3ivx

[dimitrius]

right, so the new version of 3ivx is out, I downloaded it. It was a suprisingly small package. Installed it. Tried it out.

I think to begin testing any codec you need to encode a high motion movie and an anime movie to start with.

I tried Neon Genesis Evangelion - The End of Evangelion (nice anime, fairly high action, alot of different colours in different places) and X-Men 1. When I started setting up for encode I noticed firstly that 3ivx doesn't have any advanced option that you can tweak (this made me twitch :rolleyes: ) and that it measures bitrate in kbytes/sec instead of bits (simple divide by 8 to get around that). Then I started encoding and I found that 3ivx with quality over speed setting goes almost 10 times faster than divx 5.1.1 on slowest (3ivx at 60fps and divx at 6-7fps). Surely that would mean bad quality. I was encoding at 608x448 (NGE) and 608x320 (X-Men) [I can't remember exactly, I know that horiz was definetly 608 and 4:3 for NGE and 16:9 for xmen]. The quality was excellent. I would have taken me alot of tweking with xvid or at least 3 passes with divx plus manual log editing to get that kind of quality :) . Now these ones were both encoded for 1400mb, but I also tried several clips encoded as if 700mb. Regretably I don't have pictures to show you (as I am writing this I am at uni, not at home).

One snag though. I tried encoding at cbr of 100% quality to bybass using mpeg2dec3. The resulted file was over 5gig - expected. But it was impossible to play back the file. All players would lock up when you try to seek. I thought it would be because of huge datarate/filesize. So i tried to encode the above 2 movies to 2800mb with the normal 2 pass method. Still, all players lockup. but at 1400mb there's no problem.

I really quite liked 3ivx (especially the 10 times faster encoding) but I am suprised: If I had a pretty good experience with it I am guessing other people had them too, but noone here seems to buzing about all this.

If you tried 3ivx tell us about your views

sory about long winded post...

[Sirber]

What was the bitrate used?

[dimitrius]

about 215kbytes/s - don't remember exactly - incidently I am not having any problems, just like to see peoples views

[bullitB]

But it was impossible to play back the file. All players would lock up when you try to seek. I thought it would be because of huge datarate/filesize. So i tried to encode the above 2 movies to 2800mb with the normal 2 pass method. Still, all players lockup. but at 1400mb there's no problem.
Maybe you're using an encoder that doesn't produce valid OpenDML AVIs when they are >2GB?

Regardless, I do agree with you about 3ivx. They did a really great job balancing quality and speed. At best, I've been able to get maybe 10% better quality with XviD or DivX, and it almost always takes 10-20x longer. In animated stuff where B-frames are not really needed, 3ivx is especially good.

The pixel aspect ratio stuff is also really great for hi-res encoding; you can just crop off the letterboxing, then create a reasonably good quality 1400 MB anamorphic MPEG-4 for most movies. Of course, the 3ivx MP4 muxer/demuxer is great for making MP4s, which have a lower overhead than AVIs.

disclaimer/shameless plug: I have some association (http://diva.3ivx.com) with the 3ivx guys.

[shitowax]

I'm also not that impartial ;). But anyway, our evaluation package is very small (only 1 MB). It contains a video codec with a very good quality/speed ratio usable with VfW, DirectShow and Quicktime as well, but it contains also an audio encoder and decoder (AAC), the famous mp4 splitter and an mp4 muxer as well (smaller size and ISO compliant). Everything is very easy to use ( with graphedit ), very powerfull (let you transcode/transmux audio and/or video, to or from .mp4) and is even customizable as well : you can use coreAAC or ffdshow and its custom filters if you prefer, you can even create .mp4 files using xvid or he-aac if you want ...

[tiki4]

So far I made very good experience with 3ivx 4.5. I like especially the DirectShow part of the package as handling MP4 isn't such a nightmare anymore as some month ago. The codec is very good already but nevertheless I wait for B-frames in a future release.

tiki4

[Atamido]

To see if its just the AVI structure thats b0rked, try to remux the file using AVI-Mux GUI. Or, just convert the thing to MKV where it should be in the first place. ;)

[slavickas]

does it support rtsp playback from darwin servers?

[shitowax]

nope, it's a pure local (or HTTP) file splitter, it doesn't handle RTP/RTSP ... yet

Originally posted by slavickas
does it support rtsp playback from darwin servers?

[bullitB]

Yes, but if you install both QT and 3ivx, it will take over QuickTime's MPEG-4 decoding when watching a stream so you get better picture quality and stuff. Kinda cool.

[slavickas]

Originally posted by bullitB
Yes, but if you install both QT and 3ivx, it will take over QuickTime's MPEG-4 decoding when watching a stream so you get better picture quality and stuff. Kinda cool.

does then qt thing support heaac?

[bullitB]

Originally posted by slavickas
does then qt thing support heaac?

No, it doesn't. Too bad, too, because that would be great for streaming.

[Stux]

Originally posted by bullitB
No, it doesn't. Too bad, too, because that would be great for streaming.

Although HE-AAC does play as LC-AAC at half the samplerate when decoded on an LC only decoder (ie QT)

[iago]

I like it. The only drawback seems to be the lack of b-frames. Good work! ;)

regards,
iago

[Selur]

and the lack of custom matrices, and the allways missing 'order pizza'-button ;)

Cu Selur