VC-1 ever?

[stockstar1138]

and this is why people think we are dorks, because we spend time on the interent arguing about two things that look IDENTICAL (when encoded at high bitrates).

[dk3dknight]

Originally Posted by stockstar1138

and this is why people think we are dorks, because we spend time on the interent arguing about two things that look IDENTICAL (when encoded at high bitrates).

Because we are geeks thus must protect what things we keep holy, and those are beliefs, formats, OS types, browsers, codecs, and file types.

And we must all fight to the death to prove that ours is better...

Another example of normal human behavior... (writes down in little notebook)

[Anthony P]

Not sure why people keep mentioning Amir. I know he was the sales rep on AVS for it. I realize what he says has to be taken with a grain of salt (look at my sig for goodness sake ). When i mentioned AVS in my original thread I was talking in generality among regular members who compared movies on both codecs (same format).

but most of the people that used to do that have left AVS and those that remain don't tend to do it there any more (i.e. will stay out of such discussions because the fan boys ruin intelligent discussion). All that are left are the fanboys that say Xis better and if asked why, because there is a consensus when in reality it is that most of the knowledgeable people have given up and decided it is not worth it because you can't teach a sheep that feels like religiously following someone who is there to misinform them.

Competition is what fuels progress, it would only make all products better.

funny that you say that when someone sais they should only use AVC, but you started this thread because they should only use VC-1

But lets not pretend Sony is an angel as well (rootkits, DVDs which wont play on their own players due to over the top DRM).

wow an attack on Sony, how original. Can you tell me what Sony has to do with CODECs?

PS you see you are the perfect example why AVS went down hill, you try and preach that VC-1 is the only good CODEC and then when people disagree and show why what you believe and say is wrong (guys like Max that work in the business) you start your BS and go on irrelevant tangents (like Sony is evil)

[WickyWoo]

I find it ironic that someone who's sig is:

Listen to the facts, not the company trying to sell you the product.

Is here repeating the same talking points that came from the man who repeatedly lied, cheated and slandered people to sell his product

SHIELD check your PMs

[Anthony P]

While I'm sure there were. I would strongly argue against it being overrun by such people.

but you are one of them, obviously you wouldf not notice

Most people there are just normal well adjusted consumers who like AV.

but that is exactly what is wrong, who wants to go to an AV site with normal well adjusted consumers. I want to go to a site with insane overly obsessive people like myself someone talking with people that over analyze everything AV related that look at movies with a microscope and strain to hear and demand the highest quality sound they can afford. The guy that is happy with VHS and only sais stupidities like VC-1 is the best CODEC so all studios should use it because he read it on a forum from someone that also does not know or care that read it from a post from somoene that does not care..... that read it from someone with an agenda to con these idiots into pushing his product

[Anthony P]

No idea what you're talking about. But i think I agree. If I'm understanding you right. Ill use my Tetris analogy again, the blocks will always be the same shape. You can just get better at stacking them.

ould not be the analogie I would go with, but yeah I think you understand what I am saying

FGT was mandatory since 2006 I thought? The decoders aren't going to change if that's what you're implying.

no, FGT is optional on AVC (I think VC-1 as well), in 2006 Toshiba made it mandatory on all HD DVD players which was how they talked RCA/Thompson into supporting them with the few players they affixed their label on.

If the Samsung you're talking about is the BD-01200 I thought it was an issue w/ BD+. Or the BD-01000 which had a busted scaler chip. Neither of which have anything to do w/ the decoder. The decoder is hardware not software.

everything is SW, and if the scaler chip was busted how did they fix it with a FW upgrade? I did not need to bring my player anywhere, I just put a disk in the player and it was fixed

no codecs can't change. codecs are like math; they are what they are. Encoders can improve they efficacy in which they compress data into the codec. But codecs don't change

agree that the CODEC does not change (wasn’t that my #1 in the first post) but it is not the efficiency of the encoder becomes more efficient it is that people change what compressions are less objectionable.

& the question isn't what possible reasons would they have not to use VC-1 in the future; but rather why aren't more using it now.

because even if one omits the politics (why pick DTHD/ DTS-HD MA they are both lossless so there should not be an audible difference) there is no such thing as a better CODEC now, past or future. It depends on what result you want, what encoder you have access to and what you will encode.

Which wouldn't be possible without the technology to run them. Some things just aren't technically feasible on certain platforms. You think an Apple II would be able to run even a simple photoshop filter? No, because it's constrained by it's physical limitations. With the amount of data involved & amount of computation involved in HD video it's even more present. It's not just a matter of how long it takes, but if it's even possible on said hardware. It has to look at all the information at the same time, if it can't remember the information it needs to compare it cant make the comparison.

it is not that I fully disagree, obviously the CPU in a 5 year old cell phone would not even be able to play back the movie, but that is not what we are talking about, A encoder will never need more then a few seconds of video , the advances in computation power help, for instance, in being able to make a one pass encoder instead of a 2 pass encoder, it helps make a real time encoder… but the way the encodes become better is because someone analyzed a few videos and asked a few people and saw that (for example) people don’t like banding in large areas but they don’t care as much if you remove grain, so the next revision (encoder) will give up more grain for less banding and when people see less banding they say it “looks better” and the encoder/CODEC improved. There is no fairy dust in all this, unless it is lossless and extremely high BW the only thing you do is sacrifice some information for some other one and that comes from new algorithms.

Actually it's more than just block sizes, AVC & VC-1 can display rectangles and corners as well. & your argument is ridiculous; what movie would that be exactly? & a millionMbps isnt enough for a screen of basically static? I think you're grasping at straws here. MPEG-2 is outdated & inferior in every way.

did I say it was only block sizes? You said an AVC/VC-1 encode will always be better then MPEG-2, that is not true. MPEG-2 is obviously not as good as AVC or VC-1 in general terms it is much older and many years of MPEG-2 usage went into creating AVC and VC-1, and like you pointed out MPEG-2 is at the kermnal of both these newer CODECs, the difference is that they sacrificed some of MPEG-2 how efficient it is at 8block size so that they can use more of them and have the image look better. I just gave a precise counter example that you can create if you are about knowledge and not just a fanboy and see for yourself. It is also not the only one. If AVC/VC-1 need a few more mbps to get it to the same point as MPEG-2 then it would also need a few more for something where they can use their better techniques. Is it artificial? Yes but it is a point that it is not a fact that in all cases for the same quality AVC/VC-1 can do it at lower BW.

[Neo65]

The thing about codecs is that besides the technical comparisons, there is the political and business aspects.

Technically, AVC with HighProfile and CABAC can be shown to be marginally better than VC-1. AVC can also be run with RDO on, which runs many times slower, but is a brute force way to exhaustively run through all the different ways to compress and pick the best one.

VC-1 otoh, requires less cpu power to run.

As for the political and business aspects, there are advantages of the world choosing a standard, if we look through the broadcast world, AVC (h.264) is already picked as the codec to replace MPEG2. If both ASCII and EBCDC had to be supported on all PCs, it would increase the complexity of the first PCs. But there were good business reasons for MSFT to push WMV9 (VC-1) --- it wasn't clear what royalties would look like for PCs supporting h.264, but once a cap was introduced, it was very clear that MSFT lost interest in funding the development and their engineers were otherwise deployed within the company. (IE: as a company, MSFT no longer funds VC-1 ).

Outside of Blu-Ray, today, other than in initiatives funded by Microsoft, VC-1 is a dead codec.

From camcorders to cell phones to satellite, cable, the replacement for mpeg2 is h.264.

All variants of DVB, DVB-S, DVB-T, 3GPP have decided on AVC their next gen codec. All of Europe (Spain, France, UK, Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden etc) have already picked AVC, in the rest of the world, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, Korea have announced their plans for AVC.

NATO and US DoD have also standardized on AVC as their preferred codec.

In the US, DirectTV, Dish have all announced their AVC plans. ATSC allows both AVC and VC-1 to be used, but it is expected that only AVC will be deployed as local stations can't find any real time VC-1 encoders (noone will build them) while AVC equipment and chips can be found easiy. It is expected that VC-1 will be ignored for ATSC once they switch from mpeg2.

AVC is already the next format to replace MPEG2. And, if you check pir*tebay, it's pretty obvious that hd streams have all gone avc.

So, that is why companies don't want to invest any more R&D on VC-1.

[Anthony P]

Actually it also means absolute authority

yes and no. Omnipotent comes from Omni=all Potent=power, and means all powerful. It can be absolute authority, but authority as in "do what you want" and not authority as in knowledgeable on a subject. So you could say "in medieval times the king was omnipotent in his realm because he had absolute authority and could change the laws to fit his whims even if they contradict each other" but you can't say
"people today would consider Galileo as omnipotent on astronomy for his time because he was the person that understood the astral bodies the most at the time."

For someone who preaches against an agenda so much, you sound like you have one yourself; or a vendetta at least.

Agenda? maybe I want the best PQ and AQ and I hate people who are purposefully trying to mislead or who are gullible and get annoyed when the facts contradict them. As for vendetta not at all. I used to love AVS and I learned much from there, but AVS has deteriorated over time and the truth is there is no vendetta but a real sadness. I loved that people used to say that on AVS people would rather discuss technology and spend hours tweaking the system instead of watching movies, because it was true that was what AVS was all about. On the other hand now people say that AVS is the biggest joke where a bunch of people that don't care and don't know about AV agree on stuff that don't make sense and the sad part is that again it is true. Many here where long time members that just got fed up being on AVS and having to deal with BS on a constant basis, and you might think this applies to this site but I know many that left for other sites. What I hate most is that the old AVS is gone (for enthusiasts) and there is no one site that has managed to take its place, so now I am a member of a few sites, most with mostly good people.

because ad hominems aren't effective (or polite) in any meaningful discussion.

there you go again using a word you don't know what it means ad hominem is an argument against the person. For example calling someone an a$$ is not an ad hominem, it is just vulgar, and discussing some of the members on some other site is neither (unless someone realizes it is a good description of himself). An ad hominem would be the argumentative equivalent of something like racism. You forget what the person said and you try to discredit his point because of generalized irrelevance.

For example:
Joe says “if we assume killing people is bad then an abortion should be bad because if you remove a fetus from the mother a few months early it can still survive, so a fetus is human before it comes out from the mother at child birth.”
Mark responds “you are Catholic and the Pope says that abortion is bad so you think abortion is bad”

Being Catholic is not a bad thing, it is not negative in any way, but Joe’s argument against abortion had nothing to do with Catholicism, and Mark is using it as an excuse to avoid Joe’s argument and to try and discredit the point he was making.

x264 is not h.264 & not AVC. If x264 was part of BD's standard then there would be no disputing what the best codec is. But it's not. & no VC-1 has a different encoder, but the h.264 encoders in that test are the same ones hollywood uses.

so you are saying the person that created this did not know what he was doing since he put it under "H.264/AVC-Codecs", or even these guys

but the h.264 encoders in that test are the same ones hollywood uses.

so can you tell me which one in the test is the Toshiba encoder? I know for a fact that it is the one used by Paramount for their HD DVDs it was part of their deal?

[DrXym]

The quality of VC-1 and AVC is largely a function of the encoders used for the job. Crappy encode == crappy picture. Quick illustration - run the same movie through x264 first in single pass mode and then in double pass mode. Witness how terrible the former looks compared to the latter. Same codec, same disk space, just one looks noticeably worse than the other because the tool wasn't prevented from analysing the movie first.

You'd even see differences running the same movie through Nero vs x264 with the same settings and file size.

I doubt it makes much difference for BD50 what codec is chosen, so long as the encodes are high quality, multiple pass efforts. Even some of the MPEG-2 encodes hold their own to VC-1/AVC even in mouse over comparisons. Maybe its simply the case that Warner and others are happy with the output they're getting with their VC-1 tools so why bother to change? Of course as time goes on the number and sophistication of tools for H264 is going to increase which may make them switch at some point.

I doubt very much that it matters to consumers which is chosen just as long as the picture looks as good as it can. After all, both formats are mandatory in Blu Ray, so does it matter that much? Maybe someone like Warner should do an experiment and release a less prominent movie in both formats using the same space constraints - 50% VC-1 and 50% AVC. Let the boards fight it out to see which is best.

[WickyWoo]

Maybe someone like Warner should do an experiment and release a less prominent movie in both formats using the same space constraints - 50% VC-1 and 50% AVC. Let the boards fight it out to see which is best.

Bad Santa has 1 AVC, 1 VC-1 for the 2 seperate cuts, I don't know if all things are equal though