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M$ and other Stuff.
2005-10-13 16:17:26
I always assumed "Microsoft" is the description of the brains of the poeple working there - very, very small and soft (readers excluded ;) ). Now I got the final proof: Out of couriosity I was running the sytem monitor while working at my comp, to see how much processor load is caused by by different activities. Since my last vid is played by WMP only with 19 fps, but in MPlayer it runs smooth, I compared both. Like expected, WMP caused 100% load. Calculating the fact that it runs 19fps instead of 24 means it would require around 130% of the power of my CPU. For MPlayer I expected between 60% and 80% CPU load. But it never got higher than 2%!!!!! That's a difference!
My plans to replace the DVD2AVI dv2 output in SmartRipper with the DGIndex output got an kickback. Neither Smartripper nor DGIndex was made with gcc and g++. Smartripper was made with Borland C++ Builder, and DGIndex with MS Visual C++. That' not good, because I have none of them at home and I dont want to spent money for that less amount of effort I can save with combining them. At work I have only Visual C++. So it would be better if it was vice versa. There is only the little hope that a conversion is possible. But my experience say usually that needs as near as much effort like writing it completly new.
One of the journals I read regularly seemed to be thoughtfull and sensible in the beginning. But with the time it turned out to be only full of self-pity. Maybe I'll delete her from my buddy list. - Motivation issues. 2005-10-12 15:40:31 In the moment I do more preparations than really working on project "Secret". On one side I have actually not much motivation to work on it. On the other hand I will make sure that it becomes high quality. So I playing around with different compression methods and options to ensure a high quality output of the final result. And I try to improve the footage to work with via AviSynth. With success! But now I encounter a new problem: My computer is too weak. So I'm working on an upgrade. A new CPU is already ordered. It'll bring as twice as much calculating power than my recent one. Now I'm hunting at ebay for a cheap large HD. Today I missed a good deal, my bid arrived one or two seconds too late. :(
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Strange!
2005-10-09 14:14:36
Out of couriosity I tried to compress with WMV9, and I was surprised by the results. Not only that I found no difference to DivX at high bitrates, at very low bitrates the result of WMV looked better than the DivX compressed one. I think that we see so many bad looking WMV files is the result of the M$ WMM. The export wizard of MovieMaker offers the option "Best Quality" (or something similar). But at this option a 640 x 480 file is stored only with 690 kBps. So they cheat at the people, because there are 2 options for saving as WMV which offer better Quality: 1.5 MBps and 2.1 MBps. People should use the last option.
An article in a computer magazin about BIOS tweaking made me check my own computer. My BIOS settings were OK, but I found a fault in the device manager settings of Win2K. The manufacturer has set the transfer mode for the DVD drive and the CD burner to PIO mode, but both can run DMA mode. Correcting this accelerated my DVD remarkable. Before it had only double speed, now it has nearly 6 times speed. In the future I can rip much faster. :)
Since I have no DVD burner I tested burning a Mini DVD (It's a CD with DVD structure). It worked in my DVD player. But the vid was remarkable cropped at the left side. I have no idea if it always happens if I watch DVD's or if it's because I burned it as NTSC, which the player had to transform to PAL: -
I got it!
2005-10-04 16:34:15
Finally I got AviSynth to work fine on the Noir DVD's. First of all I figured out that the crappy output if I simply frameserved to VDM had to do with the YUV->RGB conversion. VDM treated the AviSynth input as non-interlaced source and made the conversion wrong. After letting AviSynth make the conversion with the option interlaced=true I got as good looking output as with the direct vob import of VDM. Encouraged by this, I tested the deinterlacing of AviSynth. And voila, with Telecide and Decimate I got completly deintelaced footage. A job, which the 3:2 puilldown removal of VDM didn't do. It needed always additional deinterlacing. In my earlier tests I used Telecide and Decimate too, but got crappy results. I have no idea why. Maybe it's because I used a dv2 file produced by SmartRipper.
SmartRipper produces a DVD2AVI 1.76 compatible dv2 files. Since SmartRipper and DGIndex are open source, I'll try to implement the DGIndex routines in SmartRipper. By doing that I'll fix some bugs, like that it shows 25fps for 29.97fps footage.
Getting AviSynth satisfying to work means I have to make all the clips for project "Secret" again. Because Noir is hybrid source, some of the clips are too short and fast now. And of course, the IVTC'ed result looks better than the clips with interpolated frames. -
Confused!
2005-09-29 16:29:56
Today I tried the first time to use DGIndex and DGDecode to frameserve with AviSynth. Last time I used Mpeg2Dec3dg and a .dv2 file which was produced by SmartRipper. I compared the output with the one if I opened the .vob direct with VDM. What I told last time, that the colors look colder if you apply filters in VDM seems to be correct, the AviSynth output looks the same. It seems to have the same quality.
But than I noted some strange things. The AviSynth output showed interlacing where the VDM output hadn't. And the frame counter/time stamp was higher for the AviSynth output than for th VDM one. So I opened the same episode with AviSynth and the .dv2 file from SmartRipper. The first surprise: I noted no quality difference. So I have to do the comparisons with the same episode again where I noted the crappy AviSynth output. The second surprise: While the framecounter was the same like in VDM, the timestamp showed a time different to both others.
The problem with the use of the Smartripper .dv2 was the easiest to find: SmartRipper made a mistake and marked it 25 fps instead 29.97 fps. The other thing was harder to find. It was hidden in the last remark of the DGIndex .dv2 file:"FINISHED 33.79% FILM" It's hybrid footage, and AviSynth seems to convert them to 29.97 fps. That's what the additional interlacing came from. And maybe that's the reason why VDM couldn't remove all interlacing with 3:2 pulldown removal. And it explains something that I encountered as I started to use the US-DVD's for "Noir - Episode#25". Some scenes had been around 24% shorter than the same PAL scenes. This had been Film scenes, which had been treated as 29,97 fps
With this experience, but after doing some more tests, I probably have to redo all the clips for Project "Secret". :(
JOURNAL: Keeper of Hellfire
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