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  1. I guess the only real bad thing I see about xvid so far, is that if you wanted to put the codecs on a workstation, all I've found is a complete install XVid. Not just the .dll and .inf. I know a lot of corporate IT guys will do a codec, but they are not happy campers installing a full app that they know nothing about.

    I may be wrong about finding a simple codec.

    It seems to be a bit pickier about the input file specifactions it wants / needs.

    I must admit, it is a lot simpler on my end. -David
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  2. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    I guess the only real bad thing I see about xvid so far, is that if you wanted to put the codecs on a workstation, all I've found is a complete install XVid. Not just the .dll and .inf. I know a lot of corporate IT guys will do a codec, but they are not happy campers installing a full app that they know nothing about.
    SMPlayer (and MPC-HC, and many other players) can play XviD and even H.264 natively. It's largely only crappy vanilla WMP that can't.
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  3. Originally Posted by creamyhorror View Post
    It's largely only crappy vanilla WMP that can't.
    I imagine it's like IE. Crappy but has a even higher percentage of market share ( 70+ % ) of just 'cause it came with the OS and it's part of the MS updates.

    I do wish that the US gov would bust up Microsoft. They have held back technology with their drive for profits long enough, My $0.02

    It wouldn't bother me to tell my end users to find a better player. Maybe that is the approach I should take. -David
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  4. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    It wouldn't bother me to tell my end users to find a better player. Maybe that is the approach I should take.
    You could, but aren't you supplying them with SMPlayer standalone on USB drives anyway?

    You could also encode to WMV, I guess; compatible at the expense of quality.
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  5. Originally Posted by creamyhorror View Post
    You could, but aren't you supplying them with SMPlayer standalone on USB drives anyway?
    Yes, but what normally happens like this project. Presentation is made to 8 - 10 people. Some staff, mostly board of director types. 1 member wants to take the presentation to their civic club to try to get some donations. Another to their church to try and get some interest in a new kitchen. The one good thing about bink is the single .exe file. No muss no fuss. The quality just isn't there.

    You could also encode to WMV, I guess; compatible at the expense of quality.
    I haven't tried it, but guess is that WMV vacuums. I'll test it on my next low quality test run.

    For preliminary stuff, I'll make the frames into shaded surface ( not rendered ) frames ( 2 seconds per frame ) and then compile them. Kind of a check plot. -David
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  6. WMV can be very good. In the same ballpark as Xvid/Divx.
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  7. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    WMV can be very good. In the same ballpark as Xvid/Divx.
    Is media 9 the latest? That's the 1 I can find. -David
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  8. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    WMV can be very good. In the same ballpark as Xvid/Divx.
    Is media 9 the latest?
    I believe it is. You'll want to use Windows Media Encoder, not Windows Movie Maker. The latter is very limited.
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  9. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    You'll want to use Windows Media Encoder, not Windows Movie Maker. The latter is very limited.
    I've found this out this AM. Moviemaker sucks! And I'm not having any real luck with the encoder

    And VirtualDub is adamant that I haven't installed wmv 9 codecs. Which I did twice today. So you cam make an avi using media 9 compression, but not configure it and the output is yuck.

    Trying to feed the encoder the huffyuv.avi and I get basically an empty file. No luck with various other avi made in virtualdub

    This can be a very frustrating process......
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    Originally Posted by creamyhorror View Post
    I also think you can feed in the images directly into Avisynth, but that's just another option.
    Yes, importing the images, resizing and color space conversion can all be done in the Avisynth script, saving some steps.
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  11. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    And VirtualDub is adamant that I haven't installed wmv 9 codecs. Which I did twice today.
    VirtualDub requires VFW codecs:

    http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c99c648-5800-4aa3-a2fe-3de94...displaylang=en

    But with VirtualDub you will get WMV9 (fourcc = WMV3) video in an AVI container, not a WMV/ASF container.
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  12. Since you already have a lossless intermediate (huffyuv) , and have used avisynth to frameserve to HCEnc , you could use almost the same script to use WMNicEnc to encode to WMV

    Instead of ConvertToYUY2() , it has to be ConvertToYV12()

    Use WMV9 advanced (or WVC1) for slightly better compression than WMV9
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  13. Originally Posted by poisondeathray View Post
    Since you already have a lossless intermediate (huffyuv) , and have used avisynth to frameserve to HCEnc
    That makes sense. 1st one I ran was way over compressed. I see a bunch of advanced options. Hopefully that will bring back the quality.

    The MS stuff even in VirtualDub just isn't getting it. -David
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  14. just a warning, wmv is quite slow to encode to (much slower than xvid), so if you have a lot to do later on ....

    if you left at default settings, the bitrate was 600kbps , so yea that would give you horrendous quality

    since filesize isn't a big issue with you, i would try a 1-pass vbr encode (at the bottom box, checkmark vbr, use quality mode, and the value goes from 0-100. I would try between 90-100. Don't forget to match the fps of your composition (i.e enter 30)
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  15. Originally Posted by poisondeathray View Post
    since filesize isn't a big issue with you, i would try a 1-pass vbr encode (at the bottom box, checkmark vbr, use quality mode, and the value goes from 0-100. I would try between 90-100. Don't forget to match the fps of your composition (i.e enter 30)
    Trying it now. I'm used to watching concrete cure. It's much faster today than 10 years ago but still some things take time. One reason I have so m any 'puters is just for this type of work. -David
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  16. vbr got the image quality back, Media Player 11 is skipping frames like crazy. Tried 50,000 45,000 30,000 bit rates. going to 16000 next


    Smplayer didn't skip any frames. The quality and smoothness looked a bit better with hcenc.


    So it's back to m2v and force 'em to use a decent play back software. For today anyway.
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  17. If it's skipping, there maybe bitrate peaks that it can't handle, then you could use a "constrained" profile to smooth over bitrate peaks; then you could enter a max bitrate and average bitrate. WMV9 advanced profile (WVC1) is a bit more resource hungry (encode and decode) than WMV9 (WMV3). I think WVC1 might not be supported "out of the box" either (but WMP11 will download the codec I think)
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  18. How you guys figured all this out is beyond me. Just finding the settings in all of these different softwares much less figuring them out can be a challenge.

    In the CAD world, basic things change very slowly or not at all. A line is still a line after all of these years. <g>

    Trying max bit rate 50,000 -David
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  19. actually WMP11 does come with WVC1 "out of the box" , I was thinking of earlier versions of WMP like WMP9/10 (which your users might or might not have depending on how old their OS is)

    If your animations are similar to the sample you uploaded, I doubt you would need that high of an max bitrate. Even something like 20Mbps average, 30Mbps max should yield good quality. The higher the bitrate, the more CPU usage is required for decoding, so you may get choppy playback on older systems. You could also try WMV3 (i.e .WMV9 not advanced profile) , which is slightly easier to decode

    IMO WMP is a crappy player. The only benefit of going this route is that WMP is ubiquitous to Windows installs, and your end users don't have to use another player
    Last edited by poisondeathray; 7th Mar 2010 at 12:21.
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  20. The 1st run at the constrained was horrible. Over compressed, bad image quality, skipped a few frames.

    I would have thought that with television being such a static format, that most video formats would have well founded standards as well. I'm not seeing any of that.
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  21. Am I guessing this wrong? Are these bit rates in KB or actual bits?
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  22. those are expressed in bits.

    try 20000000 avg, 30000000 max

    and regarding "standards" ; there are actually very verbose and well defined standards in regards to certain devices like blu-ray, dvd, broadcast specs for TV , etc...what compression and settings you are limited to, buffer values, gop sizes, etc...

    what you are doing here is for PC display and it's basically "open". Your limitations are basically "can it play on that computer"
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  23. Originally Posted by poisondeathray View Post
    IMO WMP is a crappy player. The only benefit of going this route is that WMP is ubiquitous to Windows installs, and your end users don't have to use another player
    I finding that to be an understatement.

    Is there such a thing as an encoder to an exe file?
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  24. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    Is there such a thing as an encoder to an exe file?
    sort of;

    there are applications that "wrap" the video file into an .exe (you still encode with a different application)

    e.g.
    https://www.videohelp.com/tools/MakeInstantPlayer

    this one is based on mplayer engine (same as smplayer, which is a front end for mplayer)

    but IMO, system admins, and regular folk are less likely to "fool" around with .exe files (and with good reason). But if you were going to be bundling SMPlayer anyway, I guess this argument is null
    Last edited by poisondeathray; 7th Mar 2010 at 13:07.
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  25. Originally Posted by poisondeathray View Post
    Perfect PERFECT!! YES!!

    It does exactly what I need. Now the quality player is built in, no issues using any machine for the presentation. If it runs well on my worst machine, then shame on them if it doesn't on theirs, 'cause I got a couple crappy ones!

    About 10 minutes production time after the images are finished rendering:
    • 3.4 GB tga - 1,514 images 1,024 x 768 - high antialiasing - 24 bit color
    • 1GB VirtualDub using Huffyuv avi - resized to 1008 x 752 ( crop to aspect - multiple of 16 ) - Precise Bilinear Filter
    • 37MB HCenc m2v - 4:2:2 chroma output - 50,000 KB max bitrate - 4:3 aspect - best profile - dc prec 10 - constant quantization
    • 40 MB MPlayer exe - InstantPlayer - Full screen continuous loop presentation

    The problems I see now in the presentation are modelling, material and pathing problems on my end. Thanks to everyone! -David
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  26. Nobody in their right mind would play a video in an EXE file. You really should get WMV working.
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  27. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    Nobody in their right mind would play a video in an EXE file.

    Why would you say that? Is the palyback worse or inefficient?

    As to security, I've ran exe presentations many times at high security government installations. They usually have a dedicated Audio Visual room with computers that are segregated form any secure networks and have technicians there to actually run the software. I'm sure that they have automatic virus checks in place. As for a architectural environment, why would someone infect their clients network. I'd stand to loose a lot more than a customer with that.

    What I would have had a problem with, is the amount of things I downloaded and installed this past week. If I worked for a large corporation instead of being in business for myself, I would have had a tough time getting permission from an IT to even try VirtualDub etc. -David
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  28. Originally Posted by David Bethel View Post
    Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    Nobody in their right mind would play a video in an EXE file.
    Why would you say that? Is the palyback worse or inefficient?
    It's a huge security risk just to watch a video. It's one of the most common vectors for trojans. I'm not saying you have any such intent, but others will be wary, and rightly so.

    Your problem is easily solved by encoding as WMV. That will give you just as good results as MPEG 2 with a smaller file size and no need to install anything on the clients' computers.

    Another possibility is MPEG 1 at 320x240, 352x240, or 640x480. Windows comes with an MPEG 1 decoder that can handle those.
    Last edited by jagabo; 8th Mar 2010 at 10:16.
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  29. All of my testing so far has the animations running directly off of a flash drive using InstantPlayer. Only 1 machine refused to run it. And that's because I have to run Vista system SVGA Video driver for backwards compatibility issues.

    I does seem like a waste to have to shrink to resolution so drastically. Even a 640 x 480 image on a 21" monitor looks lost if they have the screen resolution set high. -David
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  30. Video Restorer lordsmurf's Avatar
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    If you have to share videos with stupid people, just put it on Youtube.

    For every clever fix, there is an easy dismiss.
    Example: EXE files
    Dismiss = Mac and not Windows, there goes your idea.

    Give DVDs, too
    Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
    FAQs: Best Blank DiscsBest TBCsBest VCRs for captureRestore VHS
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