2-31
Temporal Resampling: OFF
Spatial Resampling: OFF

XviD Settings
-------------
Target Bitrate (kbps): 1344 (Equiv. of 168KB/s)

Profile: Unrestricted
Quantization: H.263
Adaptive Quantization: ON
Interlacing: OFF
Quarterpel: ON
Global Motion Compensation: ON
Reduced Resolution: OFF
BVOPs: ON
Max. Consecutive B-Frames: 1
Quantizer Ratio: 1.50
Quantizer Offset: 1.00
Packed Bitstream: OFF
Closed GOV: ON

Encoding Type: Single Pass
Reaction Delay Factor: 16
Averaging Period: 100
Smoother: 100

Chroma Optimizer: ON

Motion Search Precision: 6 - Ultra High
VHQ Mode: 4 - Wide Search
Chroma Motion: ON
Frame Drop Ratio: 0
Max. I-Frame Interval: 300
Min. I-Frame Interval: 1
Cartoon Mode: OFF

Min. & Max. I, P, B Quantizer: 2-31
Trellis Quantization: ON


FINAL FILE SIZES:
VP6.AVI - 28,889,088
XVID.AVI - 26,650,624


Now, VP6 handled quite well in some situations while XviD handled better than it in others and vice versa. I would say they are almost Neck-and-Neck, BUT you have to consider the fact that the XviD file came out 2 megs less than the VP6 file and and possibly extra bits could be used to totally edge out the VP6 file if you wanted the filesizes to be exactly the same. Either way they both perform quite well.


How I judged the XviD winners:

1. Look at the jumping monsters feet, also look at the ninja's leg.

2. Blocky all around shadows, even eyelashes and eyebrow blocky in the VP6 frame, the XviD frame does not exhibit this.

3. Samurai's Face is blocky, arm in action is blocky, his chainmail type armor is completely gone in the VP6 frame, you can still see it in the XviD frame.


How I judged the VP6 winners:

1. Overall the frame is blocky in XviD while it seems smooth and clean in the VP6 frame.

2. Non-moving gradient inside the logo is blocky and the "3" part of the logo which has a moving flame in it is blocky with the XviD frame. VP6 frame exhibits none of this.

3. Jumping ninja is all blocky and the samurais in the background are blocky in the XviD frame, The VP6 frame here looks alot better but however you can notice a weird "matrix" like pattern of squares in the background of the VP6 frame to the right of the ninja in the background which is supposed to represent a wall. Even still though, the VP6 frame looks better.



Winning XviD frames:

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid1.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp61.PNG

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid2.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp62.PNG

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid3.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp63.PNG


Winning VP6 Frames:

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid4.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp64.PNG

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid5.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp65.PNG

(XVID)
http://www.gamevids.net/xvid6.PNG

(VP6)
http://www.gamevids.net/vp66.PNG

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
EDIT: Seems like images wont show up without clicking on the links, I posted images the same way in XviD forum and they show. Maybe a special rule for this part of the forum?

Ok that registry setting definitely helped. I can definitely say now that VP6 is a competitor now. I did a quick test with XviD 1.0 and VP6. Here's the settings:



Some of your PNG files look suspiciously like VP6 missed marking a keyframe.

Can you please check whether the VP6 clip missed placing keyframes at cut scenes ( ie you can look for the K in the status bar via virtual dub)? If not can you get me a copy of the avi clip ( I'll pm you with a place to put it if necessary).

Missed keyframes is one of the bugs in the codec that we're fixing. It produces some blocky frames even at high datarates.

Internally VP6 has a parameter similar to XVID's Min. I-Frame Interval. We had this set to 16! This meant we missed a lot of keyframes in short trailer like clips.

If this is in fact the case in your clip I think you'll find the new VP6 to be greatly improved..

[trbarry]

If this is in fact the case in your clip I think you'll find the new VP6 to be greatly improved.

Do you mean a newer version has been posted or are you referring to something that will be out soon. I just checked yesterday since I was installing VP6 on a new machine and didn't see anything new.

- Tom

[Bulletproof]

Originally posted by On2Tech
Some of your PNG files look suspiciously like VP6 missed marking a keyframe.

Can you please check whether the VP6 clip missed placing keyframes at cut scenes ( ie you can look for the K in the status bar via virtual dub)? If not can you get me a copy of the avi clip ( I'll pm you with a place to put it if necessary).

Missed keyframes is one of the bugs in the codec that we're fixing. It produces some blocky frames even at high datarates.

Internally VP6 has a parameter similar to XVID's Min. I-Frame Interval. We had this set to 16! This meant we missed a lot of keyframes in short trailer like clips.

If this is in fact the case in your clip I think you'll find the new VP6 to be greatly improved..

Ok I took a look using Virtualdub and it did insert the keyframes at almost every scene change, however there were some spots I did find where a keyframe should've been inserted. One thing I noticed is that on a scene change where a keyframe was not inserted the keyframe was inserted late into the scene, but the immediate proceeding frames had worse quality, should not the frames nearest the keyframe have good quality? If you want me to post an example of this I can do that also.

[plonk420]

Originally posted by Bandung
Not too many people in this forum are interested in low bandwidth encoding (ie for streaming or for playback on PDA's like pocket pc 200x). But with the quality that VP6 produces for low bandwidth, it is an ideal decoder for PDA players. A port of the VP3 codec was done for the Pocket MVP player. My question is this, are you ON2Tech interested in assisting with or producing a port of your VP6 decoder to this player as well?

oops, i thought you were about to talk about low bandwidth encoding in a negative light and was about to go off on you ^_~. this stuff fascinates the shit out of me. i've been playing with this more than i ever played with WMV9, which also blew my mind (which was probably due to my inablility to figure out multipass divx encoding, leading to total crap divx encodes).

i posted some encodes that completely amazed me on newsgroups, alt.binaries.pictures.leek if anyone was interested. and yeah, i love music videos ^_^

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by trbarry
Do you mean a newer version has been posted or are you referring to something that will be out soon. I just checked yesterday since I was installing VP6 on a new machine and didn't see anything new.

- Tom

Nothing new yet. I'll post here when we are ready to put it out.

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Bulletproof
Ok I took a look using Virtualdub and it did insert the keyframes at almost every scene change, however there were some spots I did find where a keyframe should've been inserted. One thing I noticed is that on a scene change where a keyframe was not inserted the keyframe was inserted late into the scene, but the immediate proceeding frames had worse quality, should not the frames nearest the keyframe have good quality? If you want me to post an example of this I can do that also.

Thanks for checking. Were any of the frames you showed ( particularly the blocky frames) frames that were missed keyframes or frames near a missed key frame?

Not sure why a frame preceding a keyframe would have bad quality but I suspect that they are related to the same bug. I suggest we just try again with a new version of the codec that will be coming soon.

[Bulletproof]

Originally posted by On2Tech
Thanks for checking. Were any of the frames you showed ( particularly the blocky frames) frames that were missed keyframes or frames near a missed key frame?

Not sure why a frame preceding a keyframe would have bad quality but I suspect that they are related to the same bug. I suggest we just try again with a new version of the codec that will be coming soon.

Yes one of the frames was missing a keyframe at its scene change in those pics. Perhaps since the keyframe was inserted late it just inserted it at a point with very bad reference data for the next P-frames, so I guess a keyframe inserted at the right point is better than a keyframe closer to a P-frame.

[trbarry]

I encoded a 45 minute HDTV clip at a resolution of 1440x608 with one pass best quality CBR.

It seems to look & play fine (but slowly) in Virtualdubmod but if I try to play it in Zoomplayer or WME it will immediately cause the player or even the machine to hang. It will even hang Graphedit the moment I drop it in.

Is that resolution over some limit for VP6?

- Tom

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by trbarry
I encoded a 45 minute HDTV clip at a resolution of 1440x608 with one pass best quality CBR.

Is that resolution over some limit for VP6?

- Tom Hi Tom,

Can I ask how you arrived at your image frame size?

It sounds like you are encoding from an 720i/p 'true 16:9 frame' source - You lucky man!

If that's the case then I would have thought the following 'true frame' image pixel frame sizes would apply: -
1.77:1 = 1280 x 720
1.85:1 = 1280 x 692 (688 to nearest 16th pixel)
2.35:1 = 1280 x 544

I'm assuming that a typical 2.35:1 image is not 'pulled down' when watching 720i/p broadcasts!

Cheers

[trbarry]

Can I ask how you arrived at your image frame size?

SeeMoreDigital -

It was a 1920x1080i movie, UnComb'd & Decimated to 1080p@24. After cropping obvious black bars and edge garbage it appeared to be about 2.40:1. Scaling to a 1440 width that gave me 1440x608 after rounding up to the nearest 16.

I was trying to make an excellent show piece sample encoding of what VP6 could do with a 3 hour HDTV movie on a DVD-9 dual layer red laser DVD (using 2 DVD-R's).

But I can't play the darn thing. :(

- Tom

edit: BTW, If it really had been a 720p movie they usually would have used whatever x:x pulldown to expand it to 60 FPS. Most stations just do that by duplicating frames for some reason, not even using repeat flags.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by trbarry
SeeMoreDigital -

It was a 1920x1080i movie, UnComb'd & Decimated to 1080p@24. After cropping obvious black bars and edge garbage it appeared to be about 2.40:1. Scaling to a 1440 width that gave me 1440x608 after rounding up to the nearest 16. Wow, if that's the case then you could also have used: -
1.77:1 = 1920 x 1080 (1088 to nearest 16th pixel)
1.85:1 = 1920 x 1040
2.35:1 = 1920 x 816
2.40:1 = 1920 x 800

But this would involve using even more pixels!!

Originally posted by trbarry
I was trying to make an excellent show piece sample encoding of what VP6 could do with a 3 hour HDTV movie on a DVD-9 dual layer red laser DVD (using 2 DVD-R's).

But I can't play the darn thing. :( Personally I've not encoded with VP6 using any more than 576 vertical pixels. But I would have thought it should work. Even DivX and XviD work quite well upto 720 vertical pixels!

I guess it's still WMV9 or RV9 for HD stuff up to 1080 vertical pixels!

Cheers

[trbarry]

Personally I've not encoded with VP6 using any more than 576 vertical pixels. But I would have thought it should work. Even DivX and XviD work quite well upto 720 vertical pixels!

I guess it's still WMV9 or RV9 for HD stuff up to 1080 vertical pixels!

Rarely do I encode HDTV at more than 1280x720 (usually Xvid) and sometimes I just use 1/4 res 960x544 because it encodes so much faster. But I've had decent results with my other VP6 CBR testing (including VP6 1280x720p) and I wanted to take advantage of 2 full DVD-R's this time. So I thought I'd push it up to a 1440 width for the small amount of extra detail that might be there.

- Tom

[trbarry]

An update on my problem above. If I just keep my patience and my hands off the keyboard it will actually start playing after about 90 seconds. I guess that resolution and 850 KBps is just a bit too much for my 2.4 Ghz P4. It only plays at about 18 fps.

I'm going to re-re-encode at 1280x544 and 750 KBps to see what happens.

- Tom

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by trbarry
An update on my problem above. If I just keep my patience and my hands off the keyboard it will actually start playing after about 90 seconds. I guess that resolution and 850 KBps is just a bit too much for my 2.4 Ghz P4. It only plays at about 18 fps.

I'm going to re-re-encode at 1280x544 and 750 KBps to see what happens.

- Tom Cool.

I would like to think that a 2.4 P4 could generate more than 18fps!

If you think the source is 2.40:1 you could try 1280x528 (533 exact)!

Good luck Tom and let us know how you get on please.

Cheers

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by trbarry
An update on my problem above. If I just keep my patience and my hands off the keyboard it will actually start playing after about 90 seconds. I guess that resolution and 850 KBps is just a bit too much for my 2.4 Ghz P4. It only plays at about 18 fps.

I'm going to re-re-encode at 1280x544 and 750 KBps to see what happens.

- Tom

It seems strange that you'd have trouble playing back 1280x544 on a 2.4ghz pc ( unless you can't support a yv12 overlay of that size). We've done quite a few 8 megabit 1920x1080 on a 1.7 ghz P4( with no post processing) for one of our customers.

We are still optimizing the codec on the pc and may have something that works faster soon.

Nonetheless you may want to try VP60 ( simplified profile). I doubt you'll see a big quality difference at that frame size, but you may see a big improvement in playback speed.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Jeez,

That's good to know. Thanks for the info On2Tech.

Cheers

[trbarry]

It seems strange that you'd have trouble playing back 1280x544 on a 2.4ghz pc ( unless you can't support a yv12 overlay of that size). We've done quite a few 8 megabit 1920x1080 on a 1.7 ghz P4( with no post processing) for one of our customers.

On2Tech -

Thanks.

I am running Win/Me with a Radeon LE card. With that combination I've never managed to get native YV12 display support. The hardware claims it support YV12 overlay it but on any filter graph there always appears to be a path through YUY2 for some reason, with any codec. I gave up on that months ago. I realize that really pigs things out but don't know how to change it.

But it is really good to hear about 8 mbps 1920x1080 on a machine slower (supposedly) than mine.


Nonetheless you may want to try VP60 ( simplified profile). I doubt you'll see a big quality difference at that frame size, but you may see a big improvement in playback speed.


Now THAT is useful information! I've stated here many times that with HDTV rez clips the limiting factor is often the playback speed and not saving the last nickel on disk space. That's why I've stuck with CBR. Effectively I'm "streaming" through my video card and any large bit rate peaks would just end up being stutters and pauses.

So I'll try it again with VP60. I already have all post processing turned off in the control panel but maybe this will help a bit more.

- Tom

[Bulletproof]

I did a test of my own with some of my HD material, I tried encoding a 1920x1080i file using VP6 Advanced profile, datarate set to 8mbits and interlaced mode on. The actual encoding speed was below 1fps with fast compress on. Playback speed reported by the video renderer was only 15fps. My system is a P4 3.0ghz w/ Hyperthreading, DDR400 RAM, Radeon 9800 PRO. The video also had a big green line under it when playing it (which is not in the original).

[trbarry]

VP60 does seem to be a bit faster on playback. I lowered the resolution to 1280x544 and the bit rate to 750 KBps and it more or less plays at full speed. But with software ac3 decoding I get progressive sound sync problems as it still cannot quite keep up on my 2.4 Ghz P4.

But at least with VP60 it starts almost immediately. The delay in starting VP61 playback seems to be proportional to the size of the file. It takes over 4 MINUTES to start playing a 4 GB file on VP61.

My previous testing of VP61 720p material (my standard) had been at lower bit rates and I had not noticed any particular problems. But it appears to me that VP6x must (like in streaming) calculate how much material it is going to have to buffer ahead of time, at least in some situations. This is a problem for HDTV playback.

At the same bit rate and even a 1440x608 resolution I can play back Xvid with no problems. Maybe I need a better graphics card or drivers or something to get pass thru YV12 support.

- Tom

[plonk420]

Originally posted by On2Tech
We are still optimizing the codec on the pc and may have something that works faster soon.

does this mean it's coming out for other platforms as well? or am i reading too much into this? ^_^

[plonk420]

Originally posted by trbarry
VP60 does seem to be a bit faster on playback. I lowered the resolution to 1280x544 and the bit rate to 750 KBps and it more or less plays at full speed. But with software ac3 decoding I get progressive sound sync problems as it still cannot quite keep up on my 2.4 Ghz P4.

what are you using for the container file? AVI, OGM, MKV? i've heard MKV is advanced in some aspects, i'd think it'd have better syncing or whatnot, but i could be completely wrong...

[trbarry]

what are you using for the container file? AVI, OGM, MKV? i've heard MKV is advanced in some aspects, i'd think it'd have better syncing or whatnot, but i could be completely wrong...

I'm using AVI. But I suspect the sync problems are just insufficient CPU. I can temporarily fix them just by pausing it.

- Tom

[plonk420]

Originally posted by trbarry
I'm using AVI. But I suspect the sync problems are just insufficient CPU. I can temporarily fix them just by pausing it.

you should try MKV just for grins .. should be a simple demux and remux with the disgustingly easy (compared to learning 2 pass encoding for the first time) mkvmerge gui

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/

with help

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge-gui.html

i started using the MKV container after i had problems muxing VP6 and AAC-HE into an AVI and did some research between OGM and MKV and sided with MKV...

[SpaceV]

I know that the VP6 can be decoded by several
DSP chips. Since I heard that Philips and other Cos are
working on MPEG4 encoder chips, I was wondering if
ON2 is pushing that as well. I would like to see
an EVD recorder recording / compressing 720x480 and HDTV 720p in realtime on a DSP chip. Will we see that in the future and when ?
Thanks.

[On2Tech]

I've discovered, that the files we produced that played 8 megabits 1920x1080 on a 1.7 ghz P4 used a non released profile. I've been able to duplicate your speed problems with the codec as released.

We hope to address these speed issues in a future release.

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by SpaceV
I know that the VP6 can be decoded by several
DSP chips. Since I heard that Philips and other Cos are
working on MPEG4 encoder chips, I was wondering if
ON2 is pushing that as well. I would like to see
an EVD recorder recording / compressing 720x480 and HDTV 720p in realtime on a DSP chip. Will we see that in the future and when ?
Thanks.

As you may know we have a long standing relationship with a few chip manufacturers ( you can read about these in our press releases). In addition we've demonstrated 720p playback on a 400mhz equator chip to some of our partners,

Phillips:
http://www.macreport.net/featured/ONT/pr052003.asp

TI and Equator:
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/sigdev.asp?Symbol=ont

I'm sorry but I can't reveal anything more about On2's part in EVD than what you can in our press releases:

http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/031118/0840000874_2.html

[SpaceV]

Thanks for your answer but I am not quite satisfied.

I know about the PLAYBACK capabilities of DSP chips
but if I am not completely wrong, realtime HD encoding takes
way more processing power than decoding.

So outside from EVD, the question: is ON2 working with
DSP companies to implement realtime ENCODING VP6 HD and 480p/i ?
When would those be available?

Thanks

[SeeMoreDigital]

Wow,

Yet another codec to appear on the Philips Nexperia (http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/products/nexperia/media_processing/pnx1500/index.html)processors!

No doubt this processor will not be cheap!

Cheers

[trbarry]

I've discovered, that the files we produced that played 8 megabits 1920x1080 on a 1.7 ghz P4 used a non released profile. I've been able to duplicate your speed problems with the codec as released.

We hope to address these speed issues in a future release.


Thanks. That will certainly be an important improvement for VP6/HD.

I'll be looking forward to it.

- Tom

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by SpaceV
Thanks for your answer but I am not quite satisfied.

I know about the PLAYBACK capabilities of DSP chips
but if I am not completely wrong, realtime HD encoding takes
way more processing power than decoding.

So outside from EVD, the question: is ON2 working with
DSP companies to implement realtime ENCODING VP6 HD and 480p/i ?
When would those be available?

Thanks

Sorry I didn't answer your question; unfortunately I can't. All I can do when asked questions regarding the future or even just future plans of the company is to point to our current press releases.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by On2Tech
Sorry I didn't answer your question; unfortunately I can't. All I can do when asked questions regarding the future or even just future plans of the company is to point to our current press releases. It's a company secret then!

[Bulletproof]

One suggestion I have is if you could make that registry entry you gave me the default decoding mode when the DirectShow codec is not used, or at least make the control panel option also reflect changes on the other decoder as well.

[SeeMoreDigital]

I just thoght you would like to know.

But as of yesterday I am now able to view encodes generated by your codec on my TV/monitor via my Xcard!

And very nice they look too!

Cheers

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
I just thoght you would like to know.

But as of yesterday I am now able to view encodes generated by your codec on my TV/monitor via my Xcard!

And very nice they look too!

Cheers

Glad to hear it. We'll have a new version shortly. I think you'll find its two pass mode "greatly" improved.

[slavickas]

Originally posted by On2Tech
Glad to hear it. We'll have a new version shortly. I think you'll find its two pass mode "greatly" improved.

will there be improvements in low-bitrate and(or) single-pass encodings? btw shouldn't be badframes.stt disabled in release build?
i don't think it's very useable for me :rolleyes:

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by slavickas
will there be improvements in low-bitrate and(or) single-pass encodings? btw shouldn't be badframes.stt disabled in release build?
i don't think it's very useable for me :rolleyes:

If you are getting badframes.stt it is indicative of a bitstream bug please private message me with the file / settings that cause it.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by On2Tech
Glad to hear it. We'll have a new version shortly. I think you'll find its two pass mode "greatly" improved. Cool!

There's no doubt that the VP codec is able to generate excellent results with low bitrate 1pass encodes. If this quality can be improved further using 2pass encoding, then it's well worth waiting for!

Thanks you guys

[slavickas]

Originally posted by On2Tech
If you are getting badframes.stt it is indicative of a bitstream bug please private message me with the file / settings that cause it.

don't worry, i get it only (sometimes) when watching inet tv in winamp, i think it happens when bitstream is decoded not from keyframe

[h9903209]

I just download the code and want to try encode in virtualdub, but find there are two vp6, one is vp60r simple profile, another one is vp61r advanced profile, but the configure seems the same, just wondering what's the difference between these two?

also, do you mind explain a little bit more about the adjust quantizer? still don't quite understand how to choose the value even after reading the guide...

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by h9903209
I just download the code and want to try encode in virtualdub, but find there are two vp6, one is vp60r simple profile, another one is vp61r advanced profile, but the configure seems the same, just wondering what's the difference between these two?

also, do you mind explain a little bit more about the adjust quantizer? still don't quite understand how to choose the value even after reading the guide...


VP60 is effectively a simplified decoder version of VP61. It allows for faster playback on slower machines or higher def playback on faster machines. We use it to show hi-def on various set-top box dsps. Don't use VP60 on the PC unless you really can't play back fast enough. The quality isn't too much worse but it is a little bit worse.

The quantizer parameters allow you to control how the best possible and worst possible frames will look:

- adjust quantizer allows the compressor to change the quantizer ( or roughly speaking quality ) for the frames it encodes to try and hit the datarate you requested. If you don't check this setting each frame has the same quantizer ( the max quantizer value ).

- max quantizer controls how bad the worst and the best quality frames can be. The lower the max quantizer the better the worst frame will be.

- min quantizer controls how good the best frame will be. The higher the value the worse the best frame will be. ( this might seem like a silly parameter, but with the best quantizer set at 0 you might spend thousands of bits on what looks like a black frame but actually has slight variations of black).

[Sagittaire]

For high compressibility or/and high BPF (bit/pixel*fps) use [2-30] for interval quant ...

One2 Tech are agree with that i think ... ;-)

[On2Tech]

Originally posted by Sagittaire
For high compressibility or/and high BPF (bit/pixel*fps) use [2-30] for interval quant ...

One2 Tech are agree with that i think ... ;-)

I agree that in practice 2 - 30 will work just fine unless you're shooting for ridiculously low datarates.

In 2 pass mode the codec will automatically pick a max quantizer. As such 2 - 56 hopefully will work just as well as 2 - 30. And 2-30 on extremely difficult material will limit the lowest datarate you can hit.

For instance try shooting for 200 kilobits on that Harry Potter clip with a max quantizer of 30.. Of course I don't think you'll really like the results of your 200 kilobit encode but it should actually work.

[h9903209]

thx for explanation, because used to rmvb super simple setting, don't quite understand many technical terms...

In the guide for adjust quantizer, it says "Can be set lower if you prefer better quality frames and don’t mind dropping to a lower frame rate" what's bad if dropping to a lower frame rate? less smoothing? and if uncheck temporal resampling then would it still drop frame rate?

"For high compressibility or/and high BPF (bit/pixel*fps) use [2-30] for interval quant ..."
thx for your help, but I even don't quite understand what means by high compressibility or/and high BPF (bit/pixel*fps)... high compressibility/BPF = high datarate?

I usually encode using rmvb at one pass 450kbs vbr normal EHQ before, is that ok to set 2-30 in vp6 450kbs encode or need any change in order to achieve >= rmvb 450kbs quality? or should I use 4-40 as described in the example in the guide for 500kbs encode? in fact I don't quite care about whether the resulting datarate match the entered value, it's ok even it's higher.

also, I see you disable temporal & spatial resampling while in the guide it's enabled... just wondering whether the only effect of disabling them is better quality and the resulting datarate would be a bit higher than the entered value?

[Sagittaire]

For me High compressibility is 60% /quant2 encoding and high BPF are 0.25 for advanced codec ...

450 Kbps for usual encoding in 640*272*25 is weak (450000/640*272*25=0.1 BPF) and VP6 default interval quant is good ...

temporal & spatial resampling for VP6 are activing if the encoding condition are very hard I think (read VP6 doc for more precisions ...)