ni hao! (XviD-1.0-RC3)

[Lord_KiRon]

Originally posted by Koepi
lord_kiron:

you must have changed something else on your system and maybe just forgot about it.

Or head over to your vga cards driver setup and check the brightness controls for overlays - those are different too sometimes, i.e. if you upgraded your drivers.

Can you please check that, too?

Koepi

When I am talking about "darker" I am not talking about only my computer , and yes older encodes runs fine.

It's my general expirience that last 5-6 encodes I made (everyone of them) is really too dark both on my computer , my KiSS player and other computers I tried both with XviD, DivX and FFDShow - I have to set the brightnes all the way up , while all other encodes I was doing during a year much brighter and play so on my computer (sorry I can't pinpoint execly the version where it started to happen I did not updated betas frequently and then "jumpet" to RC1 when it was out) . I play my old encodes and they look bright , so it's not a brightness setting. Also I use same set of encoding settings so nothing changed there .

[Joe Fenton]

Originally posted by poochie2
First of all I'd like to underline that I think that the problem of what I'm posting should be more pointed to the developers to the player I'll refer to, anyways I'm posting here just because I'd like to know if and what has changed in the codec that might justify what happened to me.

The people who did PS2Reality have pretty much quit work on it. They also don't really know that much... just enough to cobble together a working player.


As you will all know there's a Media Player for PlayStation2 developed by Ps2Reality. The fact is that I've been able to use it with my XviD 1.0 Betas until Beta3, then every movie (muxed using the same version of VirtualDubMod) encoded with a version of the codec equal or later than XviD 1.0 RC1 won't work, as the player will start opening the movie and say there's no index in AVI! I'd think this is more a container problem, but I'm not that experienced to be able to surely say that, so I was wondering is there could be something that changed since Beta 3 to RC1 that might result in this incompatibility with that kind of player. In every encode I did I used to keep the same settings, so it shouldn't be a problem of what I said to the codec or how I muxed audio & video. If someone could give me an hint about this it would be very much appreciated!

Thanks

PS2Reality uses an old version of ffmpeg as the video decoder. Your best bet would be to check out ffmpeg threads for notes on what settings (for B-Frames and packed bitstream and what-not) the old ffmpeg will handle. I have seen comments from people in this thread that old versions of ffdshow (which uses ffmpeg) doesn't work with the new xvid encodes. The solution was to use a newer ffdshow. Because the code to PS2Reality was never released, you can't update the version of ffmpeg it uses.

[Malevolent]

Reporting "darker than it should be" encodes here too.

I've recently been using a bit too much the Avisynth filter "Tweak",
with a setting of +15 bright +1.5 contrast, so i figured something was wrong.
A check into earlier posts suggests that too, so here's a quick & non-scientifical test:

Material:
Cartoon, light & dark areas in each frame.

Script:

Avisource("C:\X.avi").Killaudio()
Trim(200,400)

Tested with:
-direct stream copy
-XviD RC3 @ default
-DivX 5.02 @ default
-XviD Koepi 20030624 @ default

XviD RC3 was clearly the darkest, no visible changes with others.

[SiXXGuNNZ]

unless something is seriously wrong with my pc, I am getting about 50 fps on the first pass and right around 24 fps for the second both in gknot and just using vdubmod

settings:

P@L: AS @ L5
MSP: 6 - Ultra High
VHQ M: 4 - Wide Search
Use Chroma and Turbo ;-)
Frame Drop: 0
I-Frame Int: 240
Cartoon off
Quant: 2/31, 2/31, 2/31
Use Trellis
FourCC: XviD
Display Enc Status off
Quant Type: H.263
B-VOP's: 2/1.50/1.00
Use Packed Bitstream and Closed GOV
GMC, Q-Pel, Adaptive Quant and Interlaced Enc are off

I have ran about 20 different tests on different sources(usually one chapter at a time, but have encoded full movies also)

My system is(well my brothers system is ;)), AMD 2800+(2.08 GHz), 512 MB DDR 400 MHz, nForce2 chipset(all latest drivers), GeForce FX 5200 128 MB

[kilg0r3]

I did two encodes
One RC1 the other RC3 everything else equal. At least between these two builds, there is no difference in brightness.
Settings: single pass at fixed Q3; 6of9Matrix,BF(Max2, Ratio 1, Offset 2), Trellis, QP, ChrMo,ChrOpt, vhq2. Some ScreenShots (http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-allgeife8/1.rar)

[Lord_KiRon]

Originally posted by kilg0r3
I did two encodes
One RC1 the other RC3 everything else equal. At least between these two builds, there is no difference in brightness.
Settings: single pass at fixed Q3; 6of9Matrix,BF(Max2, Ratio 1, Offset 2), Trellis, QP, ChrMo,ChrOpt, vhq2. Some ScreenShots (http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-allgeife8/1.rar)

Yes I know , the RC1 was already darker for me .

[PhrostByte]

I just got some 15 S-VOPs in a row- I thought there had to be a I/P/B-VOP in between them? Maybe I'm thinking of something else...

[hajj_3]

koepi, which things do you recommend to play xvid ac3 movies.

ac3 0.70b, xvid 1.0 RC1, should i use ffdshow 12/03/2004, if so should i enable or disable any of the options ?

please could someone advise as i am having problems with ac3 audio and slight jerkiness for xvid rc1 ac3 movie "master and commander".

[SiXXGuNNZ]

the speed is really good for me

right now I am encoding res dogs at 720x480/16:9

first pass is half way done and is avg. about 40fps

settings:

P@L: AS @ L5
MSP: 6 - Ultra High
VHQ M: 4 - Wide Search
Chroma: On
Turbo ;-): Off
Frame Drop: 0
I-Frame Int: 240
Cartoon: Off
Quant: 2/31, 2/31, 2/31
Trellis: Off
FourCC: XviD
Display Enc Status: Off
Quant Type: MPEG
B-VOP's: 2/1.50/1.00
Packed Bitstream: On
Closed GOV: On
GMC: Off
Q-Pel: Off
Adaptive Quant: Off
Interlaced Enc: Off

script is simple, I just removed the bars then added them back

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AutoGK\filters\mpeg2dec3dg.dll")
mpeg2source("D:\DVD Ripping\RD\RD.d2v")
crop(2,56,716,364)
AddBorders(2,56,2,60)

I am really liking XviD 1.0, finally a reason to drop my DivX :)

edit: pass 2 is going strong at about 20fps, same settings

[Lagoon]

What's the point of adding back the black bars ? Just wondering.

[SiXXGuNNZ]

Originally posted by Lagoon
What's the point of adding back the black bars ? Just wondering.

none really, I just do it to make it the 720x480, when I do dvd2dvd with cce I do the same, so I guess that's the only reason I did it with this

[Lagoon]

K, but you lose some quality even if it's black it still need some bits.

You might as well encode in anamorphic instead of adding those bars :)

This way it will be even better if you later decide to convert them to DVD - you didn't lose the anamorphic part.

[SiXXGuNNZ]

Originally posted by Lagoon
K, but you lose some quality even if it's black it still need some bits.

You might as well encode in anamorphic instead of adding those bars :)

This way it will be even better if you later decide to convert them to DVD - you didn't lose the anamorphic part.

I didn't even pay attention to the 2.35:1 setting, so if I crop the black bars from a none resized film, I can set the actual aspect with xvid? so 1.66:1, 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 would all work?

I was just going with the cce way I had been doing things, a 720x480 @ 4:3 or 16:9

Say I crop my black bars off two towers, set the flag for 2.35:1, how and where would I resize it to anamorphic? I can do this with fit2disc, but I really do not understand how to do this outside of using a seperate app. or by flagging it 2.35:1 is it anamorphic?

[Lagoon]

Anamorphic means the raw video is encoded vertically stretched, and horizontally squished on playback, this way you get more vertical resolution, resulting in a noticeably sharper image (just like DVDs, almost all of them are anamorphic nowadays, LOTR is)

To encode this way : only crop the bars, let the video vertically stretched, in XviD option, select Pixel Aspect Ratio : 16:9 NTSC (or PAL depending on the source).

Be sure to NOT select picture aspect ratio, as it's only a flag for players that supports it, whereas pixel aspect ratio information is on the stream itself

Then encode as usual (vdubmod highly recommended), on playback it will be horizontally squished to match the correct aspect ratio - and you didn't loose any vertical resolution, plus no wasted bits for black bars !

I recommend using MPC for playback, as well as XviD decoding or ffdshow with overlay mixer checked to avoid problems.

For later DVD encoding if you wanted to do it, just add back the borders to get the dvd resolution back.

A small example : a 720x576 PAL 2,35:1 film, you crop the bars, you get 720x416, you encode it like that, on playback it will be resized to 1024x416. If you were doing it with the bars , it would be 1024x576, 160 wasted lines!

[kilg0r3]

Is it still possible somehow to get a highest quality mp4 compatible first pass output, that would be a single pass encode at highest quality that outputs also a stats file?

[mikeX]

Be sure to NOT select picture aspect ratio, as it's only a flag for players that supports it, whereas pixel aspect ratio information is on the stream itself
that is wrong and misleading information Lagoon
Quoting sysKin:
"it's always PAR
if you enter DAR, a buildin calculator will turn it into corresponding PAR"

@kilg0r3

i feel like i'm missing your point, but isn't 'Full quality first pass' supposed to do that?? (and you mean mpeg4 right?)

[Leak]

Originally posted by kilg0r3
Is it still possible somehow to get a highest quality mp4 compatible first pass output, that would be a single pass encode at highest quality that outputs also a stats file?

Well, that's what "Full quality first pass" is there for... check it and uncheck "Discard first pass" and you should be set.

np: Bola - Pendulus (Soup)

[kilg0r3]

Originally posted by Leak
Well, that's what "Full quality first pass" is there for... :stupid: 'Have been testin with RC1 and forgot to reinstall RC3. RC1 didn't have this ceckbox.

I guess however that I am right in suspecting that Full-Quality-First-Pass does not work correctly when 'turbo' is enabled?

[sysKin]

Originally posted by kilg0r3
I guess however that I am right in suspecting that Full-Quality-First-Pass does not work correctly when 'turbo' is enabled? Any reason for that?

[mikeX]

@kilg0r3
Turbo has nothing to do with 'fast first pass'
Judging from the fact that 'turbo' can also be enabled during the second pass I would say it is MPEG-4 compliant and thus safe to use with 'full quality first pass'
You can see for yourself: compare the speed difference between 'fast first pass' and 'full quality first pass' with 'turbo'
You should notice that 'turbo' does not have such a dramatic effect on speed ;)

[kilg0r3]

/staring at the screen in silent embarassement

[SiXXGuNNZ]

Originally posted by Lagoon
Anamorphic means the raw video is encoded vertically stretched, and horizontally squished on playback, this way you get more vertical resolution, resulting in a noticeably sharper image (just like DVDs, almost all of them are anamorphic nowadays, LOTR is)

To encode this way : only crop the bars, let the video vertically stretched, in XviD option, select Pixel Aspect Ratio : 16:9 NTSC (or PAL depending on the source).

Be sure to NOT select picture aspect ratio, as it's only a flag for players that supports it, whereas pixel aspect ratio information is on the stream itself

Then encode as usual (vdubmod highly recommended), on playback it will be horizontally squished to match the correct aspect ratio - and you didn't loose any vertical resolution, plus no wasted bits for black bars !

I recommend using MPC for playback, as well as XviD decoding or ffdshow with overlay mixer checked to avoid problems.

For later DVD encoding if you wanted to do it, just add back the borders to get the dvd resolution back.

A small example : a 720x576 PAL 2,35:1 film, you crop the bars, you get 720x416, you encode it like that, on playback it will be resized to 1024x416. If you were doing it with the bars , it would be 1024x576, 160 wasted lines!

nice, thanks for the heads up, it is now testing time :D

[Movie Maniac®]

Hi
I've got a TV cards by Terratec, which has only wdm drivers.
Virtualdub doesn't seem to like my card, so I'm trying to use VirtualVCR to acquire some TV programs.
I've tried to use Xvid 1.0 RC3 to compress the video, but the result is an almost unplayable video file.
Every player (except VLC that can read also stones!!!) crashes on certain frames, and even virtualdub(mod) crashes if i try to open ane edit the file.
The error seems to be the same we discussed ome times ago for the xvid 1.0 RC2 (the player tryes to read more data than what is really stored into the frame).

Did someone else had this problem?
Or it sounds completely new to your ears?

[Malevolent]

It'd be nice to get some "official" feedback on this darker encodes issue...
Koepi? Syskin?

[Daranduil]

Profile Level AS @ L4 says Maxbitrate 3000 kbps, but under this, it's writen "informative only, Xvid's ratecontrol will not respect this values".


Will XviD-1.0-RC4 come with a maxbitrate option?

[dapipa]

anybody alive?or...i'm afraid to ask :eek: ...is everyone turned into nuts,or something?
p.s.i've noticed that 'will turn developers into nuts' statement disappeared from sysKin's signature:does it mean 1.0 final is going to be released anytime soon?
man,i just wanna get my hands(or should i say my computer's decision making piece of silicon)on it!
:)

[mellon]

I cannot confirm this impression.

I encoded the same clip with XviD-1.0-RC3-29022004 and XviD-24062003-1. Configuration was on closest match. (same bitrate etc.) I decoded both clips with both release's VFW and DShow decoders and compared some I-Frames and P-Frames with the histogram function of PaintShopPro.
Average luminance was always the same on all images. Peak luminance differed less than 1% of the value.

[k4y]

I've got a xvid movie, its fourcc tag is "xvid-yv12" (!) ..
No matter what xvid codec (incl. ni hao),
it simply wont play in windows xp. :(
Manually cleaning the system for codecs, even reinstalling xp after low-level formatting doesnt help either.

With Linux, the movie started right away in MandrakeMove and Mandrake 10.0 Community.

[communist]

Originally posted by k4y
I've got a xvid movie,
dcn-medallion,
Read the rules!
No warez talk!

[k4y]

sorry :(

[MoonWalker]

About the brightess issue :

Using ffdshow-20040329 and MPC 6.4.8.2.

Using Overlay Mixer the image is a little darker than using WMR9(changed from within MPC)..Don't know if anyone has noticed this..

MoonWalker

[jared1999]

Brightness issue:
Remember that overlay (usually) has separate settings from VMR9 (VMR9 is same as desktop color settings in many drivers), and so both must be calibrated. You'll most likely end up with them looking very similar.
Personally I've always had trouble getting overlay properly calibrated (both on ATI and nVidia drivers), so I just use VMR9 as much as possible.

[Heini011]

Hi,

i use dividee's six-of-nine hvs matrix and have setting the min-quantisizers up to 3 for first and second pass, because i get a 3 gb file in fist pass when i encode my film with default-value 2.

problem: within the statfile i- and p-frame quantisizers are 2 instead of 3.

@devs: it is possible to fix this problem?

greeting, Heini011.

[GalFisk]

Hi, I have a problem playing back some clips I encoded some time ago, with the latest XviD builds. Unfortunately I don't recall which build I used when the files were encoded, it was one of Nic's builds and was done in october-november 2003. It says XviD0009 in the AVI files if that helps...

Options used, as I recall:
2-pass (2nd pass int)
Motion search precision 6
Quant: MPEG-custom (used custom cartoon quantizer matrix)
4CC: XVID
VHQ: not sure, but I think it was off
Lumi masking, Q-pel, Chroma motion, GMC enabled.
Max b-frames: 1
Min b/p quantizer was 1 or 2
Credits at 20%/greyscale
Chroma optimizer may have been enabled
Picture size: 640x480

When there is much motion in the picture, especially on pans and zooms, the picture gets smeared, it looks like the blocks don't move quite correctly, and pieces are left behind and/or misaligned. The video often plays correctly if most of the picture is static.
This happens in all clips I encoded at the time, with that build and those settings. They played back correctly at the time, they also work in the new ffdshow builds (except when using the XVID 4 decoder in ffdshow).

I use Media Player Classic (6.4.7.5) on windows XP, I have an Athlon XP 2600+ CPU and ATI Radeon 9700pro video card.
There is a clip that shows the problem at http://home.no.net/galfisk/testclip.avi (2.98MB)
It would be nice if this would work in 1.0 final (or if that's not possible, if/how I can fix the files).
Edit: looks like some of the same that Undead posted here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71803&perpage=20&pagenumber=9 (2nd post from the top)
Edit2: Several other people have reported the same problems with these clips as well, the new (200403xx) versions of ffdshow as well as old XviD builds seem to work for them too.

[communist]

Have you tried ffdshow? IIRC the XviD team will work on workarounds for decoding old xvid streams after 1.0.

In the mean time try to decode with ffdshow and see if that helps:
http://www.ligh.de/software/mirrors.phtml

[lordadmira]

Originally posted by GalFisk
When there is much motion in the picture, especially on pans and zooms, the picture gets smeared, it looks like the blocks don't move quite correctly, and pieces are left behind and/or misaligned.

I know exactly what the problem is. I've seen it dozens of times. The video stream is corrupted. You probably had some hard drive corruption taking place when u encoded them. Those artifacts are classic. I had the exact same problem when my RAID was dieing and corrupting my files.

P.S. There's no way to fix this.

[Arcon]

Originally posted by GalFisk
Hi, I have a problem playing back some clips I encoded some time ago, with the latest XviD builds.
[...]
When there is much motion in the picture, especially on pans and zooms, the picture gets smeared
you probably made them with an older build that was using another idct method. try playing the clips with ffdshow and try the different idct methods offered under misc (at least in the older builds of ffdshow it's there, might have been relocated in the newer builds).

[GalFisk]

Originally posted by communist
IIRC the XviD team will work on workarounds for decoding old xvid streams after 1.0.
Interesting to know. It seems to be a problem with GMC, since it only affects scenes where large portions of the picture are moving. The annoying thing is that it works in older XviD builds and ffdshow, but not in the newest XviD builds. I think it started a little before RC1, seems like something was either broken or an old bug was fixed...
In ffdshow it plays back correctly with any iDCT, and the built-in libavcodec or XviD decoder, but not the XviD 4 decoder. It works without enabling any of the encoder bug workarounds.

[Arcon]

Originally posted by GalFisk
In ffdshow it plays back correctly with any iDCT, and the built-in libavcodec or XviD decoder, but not the XviD 4 decoder.
does it play back ok if you watch the video in virtualdubmod? as far as i remember vdubmod uses the xvid.dll for decoding while normal movieplayers use the ds-filter xvid.ax. maybe only one of them has this problem you described?

[Lobuz]

So once again the same clip (http://www.republika.pl/lobuzsign/sample.avi) . It's with adaptive quantization which makes strange efect -> horizontal lines with xvid decoder but not with ffdshow. With new version of ffdshow when switching different idct works it appeared again with xvid(walken) IDCT. With simple IDCT the picture is ok. So it looks like the xvid idct is guilty here.

Regards
Lobuz

[GalFisk]

Originally posted by Arcon
does it play back ok if you watch the video in virtualdubmod? as far as i remember vdubmod uses the xvid.dll for decoding while normal movieplayers use the ds-filter xvid.ax. maybe only one of them has this problem you described?
Just tested, the clips play normally in vdubmod and vdub.