Racism? In MY Media Player? It’s More Likely Than You Think
Normally I am fairly lazy when it comes to muxing anything I encode, I have some shellscripts that do everything I need. After my CPU fiasco the other day, I have been rather edgy about what I do on my system, so a bunch of things I normally have open are being closed while I encode, with the encode being run in a screen session in case X dies on it due to RAM abuse or something. One thing I did was stop using my muxing script as well, although I don’t really see why anymore, I figure I had a reason at some stage. Yesterday, I used MKVMergeGUI (mmg) to mux an encode, and today, another. Because my script normally sets some things forcibly, it didn’t occur for me to double check it in mmg. This was when I found out the horrible truth: Several popular media player are racist against certain mimetypes.
Is there even a word for mimetype discrimination? I can’t think of one, but I’m sure Darkhold will if I cared to ask. Now, anyone who has experience with muxing fonts for soft subtitle styling will know that you have to be picky with what mimetype mkvmerge or whichever other muxer you choose to use writes in for each font. The works-for-everything mimetype is application/x-truetype-font, however by default, opentype fonts get written in as application/vnd.ms-opentype and some others get even stranger. From what my brief testing showed, MediaPlayer Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC) works correctly regardless. ZoomPlayer and MPlayer seem to break on that but are fine with the general application/x-font or application/x-truetype-font. VLC breaks on everything besides application/x-truetype-font, and it seems gstreamer based splitters/players will fallback to the font file extension to get it right, which is interesting as normally gstreamer Does It Wrong(tm).
I did find however that mplayer is able to link back into the system fonts if it cannot find what it needs. This made testing a bit annoying but once I had spoken to Greg, the lead libass developer, everyone became clear. So in summary, always mux your fonts as application/x-font to ensure it works correctly on all good players, even if they are discriminatory against your native mimetypes. Chances are I am the only one who would ever forget this anyway, but it’s always good to point things out to people who don’t know.
Bonus Points: Find my discriminatory comment in this post.
The Only People Dumber Than The Scene Are The Industry
Long time since I’ve last posted as there is so much fail around I couldn’t think of anything special, but today I came across some comedy gold relating to video processing and encoding. I was speaking to a friend in The Video Industry this afternoon about why the hardware encoders we use suck. Now ‘Steve’ likes to think he knows a fair bit about things, as do most other video authoring type people. Unfortunately for them, they only really know the TOOLS they use, and not all that much about the content they work with.
Steve was telling me that his new IVTC machine is super awesome and capable of matching with the current, previous, and next frames unlike his old one that only did c/n matches. It’s all cutting edge in the industry apparently. He has declared that he can now compete with my own IVTC stuff now, except on a few really tricky clips we get from DVD imports. He still has no idea how I do it he says, but eventually he’ll beat me. I didn’t comment on tritical’s excellent TIVTC filters for avisynth doing what his expensive machine does for the past 6 years, or my own usage of YATTA, an extreme manual IVTC application.
Steve then gave me another GEM of wisdom. Apparently the latest AVC encoding hardware boxes have some really cool shit called FMO that my beloved x264 doesn’t have. I recalled speaking to Jason Garret-Glaser from the x264 project a while ago about the feature, where it was pointed out that FMO is only used in the extended AVC profile, which barely anything plays and nothing encodes fully anyway. What all the hardware DOES have though is pretty much everything that is stupid about AVC, and nothing that is good. x264 has CRF. I don’t even care about other features. CRF makes me happy every day. 2-pass encoding is stupid. The hardware boxes I have used all just pick a bitrate somewhat arbitrarily and then encode with it on a 2-pass program. They don’t have any fancy RDO or magic-block trees like x264, and they certainly don’t have the speed. If x264 had full BD standards support I don’t see the industry using shitty hardware and proprietary applications when they don’t have to, certainly not in small studios.
I think the point I am trying to make is that the industry relies too much on what it is TOLD is better as opposed to actually going out and evaluating different things. Quite a lot of free applications for various things insanely better than their professional adversaries. Sometimes, I hate working with these people, and at others I love the confused looks I get for using some obscure free software to do a job faster and better than their beloved machinery.
On the Topic of Stupid
“If I master a movie with Windows Movie Maker and I burn it to a DVD-R as a DVD, how can I get it back onto the computer?”
…was the question that I was just asked. Besides the stupidity of using WMM, what really got to me here was the way he tried to sound so knowledgeable about the topic. I would imagine that if he was able to encode the thing, he would have a copy already on his computer, but apparently not. Short post that isn’t really important but is just a minor vent about encoders being retarded.
In that regard, a Certain Man in Sydney that I will not name has gone and shown himself to be just as stupid as I suspected by going on about how great encoding on servers is. Sure it’s faster on the upload and possibly on the processing depending on the gear, but that doesn’t make it better. For one thing, CLI encoding is almost impossible to watch over and ensure quality on. YATTA isn’t exactly made for server use either. Fuck you, CommieSubs, for bothering to put out shit when all you do is kill the scene.
Goddamnit, Siren, Madman, AUSTRALIA IN GENERAL: FUCK
I have grown sick and tired of shoddy products in the Australian DVD market. I have been a long time advocate of supporting Madman for the most part (the anime club at my university frequently works with Madman) however I always suggested people stay the fuck away from their DVD’s. I am of course talking about PAL conversions. OH NOES PEOPLE STILL USE PAL BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE FANCY LCD’S OR PLASMA’S? YES, INORITE? I LOL’D TOO.
Recently, Siren have licensed two series over here, The Tower of Druaga, and Genius Party. When Jon first approached me about Siren being interested in doing their PAL conversion right, I was pretty happy, “Finally,” I thought, “someone is doing it right!” Turns out I was dead wrong. About a week ago, I got an email from Jon, with a link to this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the page as it was last week, however since I replied to the email, it’s been changed drastically. I was informed last night that I have now royally pissed off Siren’s authoring house, to which I just lol’d. Here are some of the gold statements that the page had up, as quoted in my email.
We could use clever software and hardware to merge the frames, keeping the overall fps speed. This method, technically called field interpolation, is best used when the original source is a ‘true’ NTSC original and the picture motion is present in ALL the frames (relatively rare in anime). This can give very good results when handled carefully.
Well, I guess if the original source is 24fps and you like ghosting, it’s not too bad. I don’t see how this works at NTSC though, as you’d be DROPPING frames, not interpolating, what?
Another, more preferable way would be to re-create the 24 fps version and then play this, sped up, to PAL frame rates. Although speeding up might sound like a horrific thing to do to your film it is actually the best looking method, an industry standard procedure for motion pictures and can often end up being better than the original! It’s worth noting you have to handle the audio very carefully to correct the pitch (our authoring house uses high quality DIRAC processing).
Speeding up is better than ghosting fo’ sure, but it’d change the runtime. I guess if you fix the sound it’s not too bad an idea.
Finally we could use last method, called ‘Inverse Telecine’, but only in the event we are working with true true 24 fps originals.
Wait wait wait wait wait WHAT? So, telecine involves taking a video, and interlacing it with successive frames in a pattern to artifically simulate a higher framerate. So, for example, with 24->30 fps conversion (2:3 pulldown) one would be duplicating 1 frame in every 4 to make it 5. There is an excellent graphic on Wikipedia of it that I can’t be bothered linking here. So, if I understood Siren’s authoring house here, they are planning to INVERSE telecine, the process of matching the fields and decimating the duplicate frames, in a way to UP the framerate? Does that sound retarded to anyone else? I thought so.
Apparently, I am a noob that needs to read wikipedia more, which is awesome as my email QUOTED wikipedia for like 1/3 of it. So, for anyone in Australia that wants quality anime, or any international films really, I urge you, BOYCOTT SIREN AND MADMAN. Demand Blu-Ray 1080p24, demand no upscales, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE RELEASES AT THE FRAMERATE OF THE ORIGINAL ANIMATION. It’s NOT hard to do, and these companies are fucking you over with inferior products. Anyone with a TV capable of playing anime/film at this resolution will have an LCD or Plasma, which are all capable of multiple framerates, so there is nothing to stop releases at FILM rather than PAL or NTSC. With DVD’s, it’s a bit harder, but I see no reason to not release at 24FPS, unless people have ancient TV’s, in which case some sort of soft telecine could be set up or some shit.
So, how do other people think we should be getting PAL from FILM/NTSC? Keep in mind the material these companies get sourced from Japan is telecined NTSC, so it’s 30FPS after pulldown, and 24FPS natively. Speedup is one way, 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown is another. One could interpolate as well I guess. There are a few ways, what do the 4 people that might actually read this think?
DISCLAIMER: almost all 24/30FPS mentions in this post are referring to these rates with 1% slowdown, that is, 23.976FPS and 29.970FPS. I also would have pasted my entire email but didn’t feel it necessary, given it was sent to Siren.
Matroska Attachment Scripting
Earlier today, martino asked in #darkhold about extracting large ammounts of fonts and other attachments from mkv files. Noting that on linux there is no mkvextract gui, I went ahead and wrote a poorly formatted script. Copy to where ever and run it how you will, syntax is ./mkvattachex.sh infile.mkv a b c, where a, b, and c are optional. a is the number of video tracks, b the number of audio, and c the number of subtitle tracks. These are important so that the script can tail properly however I am pretty sure I can fix this. Defaults are all 1 so if it’s a standard file with only 1 of each then they can be ignored. The script will extract all attachments, which generally means all included fonts. I have no idea if it will kill your system and if it does, as always, blame movax.
Here be the actual script, I’ll be updating it later on with proper functionality:
http://ophion.pastebin.com/f8437ff2
Speaking of fail…
Also, xvid in matroska, upscaling, streamrip, fail ivtc, and a whole host of other problems. Please don’t watch this, for your eyes sake. Also mkvmerge used is 3 major versions out of date.
I made a post, hoorah!
This is mostly to take all the tl;dr eye cancer away from my LiveJournal. Most people on that probably don’t care about the latest x264 or Ophion commits, then again, why should you?