What is the FFMPEG equivalent of upscaling?

[Guernsey]

I am looking to resize and upscale some of my videos with FFMPEG as the other alternative but what is the FFMPEG alternative to "Nearest Neighbor", "Lanzcos3" and "PointResizing"? I also want to make my videos the "HD" with a 4:3 ratio. I mostly use Virtualdub2 for resizes but some people suggest I use FFMPEG for resizes. What is the equivalent of that stuff on FFMPEG?

[butterw]

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-scaler.html

-vf scale=1920x1080:flags=lanczos
or -vf scale=504:376 -sws_flags bilinear
default is a sharp bicubic.

[Guernsey]

Is that how you set it up? If so, Thanks.

[DB83]

Of course you also substitute the '1920*1080', which is 16:9 with 1440*1080. But I guess you already knew that.

[Guernsey]

Of course you also substitute the '1920*1080', which is 16:9 with 1440*1080. But I guess you already knew that.

I mostly used Virtualdub2 for my upscales. I also had to look up the sizes as well.

[jagabo]

SWScaler options for ffmpeg:

SWScaler AVOptions:
  -sws_flags         <flags>      E..V...... scaler flags (default bicubic)
     fast_bilinear                E..V...... fast bilinear
     bilinear                     E..V...... bilinear
     bicubic                      E..V...... bicubic
     experimental                 E..V...... experimental
     neighbor                     E..V...... nearest neighbor
     area                         E..V...... averaging area
     bicublin                     E..V...... luma bicubic, chroma bilinear
     gauss                        E..V...... Gaussian
     sinc                         E..V...... sinc
     lanczos                      E..V...... Lanczos
     spline                       E..V...... natural bicubic spline
     print_info                   E..V...... print info
     accurate_rnd                 E..V...... accurate rounding
     full_chroma_int              E..V...... full chroma interpolation
     full_chroma_inp              E..V...... full chroma input
     bitexact                     E..V...... 
     error_diffusion              E..V...... error diffusion dither

Note that those are simple resizers, not neural network, AI, upscalers. ffmpeg also supports a few nn upscalers like nnedi and srcnn.

[non-vol]

Hmm... this got me thinking now. The nearest neighbour/point algorithm in particular. Mostly, when resizing, I have been using flags=none and understood that would be the same as nearest/point. I've been using that for years, many years, I remember specifically reading somewhere about how to eliminate the default bicubic filter, not really because of how it looks but simply because nearest is much faster . And I have a distinct memory that the flag for that was simply "none".

Now that I read the docs now... there is no such flag listed, however "neighbor" is. Anyone happen to know whether they're the same thing and "none" is just deprecated or something? It's weird, because there's no errors or anything to indicate otherwise, so I've assumed it works and did what I thought it did... but it actually isn't documented! At least not anymore.

[jagabo]

Hmm... this got me thinking now. The nearest neighbour/point algorithm in particular. Mostly, when resizing, I have been using flags=none and understood that would be the same as nearest/point. I've been using that for years, many years, I remember specifically reading somewhere about how to eliminate the default bicubic filter, not really because of how it looks but simply because nearest is much faster . And I have a distinct memory that the flag for that was simply "none".

Now that I read the docs now... there is no such flag listed, however "neighbor" is. Anyone happen to know whether they're the same thing and "none" is just deprecated or something? It's weird, because there's no errors or anything to indicate otherwise, so I've assumed it works and did what I thought it did... but it actually isn't documented! At least not anymore.

You could just try both yourself and find out. I just did a quick comparison and "none" is definitely not the same as "neighbor". I'll leave it to you to figure out which it is...

[ProWo]

You can try up-scale.
This is a hybrid of Avisynth and ffmpeg, i.e. an Avisynth script is created (nnedi3), this can be modified and adapted; afterwards the script is encoded with ffmpeg.

[non-vol]

Hmm... this got me thinking now. The nearest neighbour/point algorithm in particular. Mostly, when resizing, I have been using flags=none and understood that would be the same as nearest/point. I've been using that for years, many years, I remember specifically reading somewhere about how to eliminate the default bicubic filter, not really because of how it looks but simply because nearest is much faster . And I have a distinct memory that the flag for that was simply "none".

Now that I read the docs now... there is no such flag listed, however "neighbor" is. Anyone happen to know whether they're the same thing and "none" is just deprecated or something? It's weird, because there's no errors or anything to indicate otherwise, so I've assumed it works and did what I thought it did... but it actually isn't documented! At least not anymore.

You could just try both yourself and find out. I just did a quick comparison and "none" is definitely not the same as "neighbor". I'll leave it to you to figure out which it is...

I tried it as far as to see that for example "-vf "scale=1440x1080:flags=noune" gives an error message, like you'd definitely expect... it's a syntax error, or not really, some kind of lookup table, but it's an error. It's a complete mystery what the "none" means. It's nowhere to be seen in the docs. I don't have the know-how or other software to do a comparison (easily), I suspect it goes to defaults or something. But it's really weird, why does it accept an argument that's not documented? I can't even find the site or sites where the "none" was, this was something like 4 years ago. And do note that this is "flags=none", not "sws_flags". Live and learn, I guess.

BTW same thing with x265 and limit-sao. I have no idea if it's enabled or disabled, it's accepted as a parameter but it's not visible anywhere if it's active during an encode. (and as far as that goes... I have SUB-zero knowledge how to figure something like THAT out after the fact...)

[jagabo]

I tried it as far as to see that for example "-vf "scale=1440x1080:flags=noune" gives an error message

For me "none" gives the same as the default, "bicubic".

x264 and x265 save all the settings used for an encode in their metadata. You can see it with MediaInfo.

[non-vol]

I tried it as far as to see that for example "-vf "scale=1440x1080:flags=noune" gives an error message

For me "none" gives the same as the default, "bicubic".

x264 and x265 save all the settings used for an encode in their metadata. You can see it with MediaInfo.

Oh, that's interesting. Thanks for the tip. I still think it's a little odd that those things aren't shown during the encode... since a whole lot of stuff is. I also thought that info might be present in some separate log file... which might be in some very random directory (Windows build...) . Really off-topic already but actually getting the live console log to also be saved onto a file would be nice. I am sure there possibly might be a switch to do that or maybe that just happens... surely it would be in /var/*, /etc/*, ...

[jagabo]

I still think it's a little odd that those things aren't shown during the encode...

The codecs' internal settings are invisible to ffmpeg. For example, if you just specify "-c:v libx264 -preset slow" ffmpeg doesn't know how that effects all the internal x264 settings. Any other settings you specify -- well, you just put them on the command line so you know what you set. And ffmpeg doesn't know if the codec paid any attention to them.

[Guernsey]

Does FFMPEG come with codecs or do you need find them in places like this site?

[poisondeathray]

Does FFMPEG come with codecs or do you need find them in places like this site?

It comes with codecs - commonly distributed ffmpeg binaries are compiled with a bunch of codecs

[Guernsey]

Does FFMPEG come with codecs or do you need find them in places like this site?

It comes with codecs - commonly distributed ffmpeg binaries are compiled with a bunch of codecs

Okay I got you.