Restoring Youtube videos

[Gooji]

Is there a filter or method for improving the qualities of videos downloaded onto your hard drive from Youtube/Google Video/etc. (obviously it would be converted to an avi file before applying any filters).

[lordsmurf]

YouTube is crap quality. Garbage in, garbage out.

[SatStorm]

This requires heavy filtering.

1 - Convert your videos to avi, better to a jpeg codec
2 - Load avi to virtualdub
3 - Load the following Filter chain on virtualdub - Don't change order / values: Msu_Smart deblocking, Static noice reduction (4), Dynamic Noise reduction ( 3 ), Resize bicubic 352 x 288 /240
4 - Frameserve and encode to mpeg 1

That's probably the best you can do...

[Gooji]

YouTube is crap quality. Garbage in, garbage out.

I'm not asking how to turn a YouTube video into something DVD-quality. Just how to make it suck less.

[Soopafresh]

The macro blocks completely ruin it for me. And, they're bad enough that you can only reduce them (sorta). The Youtube folks encode at 540bps (generally). Not much you can do with that.

[lordsmurf]

FLV is about on par with RealMedia. Blah.

[Rudyard]

This requires heavy filtering.

1 - Convert your videos to avi, better to a jpeg codec
2 - Load avi to virtualdub
3 - Load the following Filter chain on virtualdub - Don't change order / values: Msu_Smart deblocking, Static noice reduction (4), Dynamic Noise reduction ( 3 ), Resize bicubic 352 x 288 /240
4 - Frameserve and encode to mpeg 1

That's probably the best you can do...

I was trying this to see what sort of difference it makes and my virtualdub and virtualdubmod dont contain any of these filters. Where do you get them??

[tonyp12]

Youtube uses flv1 at 320x240 and probably only around 500 kbps video bitate.

I emailed them and told them it's time to move up to the size window is actually open up as

So I guess 450x338 at 1000kbps with flv6 and it probably will start looking real good.

So start emailing them too:

http://www.youtube.com/contact

[guns1inger]

Where do you get them??

The MSU filters are found here (at MSU)

http://www.compression.ru/video/index.htm

The rest can best be sourced through Donald Graft's page

http://neuron2.net/

Anything else can be googled for.

[Rudyard]

cheers

[Soopafresh]

tonyp12 - unlikely Youtube will increase their bitrate or dimensions any time soon. They already spend millions of $ per month just on the bandwidth of their existing files. X264 at 500k MIGHT be better, but a few million people would have to install an h264 codec on their system to play the files back. That's the thing about Flash - just about everyone has it.

[44echo]

This is the best quality I've seen on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPHAxgcKfM

[greymalkin]

in response to the video link above:

what a dumb chick.

don't post video's of yourself looking like a hoe on the internet and then be surprised when people treat you like one in their e-mails.


In response to the question asked, I downloaded a plugin for firefox that allows you to download video content from any website playing the video. I found with some video's on youtube I was given options of either downloading the .flv file or a higher quality divx file. Both are still going to be small (the best one was a strange resolution like 352 x 260), but the .avi looked and sounded much better.

[olyteddy]

re 44echo's clip: With that much stationary stuff (camera on tripod, body mostly stiff, etc.) any compression scheme could handle it. Switch it to full screen and there are artifacts galore in the left wall and her ear rings. And when she stands at the end there is considerable blurring. And this is the best (??) quality??

[prg0906]

This is the best quality I've seen on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPHAxgcKfM

Then you obviously haven't seen this video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCUOU_vud0A

[zworg2]

LordSmurf hit nail on head with first reply... shite in shite out.

You can smooth them off a bit, but is it worth it?

a little OT - what program do you use to d/l the vids from YouTube etc?

[mgh]

on the other hand as someone said if frozen, it can be polished
Youtube does have some very difficult to get clips
IMHO, one of the best available route is to use flvsplitter to split it into an avi (set up the vfw part of ffdshow) and an mp3,load in virtualdubmod and use the Neat video Demo
As Youtube vids are less than 352 in width and 288 in height, it does not insert a logo and size of youtube videos will not exceed its time limits.

[hech54]

Is there a filter or method for improving the qualities of videos downloaded onto your hard drive from Youtube/Google Video/etc. (obviously it would be converted to an avi file before applying any filters).

If the majority of the clips you have collected are from one person...you are better
off contacting them and asking them to share the original footage.

[cd090580]

X264 at 500k MIGHT be better, but a few million people would have to install an h264 codec on their system to play the files back. That's the thing about Flash - just about everyone has it.

.

Or even better, use some kind of WMV files and codec, everyone has it and can play them without installing anything.

Flash is a crappy format and always give a jerky playback. WMV plays fine.

[Soopafresh]

Unless something has changed, Mac machines unfortunately don't have native WMV support, unless you download the WMV codecs for OSX from Microsoft.

Flash isn't bad IF it gets enough bit rate and is encoded with care. That's a big "IF"....

This demo is pretty impressive. Not perfect, but quite good to watch. Both 750K bit rate
http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen555.html
http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen345.html


But if we are talking about Youtube, Google, etc, you are absolutely right... Their machines are blindly transcoding video to super-low bitrate flv.

I found this article to be interesting. The author says WMV and h264 are both bad during high motion scenes and low bit rate. http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9420&page=1&c=22

[Ai Haibara]

Unless something has changed, Mac machines unfortunately don't have native WMV support, unless you download the WMV codecs for OSX from Microsoft.

Even then, I'm not sure the Flip4Mac/Microsoft components support anything encoded in Windows Media 9 all that well, maybe WM3. As far as I can recall, they also don't support anything that uses DRM.

[DereX888]

Unless something has changed, Mac machines unfortunately don't have native WMV support, unless you download the WMV codecs for OSX from Microsoft.

Flash isn't bad IF it gets enough bit rate and is encoded with care. That's a big "IF"....

This demo is pretty impressive. Not perfect, but quite good to watch. Both 750K bit rate
http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen555.html
http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen345.html


But if we are talking about Youtube, Google, etc, you are absolutely right... Their machines are blindly transcoding video to super-low bitrate flv.

I found this article to be interesting. The author says WMV and h264 are both bad during high motion scenes and low bit rate. http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9420&page=1&c=22

Just because a codec isn't included in operating system it doesn't mean OS has "no native support"
Windozes don't come with i.e. quick time codecs either - does that mean to you Winows have no "native support" for qt?
What about linuxes? wWhich one comes with any of microsoft's or apple's codecs pre-installed?


Google, youtube - yes, their machines do "blindly encode videos to super-low bitrate FLVs", as expected from a free service.
Even if you encode yourself something in much higher bitrate flv, once you upload it to youtube it will be recoded to lower bitrate again.
Video in flash IS bad at any given bitrate, probably until you reach for bitrates as high as same video in mpeg-4, mpeg-2 etc - but I bet you'll still have more artefacts added by flash encoder.

Flash video is garbage.
OP:
Want to preserve the original "quality" of your FLVs without expanding it 100x times in size? Keep'em as they are.

[GMaq]

Hi,
I've had decent luck with FLV Extract to VirtualDub and the above mentioned MSU Smart Deblocking filter and Donald Grafts Smart Smoother and resizing to 512x384 with DivX or 3ivX on a CQ setting, also on a lot of stuff a brightness/contrast/colour correction can help a bit, using this method I can reduce the macroblocking by 40-50%. It's only worth it for REALLY rare or unavailable elsewhere video in my opinion. What's even worse than the video is the Audio, some of it is 32kbps, I thought nothing was worse than analog hiss, I was wrong!

[lordsmurf]

Hi,
I've had decent luck with FLV Extract to VirtualDub and the above mentioned MSU Smart Deblocking filter and Donald Grafts Smart Smoother and resizing to 512x384 with DivX or 3ivX on a CQ setting, also on a lot of stuff a brightness/contrast/colour correction can help a bit, using this method I can reduce the macroblocking by 40-50%. It's only worth it for REALLY rare or unavailable elsewhere video in my opinion. What's even worse than the video is the Audio, some of it is 32kbps, I thought nothing was worse than analog hiss, I was wrong!

Thank for sharing. This will help somebody I know.

[Alex_ander]

After SmartDeblocking and resizing it is very useful to apply NeatVideo filter (not free and slow-working but very good for removing remaining artifacts).

[orion940]

For just one or two videos, I've used http://vixy.net/. There are also links there to some open source tools.

O.

[guns1inger]

@DereX888 : Windows does not come with native quicktime support. Or native Divx, or native anything that isn't installed when you start up Windows for the first time. Native means just that. Yes, you can install third party codecs to expand the capabilities. But that isn't native support.

[DereX888]

@DereX888 : Windows does not come with native quicktime support. Or native Divx, or native anything that isn't installed when you start up Windows for the first time. Native means just that. Yes, you can install third party codecs to expand the capabilities. But that isn't native support.

Allright.
I always thought "native support" is when user don't have to use libraries not in it's OS'es (i.e. have to install additional python libs to run some codec etc)...
According to your def of "native support" no operating system has any "native support" for basically anything, hmm

[guns1inger]

Windows ships with native WMV support. You can play them out of the box as soon as Windows starts up for the first time. You can also play mpeg-1 and a couple of others.

OSX supports quicktime natively. It is there when you start uit up for the first time.

These are both integrated into the basic OS install routines. That is, AFAIAC, native support.

Anything else you install after than is not native, but third party.

Unfortunately, the waters get muddied when OS manufacturers start to include third party commercial arrangements into their base install - AOL icons in Windows etc. But that is another discussion entirely.

[DereX888]

Windows ships with native WMV support. You can play them out of the box as soon as Windows starts up for the first time. You can also play mpeg-1 and a couple of others.

OSX supports quicktime natively. It is there when you start uit up for the first time.

These are both integrated into the basic OS install routines. That is, AFAIAC, native support.

Anything else you install after than is not native, but third party.

Unfortunately, the waters get muddied when OS manufacturers start to include third party commercial arrangements into their base install - AOL icons in Windows etc. But that is another discussion entirely.

no no, that's where I was actually steering to, because I believe youre mistaken, and I wanted to give you as example AOL etc.
OS is just OS.
Just because OS's manufacturer chose to include some codec on installation disc and included installation of it in the installation routine, (or some software such as famous AOL on Win9x) it does - nor does not - make any of them "native".
Its just pre-installed, or included as "bonus" with the OS, thats all.
Native support of anything is when the software installed on given OS runs 'straight out of the box' on that OS, without calling for any additional software, runtimes, libraries etc, don't you think? While lack of native support comes when that software require additional installation of i.e. those python libraries (just to stay with same example I've mentioned earlier) in order to run something.

I think you mistaken "integrated" with "native support".


edit:
Apologies to OP for hijacking the thread, but since his question was already answered I hope nobody mind our OT small talk