Aluminum Studios returns

Castor Troy · Post by **Castor Troy** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:00 pm

Since a-m-v.org allows small amounts of html to be used in video descriptions, you can also have a link to the xvid codec download for people who don't have it.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:03 pm

Damnit, my changes didn't get saved across previews somehow.

Most people are sensible about this kind of stuff and don't distribute in 480p, but XviD can still take a sizable amount of CPU time to decode smaller files. I've also noticed that most people do not watch AMVs without doing something else on their computer, which eats into the available time even more. So software ubiquity isn't the only factor.

In spite of all this, though, I'd say just do DivX-compatible XviD. Computer power is easy to increase; quality is not.

aluminumstudios · Post by **aluminumstudios** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:09 pm

I would use divx compatible Xvid without any exotic features enabled. My system has issues with xvid files that are "xvid" but I haven't encounterd such problems with divx compatible ones, even if Divx5 or ffdshow is decoding it.

And I do agree about larger CPU usage, one reason I always used MPEG1 in the past was that it usually played back problem free - I don't want people to see my videos studdering, getting out of sync, or havig other issues caused by the codec.

I usually encode at a size a little below 480 because of the amount of motion and scene changes AMVs have, at that frame size the bockyness will detract from it's quality more IMHO than a little loss of sharpness from a smaller frame size.

Trythill, what do you use to play Xvid or MPEG4 variants on Linux?

Atvaark · Post by **Atvaark** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:14 pm

trythil wrote:On the other hand, I've been able to choke a P4 @ 1.7 GHz playing back a 704x480 XviD file. It wasn't an encoding error; rather, it was because

(1) XviD decoding is more processor-intensive
(2) the P4 was busy with other tasks
(3) the P4 architecture sucks

Yeah, I guess the third point is the most important, cause I've no or little trouble viewing such large XVid movies on my 550 MHz PowerPC G4.

Otohiko's Wasteland is a 720x400 XVid, and on average I've still got 10% available CPU while playing it. The G4 is sometimes amazing. (Otohiko's Wasteland too !

)

(OK, no post-processing... I'll have to wait for a G5...

)

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:18 pm

aluminumstudios wrote: Trythill, what do you use to play Xvid or MPEG4 variants on Linux?

I've used mplayer 1.0-pre3 to play back MPEG-4 video streams. Admittedly, many of those said streams have been either XviD or DivX-compatible XviD, but mplayer has handled every stream I throw at it perfectly.

IIRC mplayer uses libavcodec as its underlying video decoding engine, so it performs on par with DirectShow filters such as ffdshow.

mexicanjunior · Post by **mexicanjunior** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:37 pm

Sounds like a cool idea Will, I look forward to the finished project.

aluminumstudios · Post by **aluminumstudios** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:20 am

I so want to finish the video I'm working. I'm really having a blast editing it and can't wait to show it to people. I can't help but hype it up with screen shots a bit. I want to hold back though and be in the crowd at some con when it shows before I put it on-line ... but it's though waiting. Most of the video attempts to be artistic and uses animated and cg'ish stuff, but it does have this one scene in it of an anime character wakling down a street in Toronto (I took the picture in the bg: http://www.aluminumstudios.net/niea/modern_girl.jpg

You have quite an extensive list of videos on your hard drive, a number of mine are there, <Japanese accent>lucky!</japanese accent>

I need to get to bed! Peace.

Daio Kaji · Post by **Daio Kaji** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:33 am

aluminumstudios wrote:You have quite an extensive list of videos on your hard drive, a number of mine are there, <Japanese accent>lucky!</japanese accent>

yeah, there's no way i could keep all those vids on my hard drive, i've deleted more videos than i can remember because of low-disk space

i've only recently obtained a burner so that wasn't an option a few yrs back
i bought another 40 gigs of memory, and i'm still deleting, damn this obsession, DAMN IT ALL!!! [goes n' dls naruto/evanescence video, heh heh.. pst-'Ice and Mist' heh heh]

aluminumstudios wrote:I need to get to bed! Peace.

... and i was gonna tell you just how sexay that new version of Adolescense is too, well ppl will read and u'll be back... u always come back... duh, it's ur thread

the video quality is super clean, and actually, it plays much BETTER than the old mpeg, when i want to skip to the middle of the video for whatever reason, the old video used to take like 2 secs to catch up, but this new one gets to the spot instantly

, tis very nice
Xvid gets

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:43 am

aluminumstudios wrote:Most of the video attempts to be artistic and uses animated and cg'ish stuff, but it does have this one scene in it of an anime character wakling down a street in Toronto (I took the picture in the bg: http://www.aluminumstudios.net/niea/modern_girl.jpg

I notice you have a bit of green screen showing there. If you have after effects 6, the keylight filter is absolutely awesome at getting rid of all of the green screen. If not, you can fix it fairly easily by going over the edge in photoshop with a white or black brush with the overlay mode set to color.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:52 am

aluminumstudios wrote:Most of the video attempts to be artistic and uses animated and cg'ish stuff, but it does have this one scene in it of an anime character wakling down a street in Toronto (I took the picture in the bg: http://www.aluminumstudios.net/niea/modern_girl.jpg

DUDE, a Mercedes-Benz C-series in the background... I want one

(j/k, it looks great!)