MeGUI - x264/XviD/lavc/Snow encoder with MP4/MKV/AVI output & audio

[rkalwaitis]

I autoupdated as per your guidance and no mplayer that I can see. In fact it autoupdated twice.

[rkalwaitis]

I autoupdated as per your guidance, infact it updated once on its own. But still no mplayer.

[Sharktooth]

megui install folder\tools ... and sorry i meant mencoder... today im a bit confused.

[rkalwaitis]

Mencoder is there. The only things that didnt update where besplit and nero, which I downloaded seperately as per instructions.

Do I need to replace the mencoder with another?

[Sharktooth]

uhm... i will publish a mencoder update in the megui autoupdate server shortly (in the next few days). so if you want you can do it by yourself (get a sherpya or celtic druid build most recent build) or just wait for the update.

[rkalwaitis]

ill try to snag it on my own. If not Ill watch for your update, thanks a lot for helping me. At least I know where to look. Do I need to put mplayer with the mencoder file?

[Sharktooth]

np, ill do it right now... i found some free time (5 minutes... should be enough).

[rkalwaitis]

Dude I didnt mean to rush you, Im retired and have too much time on my hands :)

[rkalwaitis]

If you guys ever need any help doing anything just ask :)

[Sharktooth]

ok.... files are up in the megui.org auto-update mirror.

edit: im from italy too.
edit2: i updated ffmpeg too.

[rkalwaitis]

so need for the mplayer at all?

[Sharktooth]

check the log if there's still this problem:
---[NoImage] Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf).
---[NoImage] subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.
---[NoImage] Assertion failed: iscore >= 0, file snow.c, line 2169
---[NoImage] This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

[rkalwaitis]

okay she is a screaming at a whole 7.68fps... ill let you no if it worked or didnt work,thanks again

ciao

[Sharktooth]

ok... in the meantime im re-updating mencoder. i added the missing font. it should be up in few minutes (it's up).

[rkalwaitis]

cause you da man!!!

[Sharktooth]

if it still doenst work then we have to include the configuration files... what a PITA...

[rkalwaitis]

Well it did not fail due to the last error, in fact it completed the process and gave me an file with no video that I could at least see. Before the fix, I was getting a varily nice picture it just would not finish. Im gonna play around with it and see what happens. But I can not think of anything I changed as far as the snow codec goes.

K

[Sharktooth]

are you sure you have a recent snow decoder installed?

[rkalwaitis]

If it didnt come with megui, Then I guess not. Where do I get it?

[Sharktooth]

uhm try mplayer: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=205275&package_id=248631&release_id=614242
it is the same revision and build from where i took mencoder to add it to the megui auto-update.
get the mplayer GUI for a graphical interface.

[rkalwaitis]

okay i installed the latest of lord M's ill try yours.

Ill let you know, thanks

[Sharktooth]

ah ok... hope it works hehe

[rkalwaitis]

I used the original mencoder and your text font fix, and it worked. Played fine in VLC. Thanks for the help. Im gonna try a real test now.

Your the bomb.

[rkalwaitis]

no dice, im gonna clean everything up and start from scratch, I hate vista :( but I can't find the I Hate My Vista OS here on doom. The lmp4 looked interesting too. Are the scratchpad settings the best settings?

[Sharktooth]

what happened?

[rkalwaitis]

Sharktooth,

No Dice again.

-[Information] Log for job3 (video, quick.avs -> quick.avi)
--[Information] [8/8/2008 9:03:01 AM] Started handling job
--[Information] [8/8/2008 9:03:03 AM] Preprocessing
--[NoImage] Job commandline: "C:\Program Files\megui\tools\mencoder\mencoder.exe" "C:\Users\Baba-Nator\Downloads\Quick and the Dead\quick.avs" -ovc lavc -nosound -lavcopts vcodec=snow:vbitrate=700:vstrict=-2 -o "C:\Users\Baba-Nator\Downloads\Quick and the Dead\quick.avi" -of avi -ffourcc SNOW
--[Information] [8/8/2008 9:03:05 AM] Encoding started
--[NoImage] Standard output stream
---[NoImage] MEncoder Sherpya-SVN-r27323-4.2.4 (C) 2000-2008 MPlayer Team
---[NoImage] CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ (Family: 15, Model: 75, Stepping: 2)
---[NoImage] CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
---[NoImage] Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
---[NoImage] success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0xd3
---[NoImage] AVS file format detected.
---[NoImage] VIDEO: [YV12] 640x352 12bpp 23.976 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
---[NoImage] [V] filefmt:38 fourcc:0x32315659 size:640x352 fps:23.976 ftime:=0.0417
---[NoImage] Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
---[NoImage] Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
---[NoImage] ==========================================================================
---[NoImage] Opening video decoder: [raw] RAW Uncompressed Video
---[NoImage] VDec: vo config request - 640 x 352 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
---[NoImage] VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
---[NoImage] Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied.
---[NoImage] videocodec: libavcodec (640x352 fourcc=574f4e53 [SNOW])
---[NoImage] Selected video codec: [rawyv12] vfm: raw (RAW YV12)
---[NoImage] ==========================================================================
---[NoImage] Forcing output FourCC to 574f4e53 [SNOW].
---[NoImage] Writing header...
---[NoImage] ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
---[NoImage] Writing header...
---[NoImage] ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
--[NoImage] Standard error stream
--[Information] [8/8/2008 9:03:17 AM] Job completed


not sure what i dorked up.

i did clean up the computer and start from scratch so Im lost.


Thanks K

[rkalwaitis]

lmp4 and x254 worked fine. thanks

[rkalwaitis]

may have been an issue between mencoder and avisyth. Ive updated to the latest version of AviSynth_080730 and appears to be working as it should. I will let you know more when test is done.

[rkalwaitis]

Well Ive got it to play back, lets see if it will finish a job. Looks like it will be a small file, i picked 5.00 constant quality. Ill let you know how it looks and works out, thanks for the help Sharktooth your the man!!!!!!!

[Sharktooth]

keep in mind snow is experimental, rhe way to enable the decoder (libavcodec, the same fthat mplayer and vlc use) was also removed from ffdshow coz it was incomplete/borked...

[rkalwaitis]

The latest vlc doesnt play the file. Im using MPlayer-1.0rc2-gui (gmplayer).

[rkalwaitis]

This has tons of potential, its a shame they dont work on it. Still trying to figure out the settings. To bad Megui doesnt have a command line to add to the choices. It seems much easier on my processor too, when compared to x264. Files are much smaller as well. I need to refine what I select to help me improve quality. But your default for snow produced a file that was 2029kb compared to x264 1 pass good quality of 33mbs. Can you give me something that helps explain the options better. Im sure the x264 will be of better quality, but I think I can get close to it with a much smaller file.


Thanks

[Dark Shikari]

This has tons of potential, its a shame they dont work on it. Still trying to figure out the settings. To bad Megui doesnt have a command line to add to the choices. It seems much easier on my processor too, when compared to x264.Um, what? As an OBMC/wavelet codec, Snow is MUCH slower than x264, both for encoding and decoding.

[rkalwaitis]

i didnt say it was fast, i got anywhere from 10-12fps with snow and slightly faster with x264. But Im not sure if I put the screws to the snow codec, still trying to figure out the various settings and what they really mean. What I have seen so far looks nice, if not as nice as the x264, id say better than xvid. ill red0the tests and post my the speeds. But x264 is faster, but the x264 pulled more of my computers resources. It may because I used the 1 past good quality default. Try it on yours and see.

K

[rkalwaitis]

But if your counting on me to give some kind of high tech report I cant. Im playing with it cause it was part of megui and I wanted to see it work. I have no real way to compare the two other than how they look and the size of the files. Sorry. I can do no filters and same Bitrates and so on, but snow seems strange when trying to judge its capabilities based on how another codec like x264 or xvid may produce something at a given bitrate. I played with the CQ today and 2.50 and 2.25 gave good looking clips in small sizes. The above default mentioned above the 2mb file looked bad. But it was the default given by the program and a place to start. Maybe you can give me a couple of hints of how to do a test and I can try again.

[rkalwaitis]

Sharktooth the bitrate option doesnt seem to work. In other words the file produced is extremely small and unviewable no matter how mut of a bitrate I choose.
the CQ mode rocks!! How do I fix the bitrate option, is it trying to do a two pass by default.

K

[rkalwaitis]

Sharktooth, I think I figured out why it is like that. Ive been reading about the codec a bit and it says that all passes are internal.

So when a pass number is added to the command line vpass (ex. vpass=2) its not quite the same as lets say with xvid or x264. The way I understood it was lets say I picked 1pass. To snow 1 pass is CBR and I must supply the bitrate. If I pick 2 pass it is ABR and must provide the bitrate again. But if Im not mistaken I will not see the typical two pass as I would with xvid. As they are done within the codec. The default for snow is 800kbit/s.

Does this make sense or do I sound crazy?

thanks, I appreciate your wisdom :)

[Sharktooth]

sorry but im not able to code right now.
i annunced my megui dev possible retirement in the megui private forums on SF, unless my health conditions start to improve significantly.
if you know what multiple sclerosis is you will understand.

[rkalwaitis]

Very sorry by best to you.

[magic144]

wonder if anyone can help with this one

I'm brand new to x264 encoding and MeGUI, but not to encoding in general.

I have been trying to encode the same movie file now 3 times. Each time I use the same MeGUI 'jobs' and each time I get a very slight variation in output file size, as well as small variations in some of the logged info from x264 (see below at end of this message - the variations seem to appear in the 2nd pass of each run - the 1st pass logging output is identical so I haven't included it here for now).

Can anybody explain such variations? The profile and source files used were exactly the same - in effect, I just turned the handle a 2nd time and got a different result. Is h.264 encoding not strictly determinstic, or should I be looking at something in particular for a problem? The reason I'm asking is because the first time I tried this, I noticed a tiny glitch in playback (the screen goes fully white for a very few frames - am using ZP, Haali, CoreAVC) on both of my Core 2 Duo PCs. I did NOT see this glitch (at least not in the same place) on the 2nd and 3rd encoding attempts.

BTW, I created the 3 MeGUI jobs (pass1, pass2, mux) in Auto-Encode mode with a target size of DVD9.
MeGUI version is 0.3.0.1020
x264 version used here was 936 (though since these tests, I have progressed to 937)

================
1st Run
================
--[Information] [2008-08-16 22:31:39] Started handling job
--[Information] [2008-08-16 22:31:39] Preprocessing
--[NoImage] Job commandline: "C:\Program Files\megui\tools\x264\x264.exe" --pass 2 --bitrate 11158 --stats "G:\_compressed\my_movie.stats" --keyint 240 --min-keyint 24 --ref 5 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 2 --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --direct auto --nf --subme 6 --trellis 1 --partitions p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,i8x8 --8x8dct --me umh --threads auto --thread-input --sar 99:100 --progress --no-dct-decimate --no-psnr --no-ssim --output "G:\_compressed\my_movie.mkv" "G:\_compressed\my_movie.avs"
--[Information] [2008-08-16 22:31:41] Encoding started
--[NoImage] Standard output stream
--[NoImage] Standard error stream
---[NoImage] avis [info]: 1280x528 @ 23.98 fps (136449 frames)
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: using SAR=99/100
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 PHADD SSE4 Cache64
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice I:1406 Avg QP:15.92 size:112917
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice P:68248 Avg QP:16.55 size: 79484
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice B:66795 Avg QP:18.75 size: 35251
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: consecutive B-frames: 16.6% 36.9% 46.5%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 5.6% 78.3% 16.1%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 1.1% 15.7% 2.0% P16..4: 30.8% 26.1% 21.5% 0.0% 0.0% skip: 2.8%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 0.1% 3.1% 0.3% B16..8: 36.9% 2.6% 4.2% direct: 7.7% skip:45.1% L0:40.6% L1:27.4% BI:32.0%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:83.8% inter:53.3%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: direct mvs spatial:92.7% temporal:7.3%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref P L0 40.7% 24.5% 13.7% 11.2% 9.9%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref B L0 47.7% 30.2% 13.8% 8.4%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref B L1 91.2% 8.8%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: kb/s:11158.5


================
2nd Run
================
--[Information] [2008-08-17 06:20:18] Started handling job
--[Information] [2008-08-17 06:20:18] Preprocessing
--[NoImage] Job commandline: "C:\Program Files\megui\tools\x264\x264.exe" --pass 2 --bitrate 11158 --stats "G:\_compressed\my_movie.stats" --keyint 240 --min-keyint 24 --ref 5 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 2 --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --direct auto --nf --subme 6 --trellis 1 --partitions p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,i8x8 --8x8dct --me umh --threads auto --thread-input --sar 99:100 --progress --no-dct-decimate --no-psnr --no-ssim --output "G:\_compressed\my_movie.mkv" "G:\_compressed\my_movie.avs"
--[Information] [2008-08-17 06:20:20] Encoding started
--[NoImage] Standard output stream
--[NoImage] Standard error stream
---[NoImage] avis [info]: 1280x528 @ 23.98 fps (136449 frames)
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: using SAR=99/100
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 PHADD SSE4 Cache64
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice I:1406 Avg QP:15.92 size:112947
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice P:68248 Avg QP:16.55 size: 79485
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: slice B:66795 Avg QP:18.75 size: 35249
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: consecutive B-frames: 16.6% 36.9% 46.5%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb I I16..4: 5.6% 78.2% 16.2%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb P I16..4: 1.1% 15.8% 2.0% P16..4: 30.8% 26.1% 21.5% 0.0% 0.0% skip: 2.8%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: mb B I16..4: 0.1% 3.1% 0.3% B16..8: 36.9% 2.6% 4.2% direct: 7.7% skip:45.1% L0:40.6% L1:27.4% BI:32.0%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: 8x8 transform intra:83.8% inter:53.3%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: direct mvs spatial:92.7% temporal:7.3%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref P L0 40.7% 24.5% 13.7% 11.2% 9.9%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref B L0 47.6% 30.2% 13.8% 8.3%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: ref B L1 91.2% 8.8%
---[NoImage] x264 [info]: kb/s:11158.5

[czerro]

A size difference of 3k? It could be that the first pass size results are simply an efficient estimate of the actual output give or take 2kbytes whereas the size reports in second pass are actual size-on-disk reports. This makes sense if you consider the I frame data size was the same in both passes. Could be an artifact caused by the decoder in the second pass. The real test is to perform the test several times with the same first pass stats and see if the 2nd-pass results are identical in all cases.

[magic144]

thanks czerro, tho I'm not quite sure I follow your logic for the discrepancy...

I will try the same 2nd pass run a couple of times by using the initial STATS file and see what the result is there.

I've just updated to the newest x264 .exe and am now using the DXVA-HD-HQ profile with 2 minor mods (No DCT Decimation and No Fast Pskip both set)

I don't know how the white-screen glitch happened, but I *really* hope that's not a regular occurrence!

By the way, there's no ffdshow side-effects that can interfere here are there? I believe the encoding is only loading Haali & CoreAVC, but how can I be sure?

[Sharktooth]

ehrr... could you please open a discussion in the AVC forum?
this issue is not related to megui, but the encoder. thanks.

[magic144]

sure thing Sharktooth - I wasn't sure myself, but it does seem to be down to x264 at this point...

fyi all, the thread is now here
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1171658

[check]

for future reference: x264 should, but is not, yet fully deterministic.

[Sharktooth]

it is with default settings. but some settings may brake the determinism (threads > 1 for example).

[magic144]

Hi again Sharktooth...

this is probably more MeGUI related!
When I updated my user-modified (basically a copy of DVXA-HD-HQ) profile to have threads=1, this does seem to have updated the profile .xml file OK, but it doesn't transfer across into the jobN.xml file (for some reason the jobN.xml file always has NbThreads set to 0).

I am creating the jobs using AutoEncode.
Please let me know if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is a bug.

Thanks,
m

[Sharktooth]

did you update the profile AFTER enqueing the job?

[magic144]

no, in fact I exited MeGUI after I updated the profile to make sure the profile was updated,

then I restarted MeGUI and enqueued the 3 jobs (pass1, pass2, mux)

other profile params seem to have been successfully copied to the jobs, just not NbThreads for some reason

[Sharktooth]

ensure to unset "Automatically set number of threads" in the options