Best codec for mpeg2 in native Linux?

[Dillinger]

@the experts: Which codec (even commercial) delivers the highest quality output?

I get some nice results when converting raw dv capture to SVCD, but i would like to get as much as i can...

[shadowcat45]

Well, the estimation of "best" requires the definition of "in terms of" - meassures - it all depends what you want.

In my view, SVCD is not a codec, it just defines some constrains to mpeg2 to make it hardware - playable. mpeg2 itself allows e.g. much higher bitrates (DVD is also mpeg2 with video near 10 000 bitrate - nearly 4 times of the defined SVCD maximum).

If your only measure is quality, leave it in DV or a RAW format, there are no compression and transcoding losses. At least DV can be seen as a codec. Of course, the size is really big.
Next to this are codecs like hufyuv which provide lossless compresion to reduce size (but it's still big).

If you want highest possible hardware (standalone) player compatibility, then VCD or SVCD are the best mpeg2 variants. DVD gives you higher quality, but there are still some issues about DVD-R, DVD-R+ ... for self made DVD's and enough standalone hardware player on the market which can play the one, but not the other, thus what works for you must not necessary work on your friends hardware player.

If you want the smallest size at a given quality, the various mpeg4 formats (including DivX) seems to be the best. Some companies even present the first standalone players capable of playing such encoded movies (although I don't know if they accept any mpeg4/DivX).

Maybe someone else can give you an overview about the various mpeg4 codecs (Divx 4, OpenDivX, xvid ....) , as I own a standalone player and thus choose mostly VCD or SVCD mpeg2 (even for transcoded DVDs) - for me compatibility is most important (and I also don't own a DVD writer yet).

***
As you say that the SVCD looked bad, well, some available mpeg2 encoder (e.g. mpeg2enc from mjpegtools) give you a variety of parameters improving quality (but making the encoding time longer), e.g. -4 1 -2 1 (reduction factor for motion estimation) or -r 32 (motion search radius). You can also try to set a lower -q value than the default 8 (which means higher in terms of quality) together with -f 5 (user rate SVCD). Finally, mjpegtools provide a number of filters which can or, according to the mailing list, should be applied even if the source material was DV, e.g. yuvdenoise or (which helps IMHO for anime) yuvmedianfilter or ...

[Dillinger]

Adrian,

Thank you for pointing this out!
I think this an excellent brief overview about what is possible and has saved me bunches of time, because i figured out most of what you say about Mpeg2/Svcd by myself, but it would have taken a very long time to verify that these really the right settings / best options.
I also prefer SVCD for the given reasons (no DVD Burner,compatability issues, price)

Now i do remain with one last question : Is there a better codec available than the one Mpeg2-compression in mpeg2enc relies on?
(E.g. i I've tried the TmpegEncoder running Wine before, which does not work for me at the moment, to convert ripped DVD-stuff, and the results seemed to look better than what i get from mpeg2en at maximum settings.

I will try explain my basical problem here :
I want to import high-quality Raw dv stuff from a cam using a Mac and iMovie, which does a great job for this (so i don't have to put a Firewire-card in my beloved Linux-box and spare the time of configuring and sorting things out .

Then i want to convert it to Mpeg2/SVCD at maximum possible quality (No matter of compression time or play lenght)

K. After a while of diggin' and tryin' i found out that i can open and process the files with Kino 0.6.4 (I don't own Main Actor, and Cinelerra didn't work for me yet) . Kino gives the option to export to various formats and a kind of built-in CLI where you can set e.g. the mpeg2enc-options manually and delivers quite nice results outta the box. I also have all nessessary CLI tool (mjpeg-tools..) to do all the steps of conversion and compression "manually".

The problem with Kino is : I have no idea how it does the conversion to yuv (no big problem).
I have no option to set the scaling to maximum quality (and no idea if it is bicubic by default when downscaling, i bet not, so it is a bigger problem)
Also, i dunno if Kino sets vbr as default (but i think doesn't)
The Kino mailing-list isn't very busy, and i've got a couple of idiot-questions (would answer it from the dos if there were any, ha )

I assume the internal conversions relie on the smilutils, but the old 1.3 is buggy and the most current 2.0 won't compile on my system, so i can verify if the results would be the same.

So, my problem boils down to : I need an mpeg2-compressor (maybe even win, maybe even commercial, sooner or later i'll get this wine to work again, RH 9 brought some bitchyness with dependencies i guess...)

Cheers
/Michael

[metageek]

Now i do remain with one last question : Is there a better codec available than the one Mpeg2-compression in mpeg2enc relies on?
(E.g. i I've tried the TmpegEncoder running Wine before, which does not work for me at the moment, to convert ripped DVD-stuff, and the results seemed to look better than what i get from mpeg2en at maximum settings.

I've been using mpeg2enc and I am not very satisfied with the result, especially comparting with what I got from Tempg. I have been using the command line tools directly like this:

lav2yuv dv2file.avi  | yuvdenoise | mpeg2enc -b 9000 -r 24 -4 2 -2 1 -f 8 -o mpg2file.m2v

I am now going to try running TMPG under wine, because the windows machine where I have it installed is a 600Mhz oldie

I would prefer to run a native linux encoder. Anyone has tried others (transcode, ffmpeg, etc.) ?

metageek

[Dillinger]

I haven't seen much of ffmpg and what i saw did not throw me of my chair... As far as i got it til now, mpeg2enc is the choice running free software, but i always thought there had to be
another solution, like any company providing a commercial solution as it is with the Window-Managers for example.

Btw : What is this : " mpeg2enc -b 9000 -r 24 -4 2 -2 1 -f 8 -o mpg2file.m2v" ??

An XSVCD type 8 (-f 8)???? with a bitrate of 9000 (-b 9000)??? Svcd is 2500 standard,
i bet yours would'nt play on many settops!?

[metageek]

Btw : What is this : " mpeg2enc -b 9000 -r 24 -4 2 -2 1 -f 8 -o mpg2file.m2v" ??

An XSVCD type 8 (-f 8)???? with a bitrate of 9000 (-b 9000)??? Svcd is 2500 standard,
i bet yours would'nt play on many settops!?

It should play in all settops because it is DVD format burned onto DVD+R (or -R).

[Dillinger]

k Read the manpage yesterday evening and thought : "-f 8 ...hmmm ....seen this before..."

[shadowcat45]

Under the free available tools (not including warez), TMPGenc (i'm never sure exactly how to write this *g*) and mpeg2enc from mjpegtools are the most widely used. Unfortunately, there is no native port of TMPGenc to linux.

However, as you have mentioned Mac and commercial ... is there nothing from Sorenson ? This company has a longer experience in video (known from some Quicktime codecs) and a strong relationship to Apple. Since I had no Mac yet (i planned to buy an iBook, but an x86 notebook was much cheaper), I don't know how good their products are, and if there is any mpeg2 encoder, so maybe you drop a post to the Mac forum here.

ffmpeg is not so good for mpeg2, they make heavy development in mpeg4 where ffmpeg is better. Some programming ideas from ffmpeg's mpeg4 de/encoder will probably enhance mpeg2enc in the near future (on the mjpeg-devel mailinglist "single coefficient elimination" was mentioned by Steven M.Schulz).

There is also fame, the Fast Assembly Mpeg Encoder, but it was designed for real-time encoding and, as I know, can't encode B frames and is currently limited to mpeg1.

The old mpeg2encoder from Berkeley is also only able to encode mpeg1, is very old yet and is terrible to use, slowly it disappeared from the newer Linux distributions.

There is also bbmpeg, but currently only the bbtools (de- and multiplexer.. , no encoder) are ported to linux (e.g. used partially in transcode)

transcode itself either invokes mpeg2enc and mp2enc for encoding or uses its own module, which is, as I remember, also borrowed from ffmpeg.

MainActor, which I haven't tested (although SuSE includes it, full or trial ... hmm, I should install it to check) is more fro editing. I have read that an mpeg2 export plugin is available, or can be purchased additionaly, but i don't know its quality.

cinelerra ... hmm ... anyway, the development there started with a branch of the old berkeley encoder as I remeber, and i haven't heard that they did superior job in improving the encoder itself.

-----
I fear that there is not much choice for native linux (and wine ... is near an ideological question. Wine emulation has mostly an impact on performance, thus you can make a dual boot instead doing the job through wine. I don't like wine solutions). For Mac or Win, you will have a wider choice but since I do nothing more than gaming under win ... I simply don't know.

Sorry, that I cann't give you a satisfable answer, but i don`t know a linux encoder beyond the ability of mpeg2enc.

P.S.
-f 8 is the new mpeg2enc/mplex flag for DVD mpeg2, but currently Linux lacks the whole toolkit, e.g. for subtitle multiplexing. Authoring and DVD-style menus are also limited.
As for SVCD, many player accept SVCD with a bitrate near 3 800 , around 1.5 times SVCD constrain (-f 5 -b 3800). What hardware player dislike most is changing size (a 384 x 288 VCD will mostly not play, also people on the internet sometimes use this 4:3 size for mpeg encoding, and, also the bitrate would be o.k., one can't burn this directly).

Last but not least: some tips from the mailinglist:

The howto -V 200 is a bit to small. Drop it, -V 230 is the default, and
correct size (I'll correct the howto). -a 2 is usually also dont needed,
also set by default to that value. The -4 1 -2 1 produces a better
quality (about 10%).
The qualtiy factor of 10 is usually the lower end of SVCD Quality. A
quality factor of 7 produces rather high quality, and in scenes with
high movement it will very likely produce artefacts. So the default 8,
is good for most sources.
Unless you have very good material you have do denoise it.

If the video is interlaced you should not deinterlace it with yuvdenoise
(-F option) If it is interlace you should use the -I 1 option (is now
also default)
If it is not inerlaced (film material) deinterlace it with yuvdenoise
-F, and use mpeg2enc -I 0 option.

You should also use the: -P option. Else some DVD player might fail to
play it back because there are not 2 B frames on the end of the GOP. I
don't know if this is default of SVCD.

If you have a DVD player you might wnat to use a higher video buffer
(-V) that can help you in fast moving scenes. I usually us a buffer of
300kB.

The command I use currently looke like this for non interlaced material:
lav2yuv abc.avi | yuvdenoise -S 100 -F -r 16 | yuvscaler -O SVCD -I
ACTIVE_wxh+x+y | mpeg2enc -f 4 -q 8 -4 1 -2 1 -V 300 -I 0 -P -o SVCD.m2v

For interlaced I remove the -F and -I 0.

auf hoffentlich bald,

Berni the Chaos of Woodquarter

(Active is to cut some pixel around, which is more interresting for TV capture)

[Dillinger]

K, after 2 nights with little sleep and lot's of coffee i've figured out more about things possible mpeg2enc and got wine to compile on RH 9 (the brief info that the current release would support glibc 2.3 seemed to confuse some more people, would have been useful for many not-so-advanced Users
to pick a note onto it like "Compile --with-nptl !")

I think i'll stick with wine and TMPEG, because the Mac i can access is to slow to get decent
encoding speeds, and since i've switched to Linux, i don't want to spend any more penny on Mac-Hardware. In my opinion the stuff is way too expensive.... .

Apples Editing and DVD-Solutions (like iMovie/iDVD for HomeUse or FinalCut/DVDStudoPro are very first class for DVD, but do not provide any SVCD support ., In earlier days Cleaner was the only solution, but working with it was a pain in the a... .
Lasted three days and crashed often. The current version seemed to have improved.
Generally the situation concerning SVCD has improved a lot with OS X, but there nothing
which could compete with e.g. TMPG.

I've always been hating Win in any way, so i try to avoid a native Win solution if possible.
Besides that i'd have to buy a licencense for this crap, as i currently do not own any.

So, now one big problem stops me from being happy:

I can't import the dv Stuff (dv1 .avi, dv2 .avi, raw dv, i created running Linux
in TMPG, and any try to install a DV decoder seemed to fail (though it should be possible, following the howtos here on the site). I've tried Canopus "play only", which shows off in the "environmental settings" od TMPG, the Canopus Converter won't install, and some trial versions of videosoft failed to install, too (yes, i know, there are such problems in wine..).
Still i can't import the files, and this is starting to make me crazy....

Any help, hint, advice, link or something would be greatly appreciated....

cheers

Michael

[tsuma]

Well, I don't know about linux, but I've tried Bitvice on the Mac, TMPGEnc & Canopus Procoder on the PC and Procoder wins hands down for me anyway -- fast, high quality and easy to configure.

Plus, unlike TMPGenc, it will read *.mov DV files so I don't have to convert my Imovies to AVI first.

[Dillinger]

Plus, unlike TMPGenc, it will read *.mov DV files so I don't have to convert my Imovies to AVI first.

Hey man, you've just possibly enlighted my life in a way my first girl-friend did (and that's some years ago... ))) )

Does this really mean the procoder can read (import) and handle the stuff Apples iMovie creates? Until now i was just able to import uncompressed iMovie - stuff into TMPg
which is a waste of diskspace and covered with errors.

P.S: Were did you do the conversion to .avi, export from iMovie or pc-app??

[tsuma]

Yes, I remember the feeling!

It's been a while since I've needed to convert MOV to AVI since I am only using Procoder now. I wish they'd develop it for the Mac, since Cleaner results are very dissapointing. Bitvice, although fast, doesn't even approach Procoder in quality.

I think the mov to avi tools for the PC (like Rad Video Tools, mov2avi) are outdated since they won't read uncompressed/DV coded files.

Quicktime Pro I believe will export an AVI (uncompressed DV) file, but for a 60 min iMovie (exported to *.mov, as if preparing for DVD which is the Apple DV codec), it has to write the 15 GB AVI file so it requires a large drive and patience.

BTW, is there a Huffy Codec for the Mac to make the DV *.mov file smaller for quicker transferring to the Windows/Procoder machine?

[tsuma]

I may have just answered my own question on a good DV codec for MAC and Windows (compared to Huffyuv):

See this thread for BlackMagic DV codec (for both OS X, OS 9 and Windows):

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=124701&highlight=mov

[Dillinger]

k... just to bring any missunderstandings outta the way :

Till now the only way to bring my iMovie stuff to the PC was to export it from iMovie to .avi
with --own settings--/ --no compression--, but the resulting file will be about 5x DV (!) .

So you exported to .mov and got it into the box?

I will check out the BlackMagic codec later when i find the time and post how it worked for me.


/Michael

[tsuma]

Yes, in iMovie I used the export to (or "for") iDVD and it creates an uncompressed Apple DV codec, 720 X 480 (non-square pixel) Quicktime MOV file, with uncompressed audio.

Transfer this file to a PC and Procoder will read it directly, no need to change extension or anything.