Video Encoding: For Beginners

dashing.sujay

dashing.sujay

Moving
Staff member
4k-5k enough for 55inch? I'll try it on my new bought samsung 42inch this time. I normally used Super/mediacoder. I used to be a encoding freak long ago (good 700mb days), then left, now back again with my lappi :)) I had thought to use handbrake too, but never gave it a shot, will give it soon.
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
@Rahul: Any good GPU accelerated encoders that preserve quality and can use more than 1 GPU simultaneously?(Not badaboom).
 
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RahulB

Journeyman
I am not sure, Extreme Gamer I don't use GPU encoders because of their horrible quality... and note that you can achieve the same speed and better quality of any GPU encoder by using x264's ultrafast or superfast preset.... There are other encoders like Arcsoft and Cyberlink plus AMD's own Encoder ( I have a AMD Card myself ) but I was never impressed by them... I know of a fact that MediaCoder does have GPU based encoders and decoders... ( Sure that it has CUDA encoders not sure about AMD support )... Give it a whirl... It is add supported I guess.. Haven't used anything beyond x264 for a long time..
 
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macho84

Ambassador of Buzz
I agree but pure gpu is not recommended. In most cases cpu is good quality and multi cores are good to go. . Gpu based acceleration will reduce some time. But a full movie will take hours time when compared to small clips of 10-30 min.

If you need good quality improvement over current get mediaexpresso. If decent quality within existing then xilsoft or nero video
 
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RahulB

Journeyman
dashing.sujay said:
Also, since encoding is heavily multi-threaded, CPU takes the full advantage of it leaving GPU far behind.
Click to expand...

Plus a GPU is a parallel processor unlike the CPU.... Porting x264 is impractical and unnecessary to current GPU's, direct compute is still infancy, and Microsoft just announced C++/AMP, poting in CUDA or OpenCL with make x264 platform dependent, obviously authors wont do that. x264 is very fast at ultrafast ( for quick dirty encodes ) while still giving better quality than any GPU encoder out there... you'll get better results with it... No GPU encoder contains x264's like Psyco-Visual enhancements..... Use MeGUI.... Tutorial coming soon, from Basic to advanced... :)
 
Krow

Krow

Crowman
Really good. I was looking for a handbrake guide like this one long ago. Couldn't find it then. Anyway thanks for posting. :)
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
Thanks for all the info :)

So basically I cant get exact quality because videos always use lossy compression formats (due to space constraints).

I had said "not badaboom" because it sucks.

CPU it has to be then, I guess.
 
Niilesh

Niilesh

Padawan
RahulB said:
MeGUI is my default application for encoding however it is quite advanced... this post is for beginners... however if you are familiar with advance concepts like like filters, frames, ME etc... then suggested tool for encoding is MeGUI
Click to expand...

IMO using Minicoder will be lot easier that handbrake :)
beginners will like it ;)

BTW waiting for advanced tutorial.
 
Zangetsu

Zangetsu

I am the master of my Fate.
RahulB said:
Why do you think Zangetsu Xvid is better than x264 ( H.264 )..??? :)
Click to expand...

I have experienced is thats y...

I admit that x264 give high compression but the quality as compared to XVID is not good.'


I was converting the huge 4~10 GB avi files to mkv.....using x264
I got good output file size of around 2.5GB & also checked the video quality it was also good...but when I converted the same original avi files to mkv using XVID the output file size was bigger around 3~3.5GB but when I compared both files in video quality I found that XVID is better

bcoz

x264 focuses more on front row objects & neglects background objects....
so we think that picture quality is brilliant...but the catch is x264 makes a slightly black background more black.....

there was a scene in the video where the background wall has designs on it but was visible with little black shadow...
xvid preserved that color ambience but x264 completely turned it dark black....

so the design patterns on the wall were gone in x264.

in normal bright scene the difference may not be visible to us :mrgreen:
 
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RahulB

Journeyman
Hi Zangetsu.... :)

Your argument about Xvid being superior than x264 ( H.264 ) understood... :)
However l would like to elaborate few things...

First you haven't mentioned the encoding settings used for x264 and Xvid you used for your encoding... Quality can vary drastically due to settings...

ex - Suppose you use the following settings for Xvid

Motion Search - Ultra High
Mode - 2 Pass ** Bitrate 4000 **
VHQ Mode - Wide Search
Use VHQ for B-Frames
Use GMC
No of B-Frames - 6
I general you are using what I think are high settings for Xvid
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Now lets consider you are using x264 ( the supposedly encoder of thee two ) and you use the following settings.....

Motion Search - Diamond
Mode - 2 Pass ** Bitrate 2000 **
MB Algo - 1
Strict B-frames
Reference frames - 2
No of B-Frames - 2
This settings I consider as low quality settings....
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So now even though x264 is a superior encoder compared to Xvid the fact that we used Ultra High settings for Xvid and base settings for x264 makes the quality of encodes by x264 look inferior... Its all about the settings we use that make the difference...

x264 ( H.264 ) in general will always give better quality than Xvid Codec...
because it has better algorithms.

However also note that at Superhigh bitrates quality doesn't matter much...
Ex- Blu ray discs support 3 Codecs as standards for publishing a Movie

These are...
H.264
VC-1
MPEG-2 ( Surprise as it is inferior to Xvid ( MPEG-4 ) )

At high bitrates ( 30-40 Mbps )details are preserved no matter what codec is used....

Considering your argument that background details are ignored by x264... if we think about it in a video.. ex an action video of car chase.. people who watch the video will in 99 out of 100 cases will be more interested in watching the car rather than the scenery in the background.. however I must add all MPEG Codecs including Xvid and x264 work similarly.. giving more bitrate to high motion than static scenes...

Hope this info helps :)

===============================================================

Also note "x264 blackens" I think this has nothing to do with the encoder but with the fact how video is displayed on your monitor...

Let me elaborate..
With the explosion of HD a lot of emphasis is given on HD playback...
Almost all HD videos use H.264 rather than Xvid...

You must have noticed new Renderers being released ( EVR CP, MadVR ) etc... newer colorspaces ( NV12 etc )
Let us just see what happens...
If you update ffdshow to latest version you will notice that instead of outputting video in YUV or YV12 latest ffdshow uses NV12.. in case of H.264 video...
In case of Xvid the colorspace will be YV12

Newer colorspaces are very GPU emphasized ( good thing ) trying to use GPU's etc... this is good though there is a problem...

Because of badly designed drivers and the fact that rendering through GPU is new tech it can throw wonky artifacts in video....

Case in point as in above problem when decoder use NV12 blacks can become blacker and colors get more saturated.. This happens due to software glitches...

Now NV12 is used in H.264 while Xvid decoding still uses YV12 so no apparent blacking is noticed in Xvid leading you believe Xvid is better...

I must add I have this problem on my laptop as well... If I use EVR CP with ffdshow I get very weird video colors.. skin becomes pinkish in color.. blood looks dark pink than dark red ( Zombie movies :)) ) and blacks become over emphasized.. It doesn't happen in case of Xvid but only in case of H.264 and it doesn't happen on my Desktop... why shitty drivers by the laptop manufacturer.... so solution USE VMR9 with ffdshow.... and I want to use EVR CP because it is slightly better renderer ( quality wise ), you can't use GPU accelereation with VMR9... This problem I have seen with Dell laptops a lot

Endnote we require better quality software...

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Apologies if this post is long, I wanted to do it justice... If you want further explanation please post I will reply... Happy Christmas and New Year :)) :))
 
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uImbibe

Broken In
I think the people at Mediaget also use Megui.

They convert your normal 175mb shows into 90mb mkv's which is awesome. They reduce the file size with movies too!

I tried to use megui...but its really complicated :(
 
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