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.