Author Topic: HCenc beta (Read 28,163 times)

MilesAhead · « **on:** April 08, 2010, 02:01 AM »

New HCenc beta

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC

sajman99 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 09, 2010, 06:04 PM »

Ah, another release.

Hard to believe this MPEG2 encoder is free. Man, I'm glad I found this gem.

Hmm..I haven't yet tried the new optimized version of the encoder. Anybody check it out?

MilesAhead · « **Reply #2 on:** April 09, 2010, 06:57 PM »

Now I'm using it through AVStoDVD latest alpha. But what I'd like to do at some point is devise some simple system to demux the audio and just put the video through HC Enc, then remux at the end. Only thing is I'm not sure how to tell if the audio needs to be "fixed."

Esp. if you have an HD source a lot of audio is AC3 640 kbit. Not "compliant" so it triggers audio encoding when, from what I hear, most players manufactured recently will play DVD with 640 kbit AC3.

That and trying to cut clips of .mkv and .m2ts to try, are a couple of the stumbling blocks keeping me from using HC Enc without a front end. Plus I'd have to read up on all those settings of course.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #3 on:** April 10, 2010, 11:03 PM »

Hmmmmm, not so bad with the Gui. After demuxing the audio I just run in through ac3fix to check for bad frames. Use a bitrate calculator to set the bitrate range. Make a 2 line .avs script to load the video and apply a resize filter. For the time being I'm using DvdAuthorGui to author the DVD.

Now that I at least can do basic conversions I can read up on all that lumens jazz.

Of course this first one was easy because I didn't have to mess with subtitles.

sajman99 · « **Reply #4 on:** April 11, 2010, 12:41 AM »

MilesAhead, a freeware named Simple DVD Creator was mentioned in the AVStoDVD Doom9 thread some while ago iirc. I think the guy was going to output as elementary streams and use Simple DVD Creator to author.

Never used it personally--it may well be too simple for your requirements. What little feedback there is sounds good though.

Simple DVD Creator:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Simple_DVD_Creator
http://arakar.ifastnet.com/andrej/software

MilesAhead · « **Reply #5 on:** April 11, 2010, 05:44 PM »

Thanks for the info. One thing I have noticed is with some .mkv to dvd conversions is some slight choppiness in lateral motion scenes. I'm wondering if it may be due to QuEnc constant 1 pass high quality as AVStoDVD does by default for high bitrate. I want to put some through HC full 2 pass manually and see how they come out.

What I could really use is a free, easy to use, stable .mkv tool to get short clips for testing. I have done a couple with HC 2 pass and they don't seem to have that lateral chop. When the actor is walking across the room it's almost like 1 frame is missing here and there. I usually do Spline16Resize to size down. I tried Spline64Resize and it was even more noticeable.

Next thing is to get more into subtitles.

But in cases where you can use the audio stream as is, there's not that much to just processing the video with HC. At least when using the vanilla settings. Another reason to have short clips so I can play with lumengain and some of the other settings.

sajman99 · « **Reply #6 on:** April 11, 2010, 07:39 PM »

I always do everything HC 2 pass by overriding the AVStoDVD settings. Yeah, it takes some extra time for probably only a marginal improvement. But I figure hey, if it's worth doing, it's worth trying to achieve optimal quality.

To this day, I've never messed around with QuEnc. I don't have anything against it, per se. It's just that a HC encode looks so darn good I've stuck with it by habit.

Regarding luminace gain (LUMGAIN), I no longer use it. Some while ago I was using LUMGAIN 2 on a DVD source with lots of CGI content and HCenc locked up. After trying multiple times with the same failure, I removed LUMGAIN and was able to complete the encode. Mind you, this was a couple HC versions ago.

Bug or isolated incident? No idea, but I haven't used LUMGAIN since so as to avoid any possible issues.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #7 on:** April 12, 2010, 05:54 AM »

I think overriding to use HC Enc in AVStoDVD using 2 pass will work fine. I tried to do it with 1 pass. That's likely why HC prompted that the settings didn't make much sense. Now I'm just going with HC Enc using the gui and straight 2 pass mode. The couple of DVD9 I've made so far using that method, lateral motion in the result seems quite fluid. QuEnc seems to be ok for avi=>dvd but for sizing down with one pass it's probably less than ideal.

For some reason too it seems kind of fun to peel off the audio stream and just use it the way it is after processing the video stream. I've had a lot of "one click" tools give me problems processing the audio, or muxing at the end. Seems like if I do it myself and author with DVDAuthorGui everything runs smooth. Esp. reading from one drive and writing to another sometimes I'm on the other PC surfing and I'm surprised the job is done already. It's so much smoother when the storage load is distributed.

edit: In a way I almost feel silly doing this DVD9 stuff because the 264 is going to blow it all away. A little bit of evolution and more reliable/stable tools and it's gonna' just blow everything else out of the water. I had an .mkv that was about 16 GB and put it through Handbrake. It produced a 5 GB .mkv and I couldn't tell the difference afa color, motion, anything. It looked just as good. Only thing it took about 4 hours to do it. A few more iterations of tools and an Octocore PC and I'll be rockin'!!

Innuendo · « **Reply #8 on:** April 12, 2010, 01:18 PM »

Last night I used DVD Rebuilder Pro (with HCenc) for the first time on my new PC. Coming from an old Prescott CPU I was amazed.

There were 8 (eight!) instances of HCenc running simultaneously chewing through that DVD like nobody's business. I'd tell you how long it took, but I forgot to look at the log when I was finished. I was still thunderstruck by how fast it all went.

Miles, I do agree all the 264 stuff is going to blow this DVD crap all the way, but I'm stuck with this and Divx till I can find a nice set-top box that can process x264 without keeling over from the load.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #9 on:** April 12, 2010, 04:28 PM »

Yeah, I have DVDRB Pro. It is nice to have an instance per core running. I like my WD set top box but the real piss off is they abandoned the 1st generation box(which is what I have) and pretty much said, "well, if the stuff you don't like ain't fixed in the Nov 2009 firmware update, guess you got to buy Gen. 2." That's really annoying.

One online user review claims the Gen 1 box has better upscaling of SD content(the user says he has both a gen1 and gen2 box to compare the output.) So I guess it's a mixed bag. The other thing, for these big video files, the next version has to support USB 3.0. Then I bet a lot of that audio out of sync and subtitle out of sync because you hit FF will go away. Maybe in a year or two it will be worth going with a new version of it, or another box.

I do have to say I was a bit surprised how good avi HD looks. Some 720P a bit over a GB for a 45 minute TV show looks crystal clear. The main annoyance there is the lack of subtitle support. It won't display AviAddXSubs type subtitles as a stand-alone divx dvd player will. You have to use external .srt or burn the subs in. And of course any non-text subs or PGS subs, well forget it!! I have to convert the PGS to .srt.

sajman99 · « **Reply #10 on:** April 12, 2010, 08:13 PM »

Quote from: Innuendo on April 12, 2010, 01:18 PM

Last night I used DVD Rebuilder Pro (with HCenc) for the first time on my new PC. Coming from an old Prescott CPU I was amazed.

There were 8 (eight!) instances of HCenc running simultaneously chewing through that DVD like nobody's business. I'd tell you how long it took, but I forgot to look at the log when I was finished. I was still thunderstruck by how fast it all went...

Wow, I was feeling pretty good today until I read that.

Seriously, there are many old comments still floating around about how slow HCenc is. To give credit where credit is due, the HCenc developer hank315 has really improved (in both speed and quality) his encoder in the last few years.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #11 on:** April 12, 2010, 08:48 PM »

Yup. Just back in the Feb. beta I noticed about a 5% increase in throughput over the previous beta. Plus the default is to run at idle priority. If you are leaving the machine to just process video you might as well bump it up to at least Normal setting.

Innuendo · « **Reply #12 on:** April 13, 2010, 04:31 AM »

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 04:28 PM

I like my WD set top box but the real piss off is they abandoned the 1st generation box(which is what I have) and pretty much said, "well, if the stuff you don't like ain't fixed in the Nov 2009 firmware update, guess you got to buy Gen. 2." That's really annoying.

The time has come to start looking for a replacement for my current set-top box for playing AVIs and the like. I guess WD is off the list if that's how they are going to treat their customers.

Quote from: sajman99 on April 12, 2010, 08:13 PM

Seriously, there are many old comments still floating around about how slow HCenc is. To give credit where credit is due, the HCenc developer hank315 has really improved (in both speed and quality) his encoder in the last few years.

At the risk of sounding like a video encoding snob, anyone who says HCenc is slow doesn't know the difference between an encoder and a transcoder. I won't bore everyone with technical mumbo-jumbo, but the long & short of it is that if one cares about video quality one encodes & doesn't transcode. HCenc is just as fast as any other encoder on the market (if not faster) while yielding results that are as good as (and often better) than its competition.

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 08:48 PM

Yup. Just back in the Feb. beta I noticed about a 5% increase in throughput over the previous beta. Plus the default is to run at idle priority. If you are leaving the machine to just process video you might as well bump it up to at least Normal setting.

And here my experiment was with HCenc left at the default idle priority & the default version that's installed with the latest DVD Rebuilder Pro. Guess I need to update HCenc as that version has to be over a year old that I was using.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #13 on:** April 13, 2010, 06:34 AM »

So far I've done 3 or 4 encodes with the new HC beta and haven't noticed anything weird with 2 pass. I only tried a single one pass job so not a fair test. But I suspect the Feb beta is faster. I think there were a lot of changes in this latest and it may have slowed it down some. It's tough to say though. Sizing down is always slower. A better test may be avi => dvd.

otoh so far the results are really good. So if it takes 4 hours instead of 3 but there's no stutter in the motion, then I'll do the 4 hour 2 pass.

Innuendo · « **Reply #14 on:** April 15, 2010, 02:21 AM »

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 13, 2010, 06:34 AM

So far I've done 3 or 4 encodes with the new HC beta and haven't noticed anything weird with 2 pass.

I've always done the 2 pass. Maybe I should try the 1 pass once and do a comparison.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #15 on:** April 15, 2010, 08:02 AM »

I suspect it will work better if there's a large range in the bitrate. Say average 4 or 5 thousand kbit, max 9000. If you try to do a 1 pass with average of 7 thousand kbit or higher it may spend longer than 2 pass trying to figure out how to portion out the bits. But a sample with medium bitrate and one with high should verify it.

sajman99 · « **Reply #16 on:** April 15, 2010, 08:17 PM »

The few times I've tested HC 1 pass, the sampling phase seemed to take so long it almost felt counter-productive. I *think* with this April HC beta more frames are added in the 1 pass sampling in the effort to increase accuracy.

If I had a brand spanking new PC + DVD Rebuilder Pro supporting multiple instances of HC, I wouldn't even bother to consider 1 pass.

However, I do recognize the HC 1 pass "guessing game" works pretty well most of the time. Even the predictive quantization mode in good 'ole FAVC worked quite well.

sajman99 · « **Reply #17 on:** April 15, 2010, 08:23 PM »

So what about the new optimized SSE version of HCenc?

Anybody experiment with that version? So far I've stuck with the standard version and haven't tested that so-called optimized version.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #18 on:** April 15, 2010, 11:35 PM »

I agree on the FAVC predictive method. I got good results. For some bizarre reason though, I kept getting incomplete muxes(not just with that but with anything FAVC.) Like, a 2 hour movie might end up being 1 hour 58 minutes. It was easy to miss unless I remembered to check it. Another motivation to do the steps by hand. Maybe my next conversion I'll try one of the HC optimized exes.

edit: not sure what's up with HCenc_024_SSE4.exe.
But the gui shows SSE4 not available on my quad core.
Maybe it's an Intel i7 only thingy?

In any case for the rest of it, the encoder, if set to Auto will use the most advanced optimization detected.
I'm not sure how much it gains you to explicitly set it, unless it avoids a branch in the code. Prolly something
to ask Hank on Doom9 forum.

Innuendo · « **Reply #19 on:** April 16, 2010, 02:13 AM »

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 15, 2010, 11:35 PM

edit: not sure what's up with HCenc_024_SSE4.exe.
But the gui shows SSE4 not available on my quad core.
Maybe it's an Intel i7 only thingy?

Your processor should support SSE4.1. Intel i7 processors support SSE4.2. I don't know if HCenc_024_SSE4.exe requires SSE4.2 or not.

Found this info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4

Wonder if the new HCenc beta (SSE4 or not) is drop-in compatible with DVD Rebuilder Pro? Anyone know?

MilesAhead · « **Reply #20 on:** April 16, 2010, 03:12 AM »

I haven't tried the new one but I did plunk in an 0.24 beta from last October instead of the 0.23 without a problem. I don't use DVD-RB much now since I have DVD9 burners. And if I do it's usually a quick squeeze with ReJig.

I would take a guess and say you could substitute it using standard 2 pass mode. Only way to know for sure is make a run. Only thing with DVD-RB it's tough to make a small test case since if it fits in a DVD5 it doesn't want to process it.

Innuendo · « **Reply #21 on:** April 16, 2010, 04:14 PM »

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 16, 2010, 03:12 AM

I don't use DVD-RB much now since I have DVD9 burners.

I don't think I have ever seen a burner (at least not for years and years) that could not burn a DVD9. I mostly go for DVD5s because the blank discs are exponentially cheaper than DVD9 blanks.

Quote

Only thing with DVD-RB it's tough to make a small test case since if it fits in a DVD5 it doesn't want to process it.

If it fits in a DVD5 already why would you want/need to process it? I've seen some retail movies that top out at 5.5-6.5 GB, though. They'd be an exellent small test case.

sajman99 · « **Reply #22 on:** April 16, 2010, 06:10 PM »

DVD Rebuilder Free (which I have) and DVD Rebuilder Pro work a bit differently, but I too would guess there's no compatibility issue updating the HC .exe.

I've found HCenc to be excellent at low bitrate encoding, and I've been able to put 2.5-2.75 hour retail movies on a DVD5. Granted I don't have a gigantic screen HD TV, but the HC encodes look very nice on my modest equipment.

Innuendo · « **Reply #23 on:** April 16, 2010, 11:56 PM »

Quote from: sajman99 on April 16, 2010, 06:10 PM

DVD Rebuilder Free (which I have) and DVD Rebuilder Pro work a bit differently, but I too would guess there's no compatibility issue updating the HC .exe.

I was fortunate enough to stumble across DVD Rebuilder before it hit v1.0 & Mr. Dobbs was generous enough to give anyone a Pro license with a contribution as little as $10. I jumped on it.

Quote

I've found HCenc to be excellent at low bitrate encoding, and I've been able to put 2.5-2.75 hour retail movies on a DVD5. Granted I don't have a gigantic screen HD TV, but the HC encodes look very nice on my modest equipment.

Same here...don't have an HDTV yet. Still waiting for the technological advances to stabilize a bit. Right now anything you buy is made near obsolete by the next year's models.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #24 on:** April 17, 2010, 12:02 AM »

If you have 8 cores then I guess it's "small" but to me a small test case is slicing off about 5 minutes of video and trying it. I haven't seen any development on DVD-RB in quite awhile. I think most people are just burning to DVD9. Seems Dobbs has moved on to BluRay.

If you get 'em from an online outlet like SuperMediaStore $1.33 ea for 8x DL isn't all that outrageous. Also if you start with an HD resolution .mkv most of the time you don't want to shrink down to DVD5. If you can get > 7000 kbit with HC 2 pass, then it looks fairly close to the HD source when upconverted.

Of course you could split to a pair of DVD5 to keep the bitrate. Whatever your preference. I recently did a pair of DVD9s more or less "by hand" since the flick was 3 1/2 hours and I didn't want to skimp on the bitrate.