Why are people still sticking to old and outdated technology?

[X10A_Freedom]

Crap, no rebooting because I don't think it told me to do so!

[Daiz]

The CCCP installation guide in the CCCP website says to reboot after uninstalling all previous codecs. I suggest that you uninstall everything again, reboot, and then install CCCP again, just to make sure everything works this time around.

Use the CCCP insurgent to make sure you have uninstalled everything before installing CCCP.

http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/ind...n_Instructions

[Meatrose]

It seems as if most people use MPC. Am I some kind of idiot since I'm using Zoomplayer for all formats except wmv? =P

[X10A_Freedom]

Thanks for the patience Daiz. Mp4s finally working...after 2 hours - which is why I'll never learn how to like new stuff!

[Access]

Originally Posted by Daiz

So fansub encoders, I suggest that you all start showing people what H.264 is truly capable of with
...
Also, discuss.

In 2000 it was divx311alpha/msmpeg-v3 which was a huge step up from the .rm and other predominant filetypes in use at the time. After that it was xvid and it took a few years for that transition. By 2003 BT came out so filesize was no longer a concern at all. Now it's this H-format and next year and the year after it will probably be something else. If every new format that comes out is a 'tech generation', sure there will be people that are always staying current with each new generation and always excited about the 'latest and greatest'. But there is another group of people who recognize the cycle, and are willing to skip one or two geneations it if they can live with the old stuff. With BT making filesize largely irrelevant, and fansubbers not really set up to care about non-watchers and "file collectors", the latter group is more prevalent than it used to be. It's not that they will never update or get current; they will, just after two or three new generations rather than one. 'Leapfrogging', rather than adopting every new tech that comes along right then and there.

This can be very easily compared to life in general. You have those people who will buy a new car every few years, new clothes every season, a new computer every year, the latest 'in' phone and other gadgets (iPods, digital cameras, etc.) Then you have those people who will only buy a new car when the old one breaks down and costs too much to repair, who will only buy a new computer when their old one is so outdated it can't run the current software well, who don't have to have the latest 'in' phone, clothing, or other gadgets.

Laziness isn't necessarily a bad thing. Having more leisure time means being able to do more of what you really want to do (less burnout, lower stress, etc.) Fansubbing is a hobby anyways. You don't necessarily have to be 'the best' in order to participate. You just have to be motivated enough to do 'something'.

[Daiz]

Access, well, the thing is, H.264 is obviously here to stay at least for the whole next generation of consoles/home electronics (since Blu-Ray and HD DVD both use H.264), so basically what we have here is a huge amount of big corporations standing behind H.264. It's obvious that it will grow and become the primary video codec quite soon. Besides, H.264 has been around for quite a time already, ever since year 2003, when "the final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed", as Wikipedia says.

It would be a whole different deal if it was some obscure format that only few people on the internet uses, but H.264 is literally BIG. It's not going to disappear in only few years. And nowadays there are many tools to work with H.264, and it's also going into hardware (latest Nvidia graphic cards performing H.264 decoding, for example) with a growing rate.

The H.264 generation is one of those generations that no-one should skip.

EDIT: Also, quoting from H.264 Wikipedia page: "An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems." In other words, H.264 aims to become the standard for multiple platforms, and this far it has reached iPods, PS3 & PSP, Blu-ray & HD DVD, YouTube and probably others that doesn't come to my mind at the moment. H.264 is already a lot more used than one would likely think.

EDIT 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Applications

[Skyward]

The transition from DivX to XviD wasn't nearly as profound as the move to h.264. Both DivX and XviD are 2 encoders for the same format, so the viewers didn't need to change much of anything to watch the newfangled XviD videos. Even the avi container didn't change during the transition, and most encoders encoded XviD videos so that they were perfectly compliant with DivX boxes. However, now that DivX boxes are more prevelent, there are more reasons for people not to convert.

While HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can both utilize h.264, the majority of them use VC-1 instead, though I don't know why. H.264 has not yet been adopted into flash for youtube etc., but the next version of flash player will introduce h.264 and AAC support for streaming video. You can get the beta for the flash h.264 player from adobe's website. With the flash h.264 release, they also plan on ditching the .flv file format in favor of mp4.

[jfs]

Originally Posted by X10A_Freedom

And MPC - didn't realise it was a hacked version of mplayer2.exe!

It's not.

Media Player Classic is a wholly different program, it is NOT a hacked version of anything.
It IS however made to look and feel as much like Windows Media Player 6.4 (aka. mplayer2.exe.)
Also, it is not "Windows Media Player Classic", just "Media Player Classic". (This one is pre-emptive.)

MPC is an open source application, although the original author seems to have abandoned it now.

[TheFluff]

go back to playback help you hopeless thread derailers, why does every h264 thread have to turn out like this

Originally Posted by Daiz

Where's my 120MB H.264 releases then? Haven't seen them around for SD series...

You obviously haven't looked hard enough, F-B does 120-140MB all the time, and I know of at least 2 series that were done at 85 MB/ep.
That being said most people are sticking to 170MB mostly because of force of habit it seems. Which is dumb but at this point I've pretty much given up on trying to educate people who don't want to be educated.

Originally Posted by jfs

I've said this several times before:
Why not use quality-based encoding for video? How many people *really* care about exactly fitting everything onto a DVD or stuff like that? If you like archiving fansubs for whatever reason harddisks are dirt cheap today already, and IMO much more reliable.
No, let's see some quality-factor based encoding and get sensible file sizes for everything. Let episodes that need low bitrate get low bitrate and those that need high bitrate get that.

Because there's a small but noticeable difference in quality between 2-pass and 1-pass quality based.
On the other hand it's perfectly viable to let episode sizes vary, but hey DVD-r's are pretty convenient for storing stuff on. If you're encoding DVD's though it's almost always a better idea to encode one DVD (2-3 eps) at once to a target size of 700MB or whatever floats your boat and split with mkvmerge later. Gives better bitrate distribution.

[Isariru]

I love MPC, it plays my videos superb and is a light weight program.

I tried the H.264 1280x720 encodes of Shakugan no Shana II subbed by Eclipse, and the audio can't seem to keep up with the video. That's because my pc is as good as a sack of garbage, 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4, 512 MB ram, Geforce 7600 GS 512 MB ram. I use CCCP and MPC, its like the first thing I install when I format my computer. I would like to switch to H.264 but I have this issue. I realize that not all H.264's are high res like that but when you see just XviD and H.264 sitting there as a option, you really have no idea what res its going to be if it doesn't state it. I don't want to risk downloading an entire anime series and find out my pc can't even run it properly. It's like wow, I wish I just downloaded the XviD version, and so thats why I stick to XviD, for now.

[Daiz]

Isariru, the solution is to get CoreAVC. It will significantly boost H.264 decoding.

Also, make sure that you have video output set to Overlay Mixer, and also allow MPC to take higher process priority from the options.

I don't even remember how many times I've given this exact help already...

[LS5]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

Because there's a small but noticeable difference in quality between 2-pass and 1-pass quality based.

That's not really an issue, because you can spend the time you gain from not having to do a pre-pass on slower x264 options.

[Isariru]

Originally Posted by Daiz

Isariru, the solution is to get CoreAVC. It will significantly boost H.264 decoding.

Also, make sure that you have video output set to Overlay Mixer, and also allow MPC to take higher process priority from the options.

I don't even remember how many times I've given this exact help already...

Works like a charm! Thanks! I'll be downloading H.264 versions from now on..

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by LS5

That's not really an issue, because you can spend the time you gain from not having to do a pre-pass on slower x264 options.

All real encoders use the slowest sane settings anyway, who cares about encoding times. :|
Also, things like adaptive quantization tends to work better with 2-pass.

[jfs]

Then do 2-pass but use the size of the video encoded during first pass to hint the final size of the encode instead of using a target bitrate. Or do "3 pass" where the first pass is really a CRF encode to measure the compressability.
(Still then, I remember pengvado once saying something about the difference in bitrate distribution between a CRF encode and a 2-pass encode targeting the same bitrate as the CRF turned out to be, would be almost identical. I should really dig it out of my #darkhold logs.)

[Access]

Originally Posted by Daiz

It would be a whole different deal if it was some obscure format that only few people on the internet uses, but H.264 is literally BIG. It's not going to disappear in only few years. And nowadays there are many tools to work with H.264, and it's also going into hardware (latest Nvidia graphic cards performing H.264 decoding, for example) with a growing rate.

That may be what people are saying now, but one or two years from now, a lot can change. Don't forget MPEG-1. In 1999 or 2000 that was the definitive format for anything 'high quality' (compared to .rm, .vivo, pre-divx3). MPEG-1, even variable bitrate and with B-frames, it was nearly universally supported on any platform, and many graphics cards of the time (or the immediate future) would have MPEG-2 playback hardware. But once divx311alpha became avaliable, and the tools like nandub to encode divx311alpha well, the venerable standard barely even put up a fight. It vanished in a matter of months, eclipsed by a non-standard, hacked alpha release of a format that even microsoft was trying to disown.

You mention things like "a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage". In it's time, MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2) had all those things also.

Don't get me wrong, if, in about 2-3 years, this H. thing does become some kind of definitive be-all, end-all standard, widely adopted with near-universal support, even the latter group who typically skips a generation or two will eventually switch to it.

Added: For people who weren't around back then, if you want an example of the quality the venerable MPEG-1 format was capable of, follow this link:
http://public.ezla.com.tw/MOETAN3/05.html
and download one of the videos there.

[Daiz]

Access, H.264 has been here for 4 years already, and it has been adopted for multiple platforms and is rapidly becoming the "end-all standard" for everything. Television broadcasting methods around the world are taking H.264 as the standard. Blu-ray and HD DVD have H.264 as the standard. Mobile platforms are taking H.264 as the standard. The internet in general is taking H.264 as the standard. Just look at the list of H.264 applications:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Applications

H.264 has already been widely adopted, the near-universal support isn't quite yet here, but it's coming very fast. And just lately, DivX Inc. bought MainConcept, one of the lead providers in H.264-technology, which just proves even more how H.264 will be The Standard.

http://www.divx.com/company/press/pr....php?pr_id=273

[Westlo]

Originally Posted by Daiz

Where's my 120MB H.264 releases then? Haven't seen them around for SD series...

Off the top of my head.. you can get 110-140 mb encodes of Baccano, Zero no Tsukaima, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Terra e, Kaze No Stigma & Night Wizard.

I'm sure there's more.

[Access]

No I hope you are right, I just wanted to point out how easily something like that can be eclipsed. If it becomes like what .jpg is for still images, I'll be just as glad as everyone else. I've always hated the propietary formats or the ones that require all this custom stuff; .rm, .vivo, quicktime, etc. The only thing I'd be antsy about is that 4 years means it might be out of date on a technical level, ie. eclipsed as MPEG-1 was by a more propietary, but 'better' (more compression, at least) codec. But it doesn't seem that way, judging from the level of compression and quality people are getting using it. Even if it did, I'd fall back earlier comments about BT and nearly universal broadband, once you get to something universal these days you shouldn't have to change, as long as that thing does the job for you. .jpg for instance can be outdone on a technical and compression level, but it hasn't been replaced and need not be.

[Zippicus]

I guess the biggest thing for me is that I can grab a new release in either xvid or h264 and not notice any difference in quality. Granted there probably is some difference, just not enough for me to notice or care about. I'm not really understanding the big concern here.