Messages

1

NWR Feedback / RE: Press Conference Videos

« on: May 16, 2004, 12:39:05 PM »

BTW, I often stick around a group of people who release high score replay videos. Many of them prefer to encode to 64kbps mp3, and it seems to sound just fine. By this standard, the PCM audio is over eleven times larger than it really needs to be.

I only proposed 96kbps to reduce the chance that someone would complain it'd offend their golden ears (some audiophiles take pleasure in being picky!).

2

NWR Feedback / RE:Press Conference Videos

« on: May 16, 2004, 12:29:58 PM »

Quote
and you're simply not going to save that much on 1 minute file.

You'll save exactly the amounts I said.

2 channels x 16-bit samples x 22050 samples per second * 69.8 seconds = 6.0 megabytes. That's the amount of space you're currently using on sound. If you want to be more precise, the amount you're using is 6,159,576 bytes, not counting AVI packet overhead

If you chose 96kbps mp3, the math is 96kbits/s*69.8 seconds= 837.6 kilobytes. Like I said, a savings of over 5 megs. Not small change by any means - the PCM is more than seven times larger.

I think you're underestimating just how massive PCM is compared to any reasonably modern lossy compression.  

3

NWR Feedback / RE: Press Conference Videos

« on: May 16, 2004, 11:03:26 AM »

The friend with premier says it's Premier Pro 7. Not sure if that helps.

Currently you're using about 5.9 megs on reasonable quality audio. You could get equal quality mp3 for about 0.6-1 megs, saving you 5 megs of filesize.  Unfortunately, the nature of PCM is such that "Compressing" PCM by lowering the samplerate is basically throwing away bits indiscriminately without regard to how they affect the fidelity, which is why the fidelity drops off so sharply.

The most tactful thing I can say is that I wouldn't consider using a product to create downloadable video if the product could only output PCM. But surely there's a way...

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NWR Feedback / RE: Press Conference Videos

« on: May 16, 2004, 10:20:16 AM »

I've never used Premier, but I just asked a guy who does.

He says: Go to export movie settings; go to audio. In compressor, choose mp3 as the codec.

In advanced settings, you can set the bitrate.

This will save you up to ~4 megs and let you keep better quality, so it's worth it.

The only time it's ever worth it to use PCM is if you absolutely do not care about space/bandwidth. If it matters even in the slightest, you can get better quality-per-byte from something like mp3.

5

NWR Feedback / RE: Press Conference Videos

« on: May 16, 2004, 08:55:25 AM »

XviD is better than most DivX implementations, but libavcodec's DivX implementation beats it IMO. XviD "cheats" a little by encoding too little info in the motion vectors and then making up for it with low quantization. The result is video that looks pretty good in still shots but has an unfixable muddy, "swimmy" look to it when it's in motion.  Ironically, this means XviD has poor fidelity on the low-frequency blocks -- yet these are precisely the macroblocks that can most easily be brought to high fidelity!

Anyway, both are great codecs but they will likely be entirely superceded by something like H264 someday...  

6

NWR Feedback / RE:Press Conference Videos

« on: May 15, 2004, 08:54:01 PM »

You'd probably consider the software I use to be user-hostile. It is mplayer/mencoder. This command-line video software is very popular among Linux users, mainly because it can play pretty much every media format out there.

For encoding, if you want divx in an AVI container, mencoder is a good choice. I use it mainly because you can do an absolutely insane amount of tweaking of encoding parameters, and every once in a while it is actually useful Also it has some decent filters, including a choice of deinterlace filters which usually do a much better job than the deinterlace filters the Windows crowd seems to be using.

In case you decide to download the win32 port of mencoder, here is a command line that'd probably do pretty well:

mencoder original.avi -vf lavcdeint -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=mp3:abitrate=96:mbd=0:v4mv:vlelim=-4:vcelim=7:precmp=2:cmp=2:mbcmp=2:cbp:trell:vbitrate=1400 -o finished.avi

You can probably see why some people don't use mencoder - it's a little complex and you have to learn a lot of options. These options should get it down to around 13.5 megs and I'm pretty confident it would look better than what you have now, mainly because of the deinterlacing.

7

NWR Feedback / RE: Press Conference Videos

« on: May 15, 2004, 05:56:05 PM »

Not compressing the audio is a massive space waster. You can save 4.5 megs on audio alone just by encoding to mp3 at a reasonable bitrate. ~96kbps mp3 would sound perfect to most non-audiophile people using ordinary computer speakers.

As for the video, it's always a good idea to use a deinterlace filter before encoding to an mpeg4 implementation (DivX is an mpeg4 implementation). It gives you a lot better quality per bitrate.

I realize I'm just some random guy to you, but if you'd be willing to spare the (admittedly humongous) bandwidth to let me see the source just once, I'm confident I can give you a file that's both several megs smaller and visibly better looking. If you're willing to believe this random guy has some experience with squeezing the best quality-per-bitrate out of interlaced content, let's work something out.

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TalkBack / RE: New Twin Snakes Movie

« on: January 15, 2004, 12:51:53 PM »

I see there's no longer any need, but for future reference, this is how to capture with mplayer:

mplayer mms://wm1.streaming.ne.jp/konami/mgs_tts_27min_j.wmv -dumpstream

By default it writes the a/v stream to a file called stream.dump. And probably I should have gone for the bittorrent option...

9

TalkBack / RE:New Twin Snakes Movie

« on: January 15, 2004, 01:36:56 AM »

Using mplayer, I have extracted the wmv file from the stream. It is about 120 megs in size. (Streaming media over the internet sure is a stupid idea, especially for such enormous files). My upload is capped around 128kbps so it would take at least a couple hours to send it to someone. I am willing to arrange to send it to someone who posts here, so long as that person is able to redistribute it to everyone else, or at least to give it to someone who'll redistribute.

Additionally, I'm willing to make a smaller, lower quality version. Reply here if interested.