Hi kwag!
I must agree with black prince when he says that.
I think that with heavy letterbox movies, like matrix and lotr, we should not use TV overscan. Well, not the way FitCD does. FitCD resizes to a smaller size and then insert the borders. Doing that it reduces the height of the film. IMHO, with movies like that I think we should overlap the frame with black borders (using the letterbox filter) and not resize to a smaller size.

Some times I even cut some of left and right columns to be able to increase the height a bit and keep the aspect ratio intact.

I agree too... I'm currently trying to encode LOTR... It's hard to find correct resize values for this one... What would you recommend muaddib and others?

__________________
j3llyG0053

@SansGrip and All:

Please test these matrix changes. It's the closest I have been able to get to the BETA-1 "notch" without causing division errors.

Make the following changes to the current BETA-1 matrix (left top):

Please try it out and see if you get the artifacts. There shouldn't be any, and the softening on low frequency blocks should be about the same as with the original BETA-1 "notch". So compare this to the original "KVCD" matrix.

Please let me know as soon as you have some results

-kwag

Here is a comparison with the original "KVCD" matrix and the new "BETA-1a notch" matrix.

I just played the first 9 minutes of "The Matrix" on my HDTV, and all I can say is
The same results with "K-19", compared to the previous encodes. Take a look at this, encoded with 1-12-1-1-24 GOP and KVCD BETA-1a notch matrix: http://www.kvcd.net/k-19-newgop-newmat.mpg (no audio)
That's what the complete 138 minute film looks like on one CD-R

I think I'm going to go drink a (couple of ) beer(s)

-kwag

@Kwag,

Is this correct. I've been using 1-12-2-1-24.

-black prince

The new GOP is 1-12-1-1-24. Yes, that is correct, and the sample above was done with than GOP
Also, make the matrix changes too, and encode a small sample. Let me know what you think

-kwag

@Kwag,

Flashing in the static background areas (e.g. walls) has stopped.
Gibbs noise is hardly there. Picture quality is even better than
before. To sum it up, this is an excellent test clip. Now the big
questions are what template did you use. What setting did you
use for CQ or CQ_VBR? I will try a clip of my own to see if I
can get the same results.

-black prince

I know , you guys pushed me to fix that crap You're 100% right, by about twice This is not template related at all. Just use GOP 1-12-1-1-24 and the matrix modification posted above. The samples were encoded using CQ.
That's basically it
This should apply to all templates above 352x240(28 resolution. Maybe CQ will work now at lower resolutions . I haven't tried that yet
Let me know you findings

-kwag

@Kwag,

I used GOP 1-12-1-1-24, Notch Beta-1a and CQ for my own test and
the results were just as good as your test clip. I guess I'll switch
back to CQ with this result I know we push you, but look
what you have accomplished

-black prince

No, look what WE have accomplished
And you know what, I was just reading some old KVCD related posts at "another" site, and I'm LMAO right now

Here are some old quotes, with poster names not shown:

the video quality of that will be AWFULL... you don't need to be an expert to know that...

Needless to say, the quality will be sub-VCD if you actually did put 130 min on one disc.

130 minutes on a CDR? Oh gawd. I don't care what anyone ways, that just can't look too great.

Depends what you see as quality. Something around 2000kbps, 2 pass VBR Divx 5 is what i define as ok, I fit all my rips on 2 CDR's

but fitting that much on a disc won't give you DVD-like quality. No way

I doesn't matter what XVCD template you use, putting 130 min on one CD will have the video quality at SUB-VCD quality. That is "less than standard VCD".

And that's just some of them!
The thing is, we're actually fitting over 2 hours on one CD, but at 528x480. And that is FAR above VCD quality. Actually, I think that we're very close to DVD quality. We're not that far off

-kwag

Kwag,

which motion search precision have you been using in your latest tests?

If it's 'high quality', would you please test both 'high quality' and 'motion estimate search' and compare them against each other. I'd really like to know if it's worth switching to the much slower one.

Hmm, but look at Trinity's (is it she?) face. It looks much "blockiest"?

Testimonial:

When I first got into this hobby all I wanted to do was transfer some VHS-C tapes to CD-R.

After trying every encoder and every guide on "the other forum", on doom9, on digital-digest, etc. I gave up. There was nothing even barely acceptable. (VHS-C camvorder shooting is a difficult source: noisy, unstable colours, bad ilumination most of the time, the video is shaky, sudden pans, the auto-focus goes in and out, and you've got the "mom-i've-got-a-zoom" effect )

So I sticked to convert DVD rips and analog tuner captures, that are much easier to encode, and gave good results with 2 CD SVCDs.

After the amazing results I got with KVCDs, this week I decided to try again the VHS-C sources. Captured at 352x480 Huffyuv, converted to SKVCD (my player doesn't like hi-res mpeg1).

It's GREAT! You can't tell it from the original tape.

Many, many thanks.

Some comments about the posts on the other forum. I think they don't get how complex the human perception is. They have a closed mind: "if I have a lower bitrate, I'll have more artifacts, and if I have more artifacts it's worse". Another example, if I have a 352x240 encode and a 544x480 encode, both at the same min, max and average bitrates, the 544x480 encode should look worse, because you have less bits per pixel, that's simple math. I think if you calculated PSNR for the encodes, KVCDs, specially KVCDx3 would have awful figures (maybe I'm wrong, because bitrate viewer shows nice Q figures). But it's not as simple as that. I'm only guessing, but I think KVCDs can actually have more artifacts (noise, distortion) than higher bitrate encodes, but it looks better, because it creates more artifacts that you can't see or that aren't annoying, and less artifacts that are annoying.

A typical example is a very fast high action scene. The "normal" approach is bump up the bitrate so that it has few blocks. If you pause a KVCD at such a scene you'll see many blocks. But if the scene is in normal playing rate, you just can't see the blocks because they move too fast. Why expend bits where you can't see their effect? And you can use those extra bits where they are really needed.

And, of course, we have the labourious fine tuning of GOP and Q matrix, the noise-dithering filter, etc that help squeezing the ultimate efficience from the encoder

I've often wondered if the people in "the other forum" watch their movies at slow motion, perhaps at 1/8 x normal frame rate They mostly offer theoretical conclusions without any visual comparison and experimenting.

@Kwag,

I browse other forums occasionally for KVCD and really focus on posts where
members who have not tried KVCD process have generally the same
comments. They get to the sight and there's no guides to get them
started correctly. They usually encode with other methods, e.g. standard
VCD, and just use your templates. They get frustrated having to wade
throught so many forums and days of asking for help until they
conclude that KVCD wouldn't work anyway. I realize at this time KVCD
is under going a lot of great changes (e.g. sampler, Blockbuster, GOP,
Q-Matrix, RoboCrop, and the list goes on) but as boring as guides are
they get new comers and experienced started on the right track with
KVCD. Also, other sites, mainly DivX one's have guide sections and
some are use to looking for them. If i had just come to KVCD today
and tried to figure out how to get started, I probably would give up,
and have the same conclusions you are getting.

@Boulder,

When I used GKnot and Divx 5.0.2 the concept of pyschovisual fasinated
me and the read about encoding what vision is able to perceive and
eliminate the parts it can't. This whole topic alot of sense and produced
encodes that in still frames looked bad, e.g. atrifacts, blockiness, but
were in areas where our vision normally does'nt see. This not only saved
file size, but actually enhanced picture quality. Divx 5.0.2 has some
very good descriptions of how it's use and achieved. True it has
to be done differently for KVCD, but I believe right now it happening by
accident and not by design. Just like TV-Overscan is used to crop parts
of the frame that won't be displayed anyway, psychovisual could be used
to tune frames for detail that our vision won't detect. There's more that
can be done to improve KVCD.

@All,

KVCD, when I joined, used to be improved templates, but now it's a
process. e.g. FitCD, avisynth scripts, Tmpgenc setups, etc. It's grown
into a excellent way to make backups.

-black prince

I remember when I first tried KVCDs. I did a test encode with a chapter from "The Lawnmower Man". The results were horrible - but this was not the templates' fault. They were horrible because of the colors got all dithered and because I'd never used TMPGEnc before, I was quite unsure how to fix it. I went back to SVCDs and for some reason came back here some months after this first test. I read lots of threads and realised that the color thing was only because of the damn msyuv.dll that is broken. I removed it, tried the once-again-improved templates and have been lurking around here ever since. And damn I'm glad I didn't get scared off completely.

So, I think that a simple, one-path guide would be appreciated by novices. The problem just is that things can evolve really fast around here. It wasn't that long ago when KVCDx3 meant 60 minutes per 80min CD

Hi boulder,

I've been using "High quality". I'll make some tests today with this new stuff and "Fast" motion search

Edit: Test finished on a sample. "High quality" is FAR better than "Fast" motion estimation. At the same CQ value, the "Fast", produced a sample slightly larger than the "High quality" sample. And the quality is also slightly inferior. So if I lower the CQ value to match the size of the "High quality", the result will be even worse. So, no contest, "High quality" wins

-kwag

I think the home page needs to be revamped a little, like maybe a link to the guides as the first thing to see. There also needs to be a tools section to make it easier to find everything you need in one spot. I think it might make it easier for newbees to follow.

-Yoda

__________________
May the code force be with you

Yes, I'll work on that, as soon as things stabilize a little. But right now, there are already functional guides in the main page , so people can use them as starting point. Like Red-M's KVCDx2 guide.

-kwag