"Jetlag" <bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote in message
news:39b83b6b@news.povray.org...
> I've run into this problem a few times and I've seen it happen to a couple
> other people.  Most likely the encoding bitrate is too high;

    This seem to be a solution. By forcibly lowering the bitrate to 400/sec
I got to see the whole thing. But this is unacceptable. I have dozens of
mpgs made with Videomach that didn't have this problem.

    What bothers me is that the information seems to be in the file. I was
not able to find a way in QT to actually run a mpg, but if Chris got it to
play the whole thing, that means that it is the playing of the file that
fails, not the creation.

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Attachments:
Download 'Orbit.mpg' (61 KB)

In article <39b8da15@news.povray.org>, "Bill DeWitt" 
<the### [at] earthlinknet> wrote:

>     What bothers me is that the information seems to be in the file. I 
> was not able to find a way in QT to actually run a mpg, but if Chris 
> got it to play the whole thing, that means that it is the playing of 
> the file that fails, not the creation.

Or simply that QuickTime is more tolerant of errors in the file than 
other software.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

<><

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"Jetlag" <bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote :
>
>  Most likely the encoding bitrate is too high; the only thing
> that's moving is the orbitter.

    I think it is the second half of this statement that is the crux. I mad
a few more objects and it seems to work much better without dropping the
bitrate.

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With two different versions of windows media player I don't see the full
rotation.

Fer some reason QT4 doesn't want to open mpgs on my machine.... damn and blast.

Josh

Bill DeWitt wrote:

> I am having some sort of problem with VideoMach. I can't see but half of the
> frames in this animation. It seems to process all 36, but only ends up with
> about 12. At least it seems that way to me. Does anyone see a full orbit?
>
>                 Name: Orbit.mpg
>    Orbit.mpg    Type: WMPLAYER File (video/mpg)
>             Encoding: x-uuencode

--
Josh English -- Lexiphanic Lethomaniac
eng### [at] spiritonecom
The POV-Ray Cyclopedia http://www.spiritone.com/~english/cyclopedia/

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Bill DeWitt wrote:
> 
> I am having some sort of problem with VideoMach. I can't see but half of the
> frames in this animation. It seems to process all 36, but only ends up with
> about 12. At least it seems that way to me. Does anyone see a full orbit?


I see a full orbit with mtv.

Remco

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"Remco Poelstra" <rjp### [at] homenl> wrote :
>
> I see a full orbit with mtv.

    I want my mtv.

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>     I think it is the second half of this statement that is the crux. I
mad
> a few more objects and it seems to work much better without dropping the
> bitrate.

That is because more movement creates more for the MPEG to encode, so the
buffer does not underrun. When I first started encoding I thought that a
352x240 sized animation should get about 1.8 Mbits/s and then say 176x120
might need about 450kbits/s, and so on, and I could derive the needed
bitrate like that, but what I found is those numbers only work for
full-motion or very-near-full-motion. When I had an animation with very
little motion I needed to drop the bitrate a lot to keep from screwing it up
and making an unplayable file. Sometimes when it only screws up a little I
notice the play timer is WAY off, when it gets a lot of underruns Media
Player just chops it up. I won't say its Media Player's fault because I'm
pretty sure the MPEG's are going out of spec, but I also don't think its the
encoder's fault because it's just encoding with the parameters given (but it
should tell you that's its blown the buffer, and that it might not play
right).

I'm sure there's others around here that could explain this better because
I'm far from knowing what I'm talking about. But like I said before, finding
the right bitrate seems to be trial and error. I wish I could find some
program that I could run my animation through first, and it would return the
best bitrate, the sweet-spot so to speak, but I have yet to find it.

Enough of me blabbering, if you've encoded something, and now you find out
that it doesn't play right AND you've deleted the originals, you can get all
the unplayable data back by pushing it through VirtualDub. The program is a
free AVI mutilator, and there's lots of good stuff I could say about but
just go to http://www.geocities.com/virtualdub and see for yourself.  The
source is there too (one day I plan on shoving mpeg2encode into it, but
since I patched* MP+ to output MPEGs I don't need it that urgently anymore).


*I don't really plan to release though, it seems all I got was negative
feedback when I asked about it before.




Jeff

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"Jetlag" <bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote :
>
> *I don't really plan to release though, it seems all I got was negative
> feedback when I asked about it before.

    I didn't read that conversation, but I have been playing with VirtualDub
and so far I like it. What is your patch?

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>     I didn't read that conversation, but I have been playing with
VirtualDub
> and so far I like it. What is your patch?

A while back I patched mpeg-1 output in pov, and I threw a post into
povray.animations questioning whether anyone would want such a thing.  The
general consensus was that no one would want it, and to be truthful there
are many drawbacks to such a thing. I keep an updated version of it for
myself whenever something new comes up, because I've found myself using it
regularly.  The reason I didn't just upload it somewhere is because it was a
very sloppy implementation, memory leaks everywhere, it crashes on
pov-script errors, and other crazy stuff. I was going to rewrite it if
people seemed interested.  Someday I may add raw AVI output, which would
prove more useful than mpeg-1, for most windows users anyway. It wouldn't be
able to write codecs of course, but no one would want that anyway, for the
same reasons no one would want mpeg-1. But it's a long way from happening.
After school and work its either coding or sleeping, and sleep wins most of
the time.

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Bill DeWitt says...
> I am having some sort of problem with VideoMach. I can't see but half of the
> frames in this animation. It seems to process all 36, but only ends up with
> about 12. At least it seems that way to me. Does anyone see a full orbit?
> 
Same here with Windows Media Player, but MainActor's Player shows it all. 
MainActor's Video Editor reads your mpg just fine and re-saves it as an 
mpg of about double size (176 kB) that plays OK on WMP... Funny that all 
the information IS there but doesn't show. Some misplaced 'end of file' 
sign? 
Did you try CMPEG?

-- 
Regards,  Sander

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