Hi Daager,do you mean to download svcd instead of the divx or xvid movies,if you are into that sort of thing

What is macroblocks, were do I look, how do they look like

//Wolfi

I'm also curious as to how you go about converting SVCD to KVCD.

Macroblocks manifest in flat, darkened areas, like a wall in a dimly lit house, or in subtle gradients, such as those found in scenes with fog or smoke. I hate them with a passion, but if you're working with Divx sources, you're sort of stuck with em...

Is it just me, or do macroblocks have a certain color bias?? Mainly towards earthtones and low saturation blues... I've gotten to the point where I can watch a DVD, and key in on areas where macroblocks will appear on an encode. Boy, I miss just watching a movie to enjoy it... now I frikkin analyze everything!!

__________________
"There are two rules for ultimate success in life.
1. Never tell everything you know."

hehe
yeah, that´s the "disadvantage" of encoding

__________________
greetz Kane

ok.....not kiddin!


two months pass,
i'm trying to encode the musical
from Sarah Brightman-La Luna.

MovieStacker and ToK help me (us) a lot with this job.
don' t need to write this but....
without the templates was impossible ,of course.

the boring part:
the filters!

La Luna is a really blue film,the ilumination is too blue and dark!
using the last filters, i see lots of smoke.
with blockbuster noise, is just a few better but really slow!

then i'm waiting for new mix filters ideas cos
i really want a big result!
i don't like the "more or less things",this time is gone.

any news?
or change anything in the last script?

MarcFD's "MSoften" filter seems to make a good job of de-blocking
xvid and divx sources. I havent had a chance to play with settings
much or try it on different sources, but results on one particularily bad
source with the defaults look very promising! Flickering block artefacts
on flat areas were almost completely removed - the temporal denoiser
in MSoften seems to be something special :)

There were some other artefacts introduced however so it still needs
some tweaking. But its worth checking it out IMHO...

/girv

Hi girv were can I download and try MSoften filter And were do you put the filter in your script?

//Wolfi

I got MSoften (AVISynth 2.0x YUY2 only) from this this doom9 thread

The script I was messing about with:
I'm not entirely sure what the MSoften parameters mean :) Also
you may want to start with just MSoften on its own to see the effect.

I was loading the script in vdub and applying a +200% contrast
filter to make the blocks more obvious to the eye.

good luck :)

/girv

@ girv and Wolfi

all filters that you need:

http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic....f0cf67c08bcc12

click on "tons more" link!

Since I hadn't tried for a while, I converted a 1-CD XViD to a 1-CD KVCD using the latest "optimal script" settings. The results were outstanding. So my previous statement about always going from svcd to kvcd isn't always necessary. This was a low action film, so that may have helped, but I didn't notice any strong left-over artifacts from the original vxid encoding. (The movie was some screwy 580x306 resolution, so I used KVCDx3 at 528x480).

The optimal scripts are truly optimal!

Gotta try that Msoften filter...

It doesn't trash detail, does it?

__________________
"There are two rules for ultimate success in life.
1. Never tell everything you know."

Has anyone tried fiddling with Unfilter(-5,-5) ? It seems that it reduces the filesize with lower quality sources quite dramatically.

See here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51181

I believe Unfilter values below 0 (negative) just start to blur the image!, so I think that mergechroma with a tad of mergeluma, should accomplish a similar result. That's just what I think. I haven't made any comparisons

-kwag

yes to Boulder and Kwag !

from unfilter readme:

The effects are fairly mild but be aware that excessive sharpening makes things
harder to compress and may bring about the dreaded "edge enhancement artifacts"
the people complain about in DVD's from some studios. And while excessive
softness may hide noise it loses detail and generally just looks ugly. So it is
probably best to just try to reverse whatever has already been done to your source.

Heres my latest effort at a xvid-block busting script:

I tried the above script with a number of xvid and divx encoded sources and it did a good job of removing the blocks on all of them while retaining detail in the picture. Please do try it and tweak it yourselves!

Things to notice:

1) MSoften doesnt seem to process the top and bottom few lines of the input, hence the slightly unusual AddBorders...Crop combination in there. Perhaps this wont be required if youre using GripSize / GripBorders but I'm not sure as I dont use them myself (no reason, I just never bothered to learn how :)

2) No UnFilter. UnFilter seems to really highlight the xvid blocks, so I dropped it. This leads on to...

3) ...LanczosResize and lower MergeChroma/MergeLuma blur factors to retain sharpness.

4) Blockbuster method is "dither" as "noise" seemed to leave blurred blocky areas that changed slowly over time - like xvid blocks in slow motion.

5) No TemporalCleaner or TemporalSmoother - MSoften does enough of this IMHO even with very noisy sources.

I dont know if its just my setup or the combination of filters I was using, but TemporalSmoother() seems to affect the colour balance of the result clip, making it slightly washed out and maybe a little more green. Anyone else notice anything like this? FWIW I was using TemporalSmoother(2,3)

I get an AVISynth error when using certain filters after MSoften - perhaps there is a bug lurking in there so watch out for it. Temporal smoothers seem to be the big problem eg: FluxSmooth, TemporalSmoother, TemporalCleaner etc.


File sizes are interesting also:
The "Reno" version was made with the test deblocker script Reno posted in this thread.

It seems removing those flashing xvid blocks really helps compression :)

QUESTION:

Has anyone run time tests for the different filters? I would like to know in the latest optimal script if I can drop one of the filters and gain time?

girv

great observations.

you are right,i see it a long time:
temporalSmoother turn
a little more green(more in very dark scenes)
try(2,1)...is better but you see less green problem.

Blockbuster...blurred blocky areas that changed slowly over time - like xvid blocks in slow motion.
yeah i'm with you here too.

lanczos is sharper but give some stranges artefacts
like little waves.

File sizes get hude changes ,depending in the order of the filters.

it all in vobs too,not only in xvid!

yes telemike,

i did tests and post somewhere in the forum....
don't remember where i posted it.

Good, I knew it couldnt just have been my old eyes or crappy monitor cable :)

The effect does get less with weaker settings as you say, but I'm not using TemporalSmoother any more anyway...

But "dither" mode fixed (or improved) that right?

I didnt notice any artefacts like that, but the source I was using was a particularily bad xvid so it could have been very blurry and in need of agressive sharpening anyway. You could switch to BicubicResize or perhaps increase the Blur factors to reduce the artefacts I guess.

The filter order is important, I tried many different orders and this was the best one I found. The idea is to add noise to the xvid blocks, then get MSoften to blend them all together. But this still leaves areas of colour with blocky edges so a slight blur is applied to soften those away.

An improvement might be to apply a detail thresholded smoother to only affect the low-detail blocky areas instead of the picture wide blur Im using now. Feel free to test that idea :wink:

What did you try?

I didnt try the script with any VOBs, I was trying to optimise it for the particular type of noise found in xvid/divx encodes. Are there blocks in VOBs as well? What were the results like?

/girv