Poll - War of the Containers

[Orwell]

I'm pretty sure comprehension has a lot more to do with just my poor hearing, I wonder if only using sign language to communicate would help. Though, your post has some interesting things I may want to consider for my video.

[Fall_Child42]

Are you ready for a longpost(tm)?

etc...

This thread just got <a href=http://this.thread.justgotowned.com> Own3D.</a>

[CHAMELEON_D_H]

Short sumery post -
Container - ALL IN FAVOR of the new containers, and of them mp4 seems to be stronger
Codec - ALL IN FAVOR of h264
Audio - If it wasnt clear at the first time, I apologise. I meant Original 5.1 from DVD source, not 2.0 converted. That is just plain stupid. Most people seems to be in favor of dual audio stream.
Subs - Most people were in favor (5 of 7 by my count). Not only for kareoke, but for comments and transletions.

I hope many people would read this thread and decide to move to new technologies. Maybe someone will even write a guide and add them to Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a> *coughgetermactoitcough*.

[Coderjo]

Maybe someone will even write a guide and add them to Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a> *coughgetermactoitcough*.

Zero1 is working on an H.264 guide. Perhaps if we harrass him enough, he'll finish it up.

[Qyot27]

I'll definitely have to offer an x264 version of my next video, probably in an alternative container like OGM. No need for 5.1 audio or softsubs though (hardsubs, however, will be playing an important role).

It's been a while since I looked at the charts, but I don't think OGM even supports VFW-mode H.264, little less ISO-compliant streams of it.


Even though I'm a bit late, here goes nothing:

Containers - .MKV & .MP4 - Better than .AVI
Unquestionably. I prefer MKV, myself, partly due to the eccentricies of the setup I'm working on, and because I'd rather not have people complaining that Quicktime or Winamp doesn't play their video because MP4 is associated wrong or because it's either A) the wrong version of said programs or B) the encode uses features that the program doesn't support (in the case of QT). Most MP4 files I use are just simple audio, so I have them associated with Winamp (which I wouldn't use for video to save my life), which means that I have to go through the extra step of 'Right-click -> Open With -> Windows Media Player' if the thing has video in it.

Whether or not I choose MKV or MP4, those problems will still exist. At least with MKV there isn't ambiguity if it's video+audio or audio only (yes, I know about MKA just being a difference in extension, but it's the inverse of MP4 frequency - most MP4 files at the moment are audio only, probably not completely coincedentally due to the existence of the iTMS, whereas the majority of Matroska files contain video, not just audio).

Video codec - h264 - I'm all for qualty, and ready to run it
With the exception of botching up the first two distro encodes I made with it, and the weirdness I'm getting from my latest video's H.264 encode (which I have to research to find what was causing it - I'm thinking it had something to do with either the B-frame pyramid or the Mixed Refs), yeah. I've been using it almost exclusively since last July, I think, and off and on from the January prior.

For beta files and auxiliary encodes for releases I just didn't have the heart to release cold turkey, I do still use XviD, and it serves well in that capacity.

The only thing I have to figure out is how to balance quality, speed, and compatible setups. My computer is severely outdated by modern standards, so I have to be cautious about, primarily, bitrate, as otherwise it'll choke and lag if I try to play it back (heaven forbid I even try to play low bitrate files in Linux, though - I think part of it has to do with the mplayer version, though, or heftier hardware requirements to run it simultaneously with Gnome on my relatively archaic computer). If I can make it look good, start and keep up playback correctly, and be packed in under or equal to ~850kbps for the video stream, I'm good. All those things are also severely helpful in download times, storage space, and bandwidth consumption, so that's another plus.

(Although I do wish that XviD could expand into a full-fledged MPEG-4 Part 2 encoder rather than just Simple and Advanced Simple Profiles - I just would like a complete implementation, that's all. There is still, what, at least Core, Main, and High Profiles to cover, aren't there?)

Audio - 5.1 VS 2.0 - Bring it on (5.1) \ How can it be ".1"? \ Both
I was tempted to use the 5.1 track for a trailer project I haven't started yet, but most of the HD trailers from the Quicktime site use 23.98 instead of 23.976 and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to separate the channels, make it the correct framerate, normalize (optional, of course), and reencode, especially since AviSynth 2.56 can't handle outputting 5.1 apparently (or rather, I could figure all that stuff out, but there was no simple solution for it because of AviSynth's lack of handling 5.1 streams with the same ease as stereo/choking on trying to output to a 5.1 Wave file). So I just gave up on that, but if I didn't care so much about making the framerate easy for DVD authoring, I would have just left it alone and released the final product in 23.98.

Subtitels - I kareoke song all the time
I've used it in some capacity at this point, but softsubbing font and effect-laden kareoke is a resource hog like almost none other (again, at least on my computer). The times I've used softsubs, I've resorted to typing up an SRT script manually. I also usually put two subtitle tracks in - a dummy file with no text in it, and the real track - to get around the nasty tendency for DirectVobSub to automatically display the subtitles regardless of if they're supposed to be on or not. Putting the dummy stream in there also doesn't eat processes when you try to start up the video, and since it doesn't have anything in it, is invisible essentially. It also gives the user the option to select viewing the subtitles only if they want to at a later time, not because the subtitle filter forces them to automatically.