HUFFYUV - The saga continues, same old story

[sanlyn]

OK, so there's probably no answer to this. The question has been posed elsewhere and in Doom9, but here's a new chapter in the travails of good ol' huffyuv -- which I'm in the process of replacing with Lagarith.

I now have 5 PC's. "NewPC" #5 is the new one I built this week. It's intended to be an upgrade+replacement of "OldPC" #4. the image below is from a VHS -> huffyuv/YUY2/AVI capture made in 2007 on another PC (old #1). On the left-hand side is the way the huffyuv frames display on PC's #1, #2, #3, and #4. The right-hand image is the way huffyuv AVI's display on NewPC #5. Every huffyuv capture and processed clip since 2004 appears correctly on the old PC's, but garbled on PC #5.


[Attachment 13134 - Click to enlarge]

To add to this mystery:

The huff's were made with VirtualDub capture and ATI All-In-Wonders on PC's #1 and $2. All huff clips display correctly on those PCs. Formerly, all huff's were garbled on PC #3 and PC #4. This was weird because all 4 PC's had the same video software -- same Avisynth, same huff .dll, same plugins, same VirtualDub, same file players, same video utilities and codecs, same, same, same. None of it was installed as new downloads: every add=on and update was copied off PC #1 onto an external drive, and all installs and updates to all PC's were made from that external drive's store.

Well, at some point during the past year, all 4 PC's display all huffyuv clips correctly. Got that? What I used to do was un-compress a huff clip on PC 1 or 2, and copy it to PC 3 or 4 (un-huffed) for processing. Well, one day about a year ago I accidentally copied a still-huff-compressed AVI to one of the newer PC's, and by jove the damn clip displayed correctly. So I transferred umpteen GB's of huff clips to external drives and played 'em on both of the old PC #3 and #4. Voila. All of sudden, huff was not a problem on any of the 4 PC's.

So I built newPC #5 and installed all the video stuff from that same external hard drive that has a big "Video stuff" label on it. The same software that went into 4 other PC's. What I get is the garbled huffyuv image that I formerly saw on the two older PC's.

PC #1 = XP Pro SP2. ATI AIW Radeon 7500. All IDE. Huffyuv.dll v2.1.1 CCEPatch v.2.2 8Dec2001.
PC #1 = XP Pro SP2. ATI AIW Radeon 96000XT. All IDE. Huffyuv.dll v2.1.1 CCEPatch v.2.2 8Dec2001.
PC #3 = XP Media Center 2005 SP3 laptop. ATI Mobile Radeon X1300. All IDE. Huffyuv.dll v2.1.1 CCEPatch v.2.2 8Dec2001.
PC #4 = XP Media Center 2005 SP2. ATI Radeon X1300. All IDE. Huffyuv.dll v2.1.1 CCEPatch v.2.2 8Dec2001.
PC #5 = XP Pro SP3. ATi Radeon HD6570. All SATA. Huffyuv.dll v2.1.1 CCEPatch v.2.2 8Dec2001.

In case someone mentions ffdshow: All PC's have exactly the same version of ffdshow installed (I never use ffdshow, only to view clips using codecs I don't have). ffdshow's misnamed version(s) of huffyuv aren't huff at all, and keep changing every couple of years, so I never use them. All ffdshow's since 2005 were installed from the same external drive's downloaded updates at the same time with the same default install and the same internal settings.

Unfortunately I must have newPC #5 in working order, as the other PC's can't handle HD or BluRay. So for the next few weeks I'll be going over several years of huffyuv captures and worked-up AVI's and fast-recompressing them to Lagarith. At least I can keep all 4 PC's going at one time. No thanks to PC #5.

Attached are the Drivers32 registry entries for OldPC #4 and NewPC #5.

[poisondeathray]

Check what decoder and version is actually being used

With the file directly loaded in vdub , file=>file information . Compare with the other computers


Are all frames messed up? Or only a few? Is it repeatable ? (the exact same decoding error when you scrub around and come back)

Check with ffms2 in avisynth to see if video is decoder properly

[sanlyn]

In VirtualDub + VDubMod + VDubMPEG2 + capture in all versions, the caption reads exactly the same way:
"Huffyuv v2.1.1 - CCESP Patych v0.2.2". They all have the same .dll, as I've never used any other copy of the .dll or its "inf" installer. It's never been moved from its folder on the external drive that contains it or the backup CD I saved a while back. The download date on the original .zip file was 4-17-2004. I've seen other versions in other System32 on other PC's that read "huffyuv.dll". Mine always looks like "HUFFYUV.DLL" (all caps). Having got my wife hysterical with 5 computers piled in the living room this week, and looking thru all of them mod of the week (just like a few years ago), I can testify that huffyuv looks exactly the same on all of them, from every direction.

All frames in all huff videos look that way. Many of the same clips were filtered and saved with Lagarith -- no problem with those.

The 2007 capture from which the images were made have the same File Info on every PC I open them with, same frame count, same colorspace (YUY2), etc. Even VLC player 2.0.1, which just recently seems generous enough to actually display something from a huffyuv clip, looks the same way.

But I've been thru this before, in 2005 and 2008. Maybe I'd best stick with Lagarith.

I have ffms2 loaded but never had the chance to use it. Will give it a try tonite.

[sanlyn]

What I really don't get is how PC #3 and #4 were suddeenly able to read those clips after 3 or 4 years. What had changed? I spent half a day doing this: I made a DriveImage copy of my cuirrent install on PC #3, then restored a DriveImage copy from 14 months earlier. I used a program called RegistrarLite that lets you search for a string in the registry and makes a list of every entry containing that string. I copied that list into Notepad, saved it, then restored my current OS install and did the same thing with Registrar Lite. The key names and values in both lists were exactly the same.

[sanlyn]

ffms2 = same results. Worked OK on PC #4, same AVI clip.

Meanwhile, I'm recompressing stuff to Lagarith. . .

[sanlyn]

Well, I'll be doggone . . . ! . . . Problem 50% solved. I changed the numbers in red from "288" to "480" in VirtualDub:


[Attachment 13137 - Click to enlarge]

The other 50%: huff is still garbled in all the media players. BUT. . .if I use vdub to fast-recompress to Lagarith, the results will play in everything. Even in VLC player (that wouldn't happen earlier). It's all a little overwhelming, people. But now I can use my new PC as my primary edit/processor, the older ones are for capture and authoring, and spares that can run long processing jobs.

My old PC's would recompress at 25-35fps. This one's doing 50fps plus.

The thing with huffyuv and other players: they work on my older PC's, but the new one has all kinds of BluRay stuff installed (that OEM version of PowerDVD-10 sucks). Maybe DirectShow related? Beats me, but at least I've found a workaround.

If anyone wants to bump this silly thread over to "Conversions", I'd agree.

[NJRoadfan]

VLC finally added Lagarith support in 2.0.0. Unlike HuffYUV, there is only one Lagarith codec. HuffYUV has forked and patched a few times, and the various verisons (particularly the Multithreaded Patch) have trouble playing each other's files. Most all of my captures are done with HuffYUV-MT, none of them will play in VLC or with the original codec since it stores data in a slightly different way and uses the FOURCC of HYMT (original codec is HFYU).

[sanlyn]

Gotcha there, but I've used the same version of huffyuv since 2004 -- in fact, I've used the same file, downloaded from DigitalFAQ in 2004. Those clips play anytime/anywhere only on the PC's that originally produced them (but I've been able to work with them in VirtuaLDuib on all XP machines -- provided I configure huff in VirtualDub correctly, as mentioned above). Others and myself have had problems reading forum AVI downloads made with the "real" huff and with various ffdshow incarnations of it. So, yes, "inconsistent" would be an understatement. I can see why VLC isn't keen on huffyuv; there's no way they could match versions and combat various obscure OS/huffyuv conflicts at the same time. Looks as if I'm moving to Lagarith as my standard for VHS lossless capture and processing. No great loss, I guess. Just another pain in the neck.

[jmac698]

Lagarith is a good choice. Other close choices (out of 10 tested), are UTVideo (slightly less compression but faster) and FFHuf (slightly better compression and faster).
Based on this reference: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1463278#post1463278

UTVideo is now incorporated into FFDshow and VLC. FFHuf has no relation to HuffyUV. UTVideo has a stable format. Not sure about FFHuf.

You did a good job of using the same software. It seems to me the answer would lie in bugs in the video driver (or maybe huffyuv not using vfw correctly). But, given that the drivers were stable in some cases, perhaps it was an automatic XP update from Microsoft related to directx etc.
That would explain why machines eventually "heal" themselves.

[sanlyn]

Thanks, jmac698. Every time I look up something about huffyuv I run into conflicting reports or complaints about compatibility. With several years of captures made with huffyuv and archived on HDD and DVD (some are uncompressed extracts and cuttings), I don't think I'll run into a no-way-out situation with so many ways of reading that stuff and converting to other compressors. Likely I'll never revisit most of those projects.

The idea that stuff like Lagarith "will be around forever" sounds nice. But the same thing was said of huffyuv 12 years ago. Very little of what's around today will be here forever. (15 minutes maybe ? ).

[jmac698]

There were a lot of versions of huffyuv. My guess is that, there was pressure in that era, to have a free codec that compressed ok, but was very fast. It turned out that huffyuv was the top candidate, but it was a little slow, possibly buggy, and lacking some features. So there was pressure to improve upon it with new versions. There just wasn't any other option to focus upon.

While there's still development in codecs today, I don't think you see the same market pressures to make many versions of things. There's just so many choices now, and the speed is not so much of an issue.

As for archiving material into a codec for long-term storage, I've had this discussion before. No one became convinced of a single answer. I believe some of the points were these:
-open-source, actively developed, available in up-to-date interfaces (meaning directshow)
-stable format, no known bugs
-good compression, good speed
-64bit version available, for upward compatibility

I like anything that's been incorporated into ffdshow, on the basis that it's actively developed and I don't see it dying soon. On the other hand, don't use the ffdshow codecs that are marked as experimental. They do in fact tell you if a format is going to change. Take the Snow codec for example, that died off. x264 lossless is probably a good bet, because it's part of a standard, the format is completely set in stone, and it's in ffdshow.

We may see a reduction of the PC in the future, as most computers now sold are - smartphones. There's 100's of millions of these sold every year, which is mindblowing.

You won't be able to run XP in a new computer soon. I've had perfectly good printers and scanners go to waste because they were only supported up to Windows 98.

[sanlyn]

I still have 2 more unused copies of XP Pro (OEM). Well. not totally unused. I did a basic install to two motherboards, downloaded all the service packs, then backed up with DriveImage onto DVD's. I have three copies of those motherboards, and hardware and power supplies I haven't used yet. I use XP only for video and graphics. We have a laptop and Netbook with Win7 for playing around, email, word processing, that sort of thing. And 4 XP PC's, one with firewire if I ever get a webcam for pass-thru and captures, two exclusively for use with ATI analog AIW's. None of those 4 seems ready to give up the ghost (one is brand new, just finished building this week). As of a couple of months ago I'm short one motherboard; it's mate was used to replace the one that got sick after a hit by a power outage. Now there are two UPS's running all this stuff.

[jmac698]

I was thinking of something else though. In order to sell Windows 8, OEMs will have to include a new type of BIOS called UEFI. This BIOS has a requirement for secure boot, so you can't install anything else on it but Windows 8, unless that software has a key.
It's quite possible that MS will allow XP on it somehow, and RedHat has acquired a key, but I'm not sure of anything else.

The point being though, that in the future it will require an explicit "key" to install anything on a PC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_Boot

Yes, it does seem that you won't be able to use XP starting this year, becuase XP can't support other aspects of UEFI.

[sanlyn]

With multiple copies of XP on multiple PC's, plus frequently updated backup images, I'll be using XP for a long time. I have one cheapo Win7 machine (formerly Vista) just for adding new skills to my PC repair sideline. I can't even recall exactly the last time I turned it on, a month ago perhaps. Despite some speed increases with Win7, I have no desire to go there. Too much Big Brother going on.

[NJRoadfan]

Yes, it does seem that you won't be able to use XP starting this year, becuase XP can't support other aspects of UEFI.

They'll be plenty of motherboards that have UEFI with BIOS compatibility boot modes. Its only a requirement for OEM machines, even then it can be disabled. FWIW, just about every motherboard and OEM machine sold the past 2 years has UEFI firmware already.