Mpeg4 AVC

[lowlifecat]

I've been doing a lot of capturing recently of gaming vids. doing minor editing and encoding at the same time. Caps using FRAPS at 1280x800res hoping to encode at 720P.

Been looking for good and cheap software for both vid editing and encoding.

After a lot of messing around I've narrowed it down to 2 softwares. Nero Ultimate 7 and Cyberlink PowerDirector 5 Premium.

Proof of concept: Using nero I was able to encode a 20min vid at 720P mpeg4 AVC to ~300megs. Render Time: aprox 6hours. Same 20min vid encoded at 720P mpeg2 HD reached almost 2gigs!!!

Here's the kicker. PowerDirector renders so much faster than nero (prolly because of the ATI do-hicky) but the h.264 encoding requires and add on pack. the cyberlink site states that i need the add on pack but when i went to look for it, it said that it was only compatible with PowerDirector 5 (not premium).

Only the Premium version is available online for purchase. wtf?! is this some form of cheap false advertising?

Anyone here used or using PowerDirector 5 Premium and if yes; does it have the h.264 encoding included. *note: i'm talking about mpeg4 avc not the mpeg4 for PSP and Itunes.

any help on this will be greatly apreciated.

[Dr Mordrid]

Looks to me like Premium needs the expansion pack to do full screen H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

Question: why not export an *.avi and use ATI's own Avivo Video Converter? It does H.264 AVC, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX and WMV very quickly;

http://atitech.com/technology/avivo/technology.html

If I were doing it I'd try editing in VideoStudio 10+ and use the DebugMode Frameserver plugin (free) to 'feed' VS's timeline to the Avivo encoder on the fly with no intermediate compression.

The frameserver appears as a new export filetype in VideoStudio and it supports most encoders that can load *.avi's.



Frameserver uses a small "avi" proxy file to make a linkup between VS and an external encoder. Setting up Frameserver creates the proxy, which you load into the encoder. Set the encoder up, start the encode and they act as one, essentially turning the encoder into a VS plugin.

It even works across a network

Download the VS trial, the frameserver and Avivo and give it a shot.

http://www.ulead.com/vs/runme.htm

http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27

The only hiccup will be the frameservers installer, which hasn't been updated since VS 8.0. You will have to manually point it to VideoStudio's VIO folder.

[lowlifecat]

thanks doc. the information is very interesting but not particularly usefull for my situation.

AVIVO only supports PSP-mpeg4 avc or Ipod-mpeg4 avc; which is fine if you have an ipod, PSP or prefer 320x240 resolution. there is also a mpeg4 divx which i'm not interested in at the moment.

i also have a couple video editing softwares that will output my project to uncompressed avi but unfortunatly non of them support 16:9/16:10 and will resize my vid to 4:3 not what I want either.

it might be that the h.264 codec market is still un-matured.

on the bright side Nero Vision seems to be the most versitile of all the encoders i have tested with support for HD and HDV mpeg4 avc all the way up to 1080i. It's a little diamond in the rough compared to the rest of the Nero 7 Ultimate package. it's even better the Nero Recoder found in same package.

IQ seems on par or better than other h.264 encoders (probably because it has the option for HQ 2-pass which the others dont) and the resulting files are also significantly smaller by a couple hundred megs.

Nero vision might be a crap ass video editor but it really shines when encoding. My current work around is edit movie in another prgram and export as HD mpeg2 720p. import resulting file as project in Nero Vision then export as mpeg4 AVC 720p. turns a 23min 2.6gig file into a 350meg file with very little loss of IQ.

I've pretty much finalized a rough 'Proof of Concept' project and am now looking for someplace to host it. already tried uploading to fileplanet earlier this morning but it seems to have crapped out at the end of the upload. don't know if it had worked without re-submitting it :|

anyone know of a site that will host a 350m video file?

[wkulecz]

This ATI Avivo Video Converter looks intresting, but from the ATI website I get the impression that the cards that support it don't seem to have Windows 2000 drivers.

Is this true? If it requires XP I'll forget about it.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

Don't see the AVIVO package download for 2K. Hmmmm....

found this;

http://files.aoaforums.com/I2566-6-8_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_35179.exe.html

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/graphics-sound-cards-speakers-other-peripherals/37783-catalyst-6-8-a.html#post406588

http://files.aoaforums.com/I2533-6-6_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_33678.exe.html

[Evildead666]

How do you get Fraps to encode in 1280x800 ?
I just had a go, with Trackmania nations @ 1280x960, and the resulting file was 640x480..?
I set Fraps to "Full Size" and 25fps...

It encodes into FPS1 at 45Mbps or 45000Kbps. Its also an AVI file.

Using GSpot to get the info...

It should be recodeable with VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod. Which is free.

You could use x264 as a free h264 codec.
DivX 6.2 also allows encoding in 720p
HuffYUV is lossless, but huge files.

[lowlifecat]

How do you get Fraps to encode in 1280x800 ?
I just had a go, with Trackmania nations @ 1280x960, and the resulting file was 640x480..?
I set Fraps to "Full Size" and 25fps...

FRAPs max fullscreen recording is 1152x786 or 1280x800 at widescreen. anything more than that it'll switch to halfscreen recording. so max recording rec is 2560x1600 at half screen.

[wkulecz]

Don't see the AVIVO package download for 2K. Hmmmm....

found this;

http://files.aoaforums.com/I2566-6-8_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_35179.exe.html

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/graphics-sound-cards-speakers-other-peripherals/37783-catalyst-6-8-a.html#post406588

http://files.aoaforums.com/I2533-6-6...33678.exe.html

ATI burned me badly by not providing W2K drivers for a bunch of PCI Xpert98 cards I bought for second monitors on Win98 while waiting for W2K. Haven't bought an ATI card since.

Looks like the ATI video out is still fairly bug ridden. I'll stick with my Matrox cards since I'm not a gamer.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

Actually ATI's TV-out has improved quite a bit with the last few driver updates (older cards). The X1000 series is better yet due to their AVIVO tech, esp. the 1600's and up.

[wkulecz]

I was looking at Fry's the other day for video cards, couldn't find an ATI card with dual DVI out. I was intrested in the cards with the AVIVO, but none of the boxes listed Windows 2000 on the "requirements".

So I ended up with an Nvidia 7600GT for $140. It has dual DVI and some kind of HDTV output. I've not played with the TV out yet and suspect it won't work with dual monitors enabled. Sure takes a long time to format the SATA raid5 array on the Asus P5Bdeluxe (core 2 duo 6600).

The system this is replacing (dual P-III 500) has been in continueous use with w2k since Feb 2000 when windows 2000 first came out, sure have a lot of patches to catch up on! I can only hope to get the same good service from the new system.

--wally.