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  1. I'm trying to find a program that will tell me what the maximum video bitrate was reached in a video (not the average for the whole video like programs usually do). I've tried a program called "Bitrate Viewer" but it's not accurate.

    Can anyone suggest a program that's accurate?
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    The ancient Tecoltd Bitrate Viewer should still be good on MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files, but NOT on VC-1, H.264, or what I might call "non-MPEG" codecs. However, you need to be aware that it is very old and I wasn't able to get it to run on any version of Windows after XP. I haven't had reason to use it in a long time, but I did get it to work in an XP VM under Win 7 without problems, but not in Win 7 itself.

    Not sure why you really need accuracy. Unless you encode with TMPGenc products, which have always been notorious for ignoring the max bit rate they are told to use, most encoders that I know of actually do obey the max bit rate given them. Unless you are making SVCDs or pushing the envelope by trying to use the highest bit rate allowed by some video format, this is actually not a very important thing at all under normal circumstances.
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    Damn it. VideoHelp is being unhelpful by reading what I posted above and pointing to the WRONG program. Link to the correct program
    https://www.videohelp.com/tools?toolsearch=Tecoltd+Bitrate+Viewer&submit=Search&convert...y=Name&hits=50
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  4. Thanks but I'm trying to read h264 files. I'm recording off Satellite TV onto my PC with an Elgato Game Capture HD. HDTV does a max of 20 Mbps but I don't want to record in that bitrate as no satellite HD TV in the UK is broadcast in that high a bitrate so there's no point in making the file sizes larger for no reason. There's a bitrate viewer on my sat box that shows the max bitrate on the fly and it seems to say the max bitrate used is 14 Mbps. But that's just on the fly. I would like to use a program that analyzes a whole video and tells me the max bitrate used.
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  5. Bitrate Viewer works with h.264 files. Many players have the ability to show bitrate while playing. It shows a graph of the bitrate vs. time and reports the max bitrate in the file.
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  6. Thanks Jagabo however as I said in my 1st post, I've tried that program and it's not accurate. What programs would you suggest?
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    How is bitrate viewer not accurate? Do you want to include muxing overhead or just the video and audio? Determining bitrate isn't an exact science, bits per second is meaningless when you realise you're just inventing when that second starts and ends and you can get completely different results by simply shifting the start time by a few milliseconds.
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  8. I've seen a few files where it Bitrate Viewer screws up on the frame rate causing it to report inaccurate results. Other than that I find it to be pretty accurate. It can report bitrate per frame, per second, per GOP, and per modified GOP.

    In any case your theory of only using as much bitrate as your source's peak bitrate is flawed.
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  9. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    I've seen a few files where it Bitrate Viewer screws up on the frame rate causing it to report inaccurate results. Other than that I find it to be pretty accurate. It can report bitrate per frame, per second, per GOP, and per modified GOP.

    In any case your theory of only using as much bitrate as your source's peak bitrate is flawed.
    How so? I was going to record in 1 Mbps higher than the peak bitrate I've seen on the on-the-fly bitrate viewer on my satellite box. What's wrong with that?

    I recorded a video and the on-the-fly bitrate viewer in my Sat box showed a max bitrate of around 14 Mbps but Bitrate Viewer says the peak bitrate is 19.4 Mbps when it obviously isn't. It's not the first time I've got inaccurate results from the Bitrate Viewer program.

    Are there any other programs that give accurate results?
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    Originally Posted by VideoFanatic View Post
    I recorded a video and

    the on-the-fly bitrate viewer in my Sat box showed a max bitrate of around 14 Mbps

    but Bitrate Viewer says the peak bitrate is 19.4 Mbps when it obviously isn't.
    How can you be so sure that the bitrate viewer of your satellite box "is accurate"
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  11. I can't but I know for a fact that Bitrate Viewer isn't always accurate so I'm looking for another program so I can compare it with the Bitrate Viewer of my sat box.
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    Originally Posted by VideoFanatic View Post
    I can't but I know for a fact that Bitrate Viewer isn't always accurate so I'm looking for another program so I can compare it with the Bitrate Viewer of my sat box.
    How exactly do you know this for a FACT? Would you bet your life on it? I'd hope you have more to go on here than "Some dude said so on another website". In my experience some recording devices don't actually use bitrates as high as you give them when recording TV signals. I don't know why, I just have seen it happen. You know you could just set the bit rate on your capture device to something you can live with and get on with your life instead of trying to move heaven and earth to find an "accurate" bitrate viewer. I also find your belief that your satellite box is giving you "accurate" information to be interesting.
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  13. Originally Posted by jman98 View Post
    Originally Posted by VideoFanatic View Post
    I can't but I know for a fact that Bitrate Viewer isn't always accurate so I'm looking for another program so I can compare it with the Bitrate Viewer of my sat box.
    How exactly do you know this for a FACT? Would you bet your life on it? I'd hope you have more to go on here than "Some dude said so on another website". In my experience some recording devices don't actually use bitrates as high as you give them when recording TV signals. I don't know why, I just have seen it happen. You know you could just set the bit rate on your capture device to something you can live with and get on with your life instead of trying to move heaven and earth to find an "accurate" bitrate viewer. I also find your belief that your satellite box is giving you "accurate" information to be interesting.
    Some dude called... Jagabo confirmed it! https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/364537-Is-there-a-Bitrate-Viewer-Program-to-show-ma...=1#post2321560

    No I wouldn't bet my life on it, I'm just explaining what I've found in my tests. Finding out the peak bitrate is important to me as when you record a few videos per day, recording in 20 Mbps bitrate instead of 14 Mbps for example will result in larger files which fills up a hard drive quicker. Also I'd like to know the max bitrate so I can confirm if my satellite provider is providing a good service or not. A free channel called BBC1 HD in the UK uses a 4 Mbps bitrate which is quite bad so I want to know what the max bitrate of my satellite paid channels are.

    As far as I can tell the Elgato does indeed use the bitrate I specify as MediaInfo and VideoRedo reported the correct bitrate.
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    Do MediaInfo and VideoRedo parse the entire file or do they just read the header and post what's there? I recall reading quite often that people would like MediaInfo to parse entire files to give more accurate results but it has yet to be implemented. If they're just reading the header, of course they're going to report exactly what Elgato thinks it should be.

    Jabago said BitrateViewer gets the frame-rate wrong occasionally, and if you're dealing with things like Transport Streams or Elemental Streams, well, there's very few programs that don't. As long as you put it in a decent container, that shouldn't be an issue.
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  15. Jagabo how is using as much bitrate as your source's peak bitrate flawed?
    Is recording in 1 Mbps higher than the peak bitrate I've seen on the on-the-fly bitrate viewer on my satellite box OK?
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  16. Originally Posted by ndjamena View Post
    Jabago said BitrateViewer gets the frame-rate wrong occasionally, and if you're dealing with things like Transport Streams or Elemental Streams, well, there's very few programs that don't.
    Yes, I've seen it happen in less than 1 percent of the files I've used it with. And many other tools couldn't handle those particular files properly. I view Bitrate Viewer as the most accurate bitrate reporter.

    Originally Posted by ndjamena View Post
    Do MediaInfo and VideoRedo parse the entire file or do they just read the header and post what's there?
    They read the header or perform a quick calculation based on the file size (compensating for other streams, etc.).


    Originally Posted by VideoFanatic View Post
    Jagabo how is using as much bitrate as your source's peak bitrate flawed?
    Different encoders, different efficiencies, different bitrate distribution strategies, etc. Each encoding with a lossy codec reduces the quality. Of course, the lower the bitrate the more quality is reduced.

    When you're dealing with bitrate you need to specify over what period of time you want to view the bitrate. Instantaneous (per frame), per second, per GOP, per device buffer size, per entire video (average). They will all be different.
    Last edited by jagabo; 17th May 2014 at 08:01.
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  17. Here's what I don't understand. I thought satellite HDTV had a maximum supported bitrate of 20 Mbps yet I analyzed a video copied directly from my satellite receiver with Bitrate Viewer and it said this:

    http://i384.photobucket.com/albums/oo290/holygamer/SkyUKTVcopieddirectlyfromVUDuo2Sate...ps62412e8c.png

    As you can see the peak bitrate is above 20 Mbps. How is that possible or is bitrate viewer reporting wrong? The Frame Based mode was 148 Mbps!
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    ^ p.e.b.k.a.c.
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    Bps is meaningless and can only be calculated when the start time, end time and size are absolute, as with an entire file on a hard drive. As you're playing a video your TV/satellite box is buffering the stream. When determining maximum bitrate X264 has two settings --vbv-maxrate and --vbv-bufsize, ie the speed of the connection plus the size of the buffer. It's one of those three part, triangle calculations like SAR/DAR/PAR where knowing two of the values lets you calculate the third, but one single number, although it seems to make sense in and of itself, is completely useless in and of itself in a behind-the-scenes technical sense. An I-frame is larger than a p or b frame, so the amount of time it takes to send each frame fluctuates wildly, making any attempt to calculate a BPS value from a recorded file a waste of time.

    -Edit- it's possible your recorder already knows the buffer size and has calculated the BPS based on that buffer size and the bit-stream. Bit-rate viewer won't do that as it needs to be compatible with multiple file types and distribution medium.
    Last edited by ndjamena; 21st May 2014 at 16:36.
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  20. Originally Posted by VideoFanatic View Post
    As you can see the peak bitrate is above 20 Mbps. How is that possible or is bitrate viewer reporting wrong? The Frame Based mode was 148 Mbps!
    Because the bitrate of other nearby frames is less than 20 Mb/s. 20 MB/s is the max average bitrate over some short period of time, not a single frame.
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    Actually, ndjamena, that's not quite true. You could calculate accurate Instantaneous bitrate by doing a derivative of the integral/summation of sampled sections. However, no app I know of goes to all that trouble.

    And BR, which I agree is one of the best out there, isn't perfect. What the OP has to remember is that if the sampling is done on Frames, and it hits an I-frame, it would calculate it thusly: 1920 x 1080 pixels * 12bpp (for 4:2:0 YUV color) * ~8:1 compression (for JPEG-like I-frame MPEG intra-frame compression used). IF that were to be sustained throughout (aka constant all I-frames at 50 FPS), it's bitrate would be ~148Mbps! (sound like a familiar number?)
    But the viewer doesn't know or care that it is reading IBP, vs. all I-frame so that's all it can give you.

    So, much of this misunderstanding has to do with your understanding(?) of how GOP based encoding works and your reading of it, not with what it is telling you.

    As has already been mentioned, a re-encoding of a stream using matching/equivalent bitrate to its original bitrate does NOT ensure a lossless encode. Were you to have a 20Mbps incoming stream and were re-encoding at 100Mbps, you would STILL have some (very minor) losses compared to the original stream (not even counting compared to the uncompressed source!). What is noticeable or bearable to you is what matters here.
    It could be that an "equivalent to incoming" is an OK rule of thumb for you, but that is quite a blanket statement and some titles would actually require more and some require less to give you that same "percentage of acceptable loss". If you choose to just stick with an arbitrary number (or with a source-matching number), you will likely encounter both bitrate waste and bothersome quality loss (though maybe not always in equal measure) as well as Right-On-The-Money encoding.

    I've got to ask: why aren't you using CRF encoding? Is it because ElGato doesn't give that option (never used it, never will)

    Scott
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  22. ElGato's software only gives you a slider for setting bitrate (a single pass VBR since it's recording live video) that ranges from 8 to 30 Mb/s.
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    I'm trying to make sense of what Cornucopia said. This is not a real scenario but if I have a device with zero buffer, it would have to convert each bit it acquires to something it can send to the display as they arrive, the full picture must be on display on the correct time-code. Between the time-code of that picture and the time-code of the next the whole next frame has to be sent. Which is where the frame by frame bitrate comes in, in order to display a video file with zero buffer, you'd need a connection with as much bandwidth as the frame by frame bitrate.

    But that's implying a zero buffer, which gives you 2 of the 3 pieces of the triangle, I don't see how you can determine accurate peak bitrate any other way without some understanding of the size of the buffer on the other end and the acceptable delay.
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