And so, last night I signed up for a YouTube account.

It took multiple attempts, mind you. For some reason, you have to click 
on every link on the site 4-5 times before the corresponding page 
actually loads. Plus the application form gets rejected if any fields 
are blank, and when it does this it helpfully blanks out some of the 
fields you already filled in (but not all of them, because then you'd 
notice it and wouldn't get caught out).

I did have a go at uploading a video, but this was an excercise in 
extreme futility. The smallest video I had handy was roughly 300 MB, and 
it took half an hour to upload 8 MB. Clearly uploading uncompressed 
video is infeasible.

I shall have a go tonight. Hopefully if I apply a really tiny amount of 
compression, the video will still be recognisable and will unload in 
less than thirteen millennia...

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Clearly uploading uncompressed video is infeasible.

  Not only infeasible, but madness.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Clearly uploading uncompressed video is infeasible.
> 
>   Not only infeasible, but madness.

Madness?

    MADNESS!

Madness?

    MADNESS!



...damnit Warp, now I have that *thing* stuck in my head again! >_<

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rZBA0SKmQy8

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:

> Clearly uploading uncompressed video is infeasible.

I just tried taking my test video and encoding it as MPEG1. On one hand, 
the file shrank from 730 MB to 6 MB. On the other hand, the picture is 
now fuzzy and indistinct. But no matter how much I turn up the bitrate, 
the file size remains the same. *sigh*

Still, I needn't have worried. Once I uploaded the video to YouTube, it 
became completely unrecognisible:

   http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JbSpGve_c

You now cannot even tell what it *is*! o_O

Clearly I am wasting my time here...

Don't ask me why, but I was expecting better. Oh well, I guess I should 
just give up on this as a bad job. Even if I could figure out how to 
upload my movie, if it's going to become unrecognisible like this then 
there's really no point to it.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Don't ask me why, but I was expecting better. Oh well, I guess I should 
> just give up on this as a bad job. Even if I could figure out how to 
> upload my movie, if it's going to become unrecognisible like this then 
> there's really no point to it.

  You seem to have certain compulsive obsession about many things. One of
them is that you won't touch DivX or Xvid, no matter what, even though those
are the codecs which most people use to create video (including those which
go to youtube). It feels like you would jump through a thousands hoops just
in order to not to use those mpeg4 codecs. Well, your loss.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Don't ask me why, but I was expecting better. Oh well, I guess I should 
>> just give up on this as a bad job. Even if I could figure out how to 
>> upload my movie, if it's going to become unrecognisible like this then 
>> there's really no point to it.
> 
>   You seem to have certain compulsive obsession about many things. One of
> them is that you won't touch DivX or Xvid, no matter what, even though those
> are the codecs which most people use to create video (including those which
> go to youtube). It feels like you would jump through a thousands hoops just
> in order to not to use those mpeg4 codecs. Well, your loss.

I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the math. :-P

(Besides, the video looked OK encoded in MPEG1. Trouble is, YouTube 
resized it to some much smaller spatial resolution, rendering it 
unrecognisible. The actual compression isn't *that* bad, but the 
resizing means that half the image is invisible...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490a00a8@news.povray.org...
> I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the math. 
> :-P

So get one. You can get a 15-day trial of the dix-X convertor free, and XVid 
is GNU GPL-licenced software.

> (Besides, the video looked OK encoded in MPEG1. Trouble is, YouTube 
> resized it to some much smaller spatial resolution, rendering it 
> unrecognisible.

It's all YouTube's fault.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >   You seem to have certain compulsive obsession about many things. One of
> > them is that you won't touch DivX or Xvid, no matter what, even though those
> > are the codecs which most people use to create video (including those which
> > go to youtube). It feels like you would jump through a thousands hoops just
> > in order to not to use those mpeg4 codecs. Well, your loss.

> I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the math. :-P

  Did you know that Xvid is completely free? Also x264 is completely free
if you want something even fancier.

> (Besides, the video looked OK encoded in MPEG1.

  It's not so much about image quality as about quality/size ratio.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:

>> I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the math. :-P
> 
>   Did you know that Xvid is completely free? Also x264 is completely free
> if you want something even fancier.
> 
>> (Besides, the video looked OK encoded in MPEG1.
> 
>   It's not so much about image quality as about quality/size ratio.

Maybe I am baised. I did try one of these codecs one time. (I really 
can't remember whether it was DivX or Xvid, but it was one or the 
other.) I found that no matter which settings I changed, it was 
absolutely impossible to generate a video that didn't look horribly 
compressed. There seemed to be billions of settings, but none of them 
would improve the image. Everything came out fuzzy and blurry 
(especially anything blue), and there were lots of ugly blocks 
everywhere, and it just looked a mess.

Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of 
these problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490a1712$1@news.povray.org...

> Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of these 
> problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...

Or you haven't read tutorials that they have

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Maybe I am baised. I did try one of these codecs one time. (I really 
> can't remember whether it was DivX or Xvid, but it was one or the 
> other.) I found that no matter which settings I changed, it was 
> absolutely impossible to generate a video that didn't look horribly 
> compressed. There seemed to be billions of settings, but none of them 
> would improve the image. Everything came out fuzzy and blurry 
> (especially anything blue), and there were lots of ugly blocks 
> everywhere, and it just looked a mess.

  Give me a high-quality mpeg1 video you have, and I will try to convert
it to mpeg4 preserving the same image quality as much as possible. If
I don't succeed in doing that, or if the resulting file size is not
significantly smaller, I will concede that in some cases mpeg4 does not
beat mpeg1.

  Preferably live video, which is what mpeg4 is best suited for. (Video
which has very sharp contrast, for example cartoons or certain rendered
animations, can also be compressed well with mpeg4, but it usually requires
a lot more fine-tuning of the parameters.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I just tried taking my test video and encoding it as MPEG1. On one hand,
> the file shrank from 730 MB to 6 MB. On the other hand, the picture is
> now fuzzy and indistinct. But no matter how much I turn up the bitrate,
> the file size remains the same. *sigh*

	I had a strong sense of deja vu when I read this. Probably because
you've had this same conversation here in the past!

	So I'll tell you what you were told before: MPEG1 sucks. MPEG2 is
better. If mpeg4 is a headache for you, just do mpeg2.

-- 
Fax me no questions, I'll Fax you no lies!


                    /\  /\               /\  /
                   /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the math.
> :-P

	My friend, let me introduce you to this new invention. Some are
beginning to call it "The Internet".

	Can't help you otherwise: I do all my stuff in Linux. mencoder,
transcode and avidemux have worked well for me the few times I've done
this. My distribution automatically installed most of the encoders when
I installed mplayer. Gotta love USE flags...

-- 
Fax me no questions, I'll Fax you no lies!


                    /\  /\               /\  /
                   /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490975d6$1@news.povray.org...
> Invisible wrote:
> Still, I needn't have worried. Once I uploaded the video to YouTube, it 
> became completely unrecognisible:
>
>   http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JbSpGve_c
>
> You now cannot even tell what it *is*! o_O

     Just add this to the end of the URL for higher quality:

      &fmt=18

     http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JbSpGve_c&fmt=18


      ~Steve~






> http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
> http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

>> I have an MPEG1 encoder. I don't have an MPEG4 encoder. You do the 
>> math. :-P
> 
> So get one. You can get a 15-day trial of the dix-X convertor free, and 
> XVid is GNU GPL-licenced software.

In that case... it must have been DivX I tried. (I definitely remember 
it being a "trail version"; all the encoded videos had a watermark on them.)

>> (Besides, the video looked OK encoded in MPEG1. Trouble is, YouTube 
>> resized it to some much smaller spatial resolution, rendering it 
>> unrecognisible.
> 
> It's all YouTube's fault.

Well, I guess if I knew exactly what size it resizes them to, I could 
render at that resolution in the first place... For the video I was 
thinking of uploading, I'd have to crop it though. The interesting parts 
are barely visible at the *current* resolution, never mind with 
downsampling...

Post a reply to this message

St. wrote:

>      Just add this to the end of the URL for higher quality:
> 
>       &fmt=18
> 
>      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JbSpGve_c&fmt=18

My God... Eddison you're a genius! o_O

Seriously though. I've seen other videos where there's a "watch in high 
quality" button, but my video doesn't have that button. And yet, the 
link you posted does indeed show it in slightly higher quality. What gives?

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:
> 
> "Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
> news:490a1712$1@news.povray.org...
> 
>> Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of 
>> these problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...
> 
> Or you haven't read tutorials that they have

...they have tutorials now? ._.

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ac8c4$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>
>>      Just add this to the end of the URL for higher quality:
>>
>>       &fmt=18
>>
>>      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JbSpGve_c&fmt=18
>
> My God... Eddison you're a genius! o_O
>
> Seriously though. I've seen other videos where there's a "watch in high 
> quality" button, but my video doesn't have that button. And yet, the link 
> you posted does indeed show it in slightly higher quality. What gives?

    Heh... Genius.  :)

    See this page:

     http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=91450&topic=10526


     ~Steve~

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ac8da@news.povray.org...
> Gail wrote:
>>
>> "Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
>> news:490a1712$1@news.povray.org...
>>
>>> Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of 
>>> these problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...
>>
>> Or you haven't read tutorials that they have
>
> ...they have tutorials now? ._.

<sigh> Do you think that everyone else just somehow managed to intuit the 
proper settings?

http://www.google.com/search?q=xvid+tutorial
http://www.google.com/search?q=divx+tutorial

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ac7f9$1@news.povray.org...

> Well, I guess if I knew exactly what size it resizes them to, I could 
> render at that resolution in the first place...

They don't just resize. They also convert into flash and I think compress 
more. It's not just a size thing.

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:
> They don't just resize. They also convert into flash and I think 
> compress more. It's not just a size thing.

Sure. But my particular video has a problem because the waves are 
approaching pixel size. There aren't actually all that many compression 
artifacts in this particular video. (Because most of the image is black, 
so it compresses quite easily...)

Post a reply to this message

>> ...they have tutorials now? ._.
> 
> <sigh> Do you think that everyone else just somehow managed to intuit 
> the proper settings?

Well yeah, presumably.

I mean, TMPGEnc doesn't come with a manual or any tutorials either, and 
most people manage to figure that out. Ditto for Virtual Dub...

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490acebb$1@news.povray.org...
>
> I mean, TMPGEnc doesn't come with a manual or any tutorials either, and 
> most people manage to figure that out. Ditto for Virtual Dub...

It may not come with it, but that doesn't stop people who have wored things 
out to write tutorials for all the people who can't or who don't want to 
fiddle for days to get a good result.
If you're wondering how to do something, ask google. Chances are, someone 
has done it before and will have written up something explainig how.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> ...they have tutorials now? ._.
> > 
> > <sigh> Do you think that everyone else just somehow managed to intuit 
> > the proper settings?

> Well yeah, presumably.

> I mean, TMPGEnc doesn't come with a manual or any tutorials either, and 
> most people manage to figure that out. Ditto for Virtual Dub...

  You know, there's this thing called "Google". Ever tried that?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:

> It may not come with it, but that doesn't stop people who have wored 
> things out to write tutorials for all the people who can't or who don't 
> want to fiddle for days to get a good result.
> If you're wondering how to do something, ask google. Chances are, 
> someone has done it before and will have written up something explainig 
> how.

I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need them.

At the time, I was only really trying out various codecs. The general 
conclusion I reached is that every codec known to man produces some 
degree of visible distortion, so it's best to store everything fully 
uncompressed, only encoding it when writing to DVD. Basically I only 
ever play video on my PC or on a DVD; I've never tried to put video onto 
the Internet before.

I decided that for lossy encoding, MPEG1 is good enough. (And has the 
advantage that absolutely everything can play it, and there's a nice, 
free, fairly usable encoder available.)

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ad8c2$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail wrote:
>
>> It may not come with it, but that doesn't stop people who have wored 
>> things out to write tutorials for all the people who can't or who don't 
>> want to fiddle for days to get a good result.
>> If you're wondering how to do something, ask google. Chances are, someone 
>> has done it before and will have written up something explainig how.
>
> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
> them.

No. You assume that it should be obvious.
Most other people I know (myself included) would go looking for some 
assistance (whether it be asking someone or searching online)

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:

>> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
>> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
>> them.
> 
> No. You assume that it should be obvious.
> Most other people I know (myself included) would go looking for some 
> assistance (whether it be asking someone or searching online)

Well, the encoder _did_ work. It just produced very bad quality 
pictures. I assumed it was just a naff codec, and continued my 
explorations elsewhere. (At the time I'd never heard of it before, so I 
figured that was because it's not very good.)

I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to 
work well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you 
have *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I 
assumed that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours 
trying to fix it.

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490adb53@news.povray.org...

> I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to work 
> well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you have 
> *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I assumed 
> that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours trying to fix 
> it.

You seem to often make assumptions based on insufficient information. Don't. 
Investigate, verify, confirm for yourself. The tools needed are there, it's 
not hard.
You do your reputation no good if you make an assumption that 2 min or less 
with google will show to be completely false.

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:
> 
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
> news:490adb53@news.povray.org...
> 
>> I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to 
>> work well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you 
>> have *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I 
>> assumed that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours 
>> trying to fix it.
> 
> You seem to often make assumptions based on insufficient information. 
> Don't. Investigate, verify, confirm for yourself. The tools needed are 
> there, it's not hard.
> You do your reputation no good if you make an assumption that 2 min or 
> less with google will show to be completely false.

You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which ones 
are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've never 
heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be good? 
Where are you going to spend the most effort?

Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
instantly answer any possible question. This is not actually the case. 
Google works very well for certain questions, and drastically less well 
for certain other questions. Sometimes it can take hours of hunting to 
get a useful answer out of Google. (Though probably not for the specific 
case in question.)

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ae0c2$1@news.povray.org...

> You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which ones 
> are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've never 
> heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be good? 
> Where are you going to spend the most effort?

First I'd spend some time investigating what are considered to be good 
codecs, which ones are popular and which are seldom used, rather than 
relying on my own knowledge. If I have some I've never heard of (and if so, 
why would I have them at all), I'd do a little bit of investigating until I 
had a basic understanding of them

> Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
> instantly answer any possible question.

I never said that. I said that you should investigate, verify and confirm 
for yourself. If you search and can't find an answer, that's one thing, when 
you state something as a categorical truth and half a minute with google 
proves that it's completely false, that's quite another.

Searching's a skill that needs practice, it's not obvious first time what 
keywords are going to produce an answer. Sometimes it takes several 
searches, refining the terms each time based on what's returned and what's 
not.

fyi, I've had very few questions where I couldn't get an answer out from 
either google or a forum/newsgroup/mailing list on the particular subject. 
That's for work stuff, for stuff that I'm casually interested in, for 
game-related stuff and for information for my Masters thesis.

Post a reply to this message

>> You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which 
>> ones are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've 
>> never heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be 
>> good? Where are you going to spend the most effort?
> 
> First I'd spend some time investigating what are considered to be good 
> codecs, which ones are popular and which are seldom used, rather than 
> relying on my own knowledge. If I have some I've never heard of (and if 
> so, why would I have them at all), I'd do a little bit of investigating 
> until I had a basic understanding of them

Now here's the thing. Google is very good at answering "what is X?" and 
to some extent "how do I do Y?". But how on earth do you get an answer 
to something like "what's the most popular Z?" Google can't tell you 
that. Only *people* can tell you that.

>> Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
>> instantly answer any possible question.
> 
> I never said that. I said that you should investigate, verify and 
> confirm for yourself. If you search and can't find an answer, that's one 
> thing, when you state something as a categorical truth and half a minute 
> with google proves that it's completely false, that's quite another.

Well this thread started by my stating that *I* couldn't get a decent 
picture out of DivX - which *is* a categorical truth. I know. I was there.

I have never claimed that DivX isn't good; I just said that it didn't 
work for me.

Also, I can't really do a Google search every single time I utter any 
sentence in case something in that sentence is not factually accurate. 
I'd never say anything! There has to be some sane limits here.

> Searching's a skill that needs practice, it's not obvious first time 
> what keywords are going to produce an answer. Sometimes it takes several 
> searches, refining the terms each time based on what's returned and 
> what's not.
> 
> fyi, I've had very few questions where I couldn't get an answer out from 
> either google or a forum/newsgroup/mailing list on the particular 
> subject. That's for work stuff, for stuff that I'm casually interested 
> in, for game-related stuff and for information for my Masters thesis.

Clearly you are radically better at this stuff than I am.

Just the other day I was trying to figure out the relative speed of 
various CPU arithmetic operations, and I couldn't find anything useful 
with Google (as evidenced by my asking here).

It was only a few weeks back that I wanted to know how to configure an 
Exchange public folder so it can receive email. Various websites tell 
you how to do this, but they all assume you have access to the Exchange 
admin console. Is there a way of doing it without that access? I guess 
I'll never know - cos Google sure can't tell me.

There is an endless list of obscure computer problems I've had that 
Google couldn't solve for me. (Clearly nobody else had ever had the 
exact problem I had.)

So yeah, there's a pretty huge sea of questions that I couldn't get 
Google to answer. It's not an Oracle, it's just a search engine.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
> them.

I think that only applies to commercial products. Sadly, I've bought a 
few commercial products, hoping they'd have better instructions than the 
free equivalents, only to find that the author didn't even feel it was 
worth updating the printed manual to cover the last couple of versions 
of the software.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Google works very well for certain questions, and drastically less well 
> for certain other questions. 

No. Google works well if you are looking for an answer. It works poorly 
if you're asking a question.

The difference is that google searches answers. If you don't have any 
idea what the answer looks like, you're unlikely to find it no matter 
how precisely you state the question.

Fortunately, *most* questions have the seeds of their answer already 
planted in the question.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> But how on earth do you get an answer 
> to something like "what's the most popular Z?" 

http://google.com/search?q=what+is+the+most+popular+codec

> Just the other day I was trying to figure out the relative speed of 
> various CPU arithmetic operations, and I couldn't find anything useful 
> with Google (as evidenced by my asking here).

That's the sort of thing where you need to know what the answer looks 
like in order to find it, methinks. If you don't know the term used for 
spec sheets, you're going to get too many odd hits on relative speeds of 
CPUs.

> So yeah, there's a pretty huge sea of questions that I couldn't get 
> Google to answer. It's not an Oracle, it's just a search engine.

That searches answers, not questions. Keep that in mind. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Now here's the thing. Google is very good at answering "what is X?" and
> to some extent "how do I do Y?". But how on earth do you get an answer
> to something like "what's the most popular Z?" Google can't tell you
> that. Only *people* can tell you that.

Google searches the WWW. Finding things *people* put there.

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:07:17 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> Now here's the thing. Google is very good at answering "what is X?" and
> to some extent "how do I do Y?". But how on earth do you get an answer
> to something like "what's the most popular Z?" Google can't tell you
> that. Only *people* can tell you that.

Try putting "popular video encoders" in the Google search box.  The links 
that come up (just on a quick overview) don't say "this is the most 
popular", but they do give some useful pointers.

> So yeah, there's a pretty huge sea of questions that I couldn't get
> Google to answer. It's not an Oracle, it's just a search engine.

Yes, and if you learn how to speak the language the search engine knows, 
it is a very powerful tool for learning stuff.

With the search terms suggested above (without the quotes), the fifth hit 
is a Wikipedia article on Video Codecs; item 3 in the TOC on that page is 
"Common used standards and codecs" and gives a good overview of each of 
the most popular codecs out there.

For example:

"MPEG-1 Part 2: Used for Video CDs, and also sometimes for online video. 
If the source video quality is good and the bitrate is high enough, VCD 
can look slightly better than VHS. To exceed VHS quality, a higher 
resolution would be necessary. However, to get a fully compliant VCD 
file, bitrates higher than 1150 kbit/s and resolutions higher than 352 x 
288 should not be used. When it comes to compatibility, VCD has the 
highest compatibility of any digital video/audio system. Very few DVD 
players do not support VCD, but they all inherently support the MPEG-1 
codec. Almost every computer in the world can also play videos using this 
codec. In terms of technical design, the most significant enhancements in 
MPEG-1 relative to H.261 were half-pel and bi-predictive motion 
compensation support. MPEG-1 supports only progressive scan video."

Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to what 
sort of quality to expect out of it.

Jim

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On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:07:17 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> Just the other day I was trying to figure out the relative speed of
> various CPU arithmetic operations, and I couldn't find anything useful
> with Google (as evidenced by my asking here).

Search with "cpu speed arithmetic" - hit numbers 4&6 seem like they might 
be relevant.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to what 
> sort of quality to expect out of it.

Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over 
a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't 
really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality 
uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:19:40 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to
>> what sort of quality to expect out of it.
> 
> Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over
> a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't
> really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality
> uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

Yup. :-)

Jim

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Darren New wrote:

> Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over 
> a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't 
> really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality 
> uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

Really? That's interesting; I was under the impression that you can use 
MPEG1 at any arbitrary bitrate.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of these 
>> problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...
>
> Or you haven't read tutorials that they have

Or used one of the many GUIs for the command-line encoders that provide a 
wide variety of configuration presets.

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scott wrote:
>>> Since apparently every other user on the planet doesn't have any of 
>>> these problems, apparently I'm just too stupid to work it out...
>>
>> Or you haven't read tutorials that they have
> 
> Or used one of the many GUIs for the command-line encoders that provide 
> a wide variety of configuration presets.

The tool I was using *had* a GUI. With 50,000 options on it. None of 
which appeared to affect image quality. (E.g., increasing the bitrate or 
the "quality" settings made little to no difference.)

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> The tool I was using *had* a GUI. With 50,000 options on it. None of which 
> appeared to affect image quality. (E.g., increasing the bitrate or the 
> "quality" settings made little to no difference.)

Try XVid4PSP, it's free and so far I have never even needed to change any 
advanced settings.  It has presets with names for each format.  If you 
choose the format as plain AVI, under video encoding you can choose options 
like "FFV1 Lossless" or "xVid HQ Ultra" or "x264 HQ Ultra" etc.  Under 
format you can also choose MP4 Mpeg1 Mpeg2 etc, it really is quite easy to 
use.

It also accepts a huge range of input formats, including VOB if the "open 
file" dialog box is anything to go by.

And of course if you feel like tinkering (I have never needed to), you can 
go and edit the details of each preset.

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scott wrote:
>> The tool I was using *had* a GUI. With 50,000 options on it. None of 
>> which appeared to affect image quality. (E.g., increasing the bitrate 
>> or the "quality" settings made little to no difference.)
> 
> Try XVid4PSP, it's free and so far I have never even needed to change 
> any advanced settings.  It has presets with names for each format.  If 
> you choose the format as plain AVI, under video encoding you can choose 
> options like "FFV1 Lossless" or "xVid HQ Ultra" or "x264 HQ Ultra" etc.  
> Under format you can also choose MP4 Mpeg1 Mpeg2 etc, it really is quite 
> easy to use.
> 
> It also accepts a huge range of input formats, including VOB if the 
> "open file" dialog box is anything to go by.
> 
> And of course if you feel like tinkering (I have never needed to), you 
> can go and edit the details of each preset.

I installed FFDshow the other day. That seems to give me several 
lossless codecs that are nice and easy to use.

According to what Gail said, the tool I used must have been the DivX 
encoder. (Or rather, the trail version of it.) I'm going to give Xvid a 
try later and see what that does...

(Of course, you never see DVDs that look blurry and messed up. 
Presumably that means they figured out how to avoid that in MPEG2. 
Unfortunately, MPEG2 is the hardest codec under the sun to find software 
for - presumably because they use it on DVDs, so everybody wants to 
charge you *money* for it...)

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> (Of course, you never see DVDs that look blurry and messed up. Presumably 
> that means they figured out how to avoid that in MPEG2. Unfortunately, 
> MPEG2 is the hardest codec under the sun to find software for - presumably 
> because they use it on DVDs, so everybody wants to charge you *money* for 
> it...)

Xvid4PSP offers MPEG2 PAL and NTSC format options, with encoding options 
like "1-pass 8mbit", "2-pass 8mbit", "CBR 9.2mbit", and "copy" which 
presumably does no reencoding if your source file is already MPEG2 
compatible.

I would expect those would give the same results as a commerical DVD.

But for uploading to YouTube, I would use a more modern codec like xVid 
(which they accept) that will give you smaller files for the same quality.

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Mueen Nawaz wrote:

> 	So I'll tell you what you were told before: MPEG1 sucks. MPEG2 is
> better. If mpeg4 is a headache for you, just do mpeg2.

MPEG2 is very hard to get hold of. It seems that because DVDs use it, 
and DVD software costs money, it is not possible to get hold of a free 
MPEG2 encoder.

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scott wrote:
>> (Of course, you never see DVDs that look blurry and messed up. 
>> Presumably that means they figured out how to avoid that in MPEG2. 
>> Unfortunately, MPEG2 is the hardest codec under the sun to find 
>> software for - presumably because they use it on DVDs, so everybody 
>> wants to charge you *money* for it...)
> 
> Xvid4PSP offers MPEG2 PAL and NTSC format options, with encoding options 
> like "1-pass 8mbit", "2-pass 8mbit", "CBR 9.2mbit", and "copy" which 
> presumably does no reencoding if your source file is already MPEG2 
> compatible.
> 
> I would expect those would give the same results as a commerical DVD.

Heh. My DVD authoring software [came free with the DVD burner] doesn't 
give me quality *quite* that good. (Although it is fairly close.)

> But for uploading to YouTube, I would use a more modern codec like xVid 
> (which they accept) that will give you smaller files for the same quality.

At the moment, just getting good quality at all - at *any* filesize - 
would be impressive.

What I can't figure out is this: There are dozens of audio codecs that 
can take a sound file and make it *at least* 5x smaller with absolutely 
_NO_ detectable loss of quality at all. (And far smaller still if you're 
willing to sacrifice a little clarity.) But it seems there are no codecs 
that can shrink video without a visible loss of quality. (Aside from a 
few lossless codecs which usually give you about ~20% smaller or so.)

I guess video is just a much harder problem...

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> What I can't figure out is this: There are dozens of audio codecs that can 
> take a sound file and make it *at least* 5x smaller with absolutely _NO_ 
> detectable loss of quality at all. (And far smaller still if you're 
> willing to sacrifice a little clarity.) But it seems there are no codecs 
> that can shrink video without a visible loss of quality. (Aside from a few 
> lossless codecs which usually give you about ~20% smaller or so.)

Huh? Even MPEG2 (as used on DVDs) can reduce the raw bitrate from 240 Mbit 
to 10 Mbit (so 24x smaller) with little detectable quality loss.  More 
recent codecs will definitely improve on this, like xVid and h264.

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scott wrote:
>> What I can't figure out is this: There are dozens of audio codecs that 
>> can take a sound file and make it *at least* 5x smaller with 
>> absolutely _NO_ detectable loss of quality at all. (And far smaller 
>> still if you're willing to sacrifice a little clarity.) But it seems 
>> there are no codecs that can shrink video without a visible loss of 
>> quality. (Aside from a few lossless codecs which usually give you 
>> about ~20% smaller or so.)
> 
> Huh? Even MPEG2 (as used on DVDs) can reduce the raw bitrate from 240 
> Mbit to 10 Mbit (so 24x smaller) with little detectable quality loss.

Now compare the MPEG2 video back-to-back with the uncompressed original. 
Are you seriously telling me there is *no* detectable loss of quality?

Sure, it's a fairly small loss, but it *is* noticable. I wonder what the 
bitrate would need to be increased to for it to be impossible to tell 
the difference...

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ec9db$1@news.povray.org...
> Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>
>> So I'll tell you what you were told before: MPEG1 sucks. MPEG2 is
>> better. If mpeg4 is a headache for you, just do mpeg2.
>
> MPEG2 is very hard to get hold of. It seems that because DVDs use it, and 
> DVD software costs money, it is not possible to get hold of a free MPEG2 
> encoder.

http://www.google.com/search?q=free+mpeg2+encoder

The first hit is for the site www.free-codecs.com/download/FreeEnc.htm
"FreeEnc is a free MPEG-2 encoder, which uses avcodec library to encode. 
This encoder takes  AVISynth input(.avs) and outputs MPEG2 like  QuEnc, but 
the main difference is that every parameter is tweakable, plus it comes with 
the optimized parameters of MencodeMe, which are known to produce great 
quality."

The third hit is for www.videohelp.com/tools/HC
"HC is a free MPEG2 Encoder. Input can be a d2v project or input using 
Avisynth. 2 pass VBR encoding."

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