Any known HD with NSV?

[yeshuawatso]

Just wondering if anyone has seen any HD content either streaming using SC or just in general with NSV?

If you have seen anything, post a link or something.

Also, would VP6 or h264 be better for HD content encoding?

[yeshuawatso]

Also, sort of off topic here, is there any know codec that works right out of the box for all OS's?

[slavas]

MPEG1

[yeshuawatso]

and the HD?

[sankt]

There was a NSV station that did that about 2 years ago. It was a Bjork music video channel.

The station streamed their video around 1 megabyte. The video quality was excellent.

[yeshuawatso]

did they stream music like Jazz and stuff because that is the only stream that I remember.

[Smelter]

bjork tv!
music by bjork

1 mb/s
720x480 dvd or somthing like that size.

[slavas]

HD = just big resolution, the only one codec which everywhere supported "out of the box" and is light at decoding MPEG1.

[yeshuawatso]

Anyone willing to give this a shot? I don't think it would be possible to stream HD but we could try using vp6, vp3, and h264 to see which one does the best.

[rockouthippie]

EDTV (dvd 720x480) resolution still takes a couple of megabits, no matter what you use for a codec. I did a 1000kbps stream for a while, and it was pretty good at 640x480, but not accurately rendered.

Heres my guestimation formula for figuring out what bitrate looks pretty:

WIDTH*HEIGHT*FRAMERATE/3000=TARGET BITRATE.

By that estimate, encoding at EDTV would take 3500 kbps for an accurate rendering with MPEG4. That's about right, because MPEG2 takes about 8000.

You could probably shave those numbers down 20% by using VP6 or h264, but there are no codec miracles. H264 is so slow, that you'll never get real time encoding at these rez either.

ON2 claims that you can encode in DVD quality at a megabit. Nope.

[yeshuawatso]

I've encoded at near DVD quality once with vp6 at about 800k bitrate, this is what is encouraging me to try HD

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by yeshuawatso
I've encoded at near DVD quality once with vp6 at about 800k bitrate, this is what is encouraging me to try HD

Near?. Not very near. Not to say it wouldn't look halfway decent, but it's hardly DVD quality.

[toqer]

Look for the FAZZ music. Or search the forums for "nsv reviews", I did a review on the stream once, very nice looking.

--toq

[rockouthippie]

Heres some tests of some particularly acid test video. You'll notice at 2000kbps, these recordings are certainly not perfect. I actually think the mpeg4 looks a little better.

http://retrovision*****blackhawk.x264.avi
http://retrovision*****blackhawk.mpeg4.avi

I could actually stream this fast off my dedicated servers.

Another thing to notice is that with a 3800 Athlon 64 X2, x264 processed the video at 15 fps. The mpeg4 processed at 90 fps. It's clear that there is no way that x264 could handle real time encoding at this resolution with any machine I ever saw.

Like I said at a couple of megabits, it's pretty close to DVD quality. Theora basically is mpeg4.... a little slower and a little less quality.

[yeshuawatso]

The h264 decodes too slow on my G3 iBook, but from what I've seen, it handles the transitions better than the mpeg4. The mpeg4 however does a lot better at general video. I was able to scan to any point in the h264 video and see the video very pixelated. I wasn't able to do the same action with the mpeg4. If I had to choose, the mpeg4 would be my pic simply because the video quality is extremely better in a lot of places when compared to the h264.

Take a look at this video that I encoded with vp6 single pass. What is your judgement?

#Edited by deppy#
URL REMOVED
#End of Edit

[rockouthippie]

http://retrovision*****black.avi

Look at your video and then look at this one encoded at 600kbps-352:288. You will notice in my video that the frame rate doesn't completely drop in fast changing scenes. Artifacting is still evident. This amount of artifacting would be covered up by vp6 somewhat.

Set the aspect ratio on your viewer to 16:9 because I forgot.

Use VLC to view this with postprocessing on and it would probably look about like VP6.

Look at your video. In some places it loses quantity altogether. And look at the quantizer imposed reduction in frame rate. This is really evident in the first pan with the winged lady.

Try again at like? 352:240 and you'll see that you get an overall more pleasant viewing experience.

I have suffered from wishful thinking about the capabilities of codecs before

[yeshuawatso]

I noticed the differences in the video particularly with the fast movements between the vp6 and whatever codec you used. The postprocessing didn't look any different (at least on my mac it didn't).

Although the quality of either video is great, the question still remains: Can HD happen via streaming with shoutcast and winamp?

I am willing to say is it possible period? I know internet speeds have not caught up accross the globe for HD streaming, but the project itself is worth the experience to try.

Apple has a lot of video on it's website that are already encoded (h264) in HD. I'm going to try to test this video in mpeg4 (theora maybe?)

[rockouthippie]

The mpegs (lavc ffmpeg mpeg4) were made with mencoder on a Fedora box.

I guess. Those are the mpeg4 codec. I have dedicated servers, one in Missouri, one in Huerst, Germany. My house connection is 2/15 mbps verizon fios. Off peak time, I could probably get 4 or 5 mpbs from these servers. I haven't really tested it without 20 average megabits from the video streams.

So the video could be very good. 2500 kbps streams are possible consistently. That's dvd quality.

Doing 720p (1280x780 progressive @60 fps) seems out of reach. I am guessing 5-8 megabits with mpeg4 for anything that even looked half reasonable.

http://orange.blender.org/ has "Elephants Dream" in HDTV, so you could use that to experiment.

HDTV?. Well, maybe downhill with a tail wind?. I wouldn't want to pay the bandwidth bill.

A thought comes to mind that the codecs really don't matter enough to make web design decisions based on that. Decide what bandwidth you can use, and do that.

More is better But then you have to weigh that against your viewers capability. You can pretty much count on your viewers having 500 kbps of usable bandwidth. More than that and you'll have problems.

[yeshuawatso]

Well I would think the bandwidth would be based on locations. Most cities in the US have broadband speeds of at least 1.5mbps down. Even faster for cable users (14mbps is what is being advertised in my area anyway).

Although, the problem exist like you said in the hosting parts. I too have a dedicated box in chicago, however even at 100mbps, with HD you could only experiment with 50 users max (safely anyway). And personally, I would hate to see the bandwidth bill on that. Of course if you have the money to dish out, you could always order an oc193 for $30,000/month .

I'm not putting down Ton and the Orange team for their hard work on Elephants Dream, but the video they encoded in HD lost a lot color quality (download the source files and click Render if you want to see the difference, use the svn build of Blender though). But for legality reasons, the CC license looks the best if I want to keep my server. It's good to see that I'm not the only Blender Head on the NSV forums.

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by yeshuawatso
[Well I would think the bandwidth would be based on locations. Most cities in the US have broadband speeds of at least 1.5mbps down.

I know that. I've been doing this in the real world for two years. I'm telling you 500kpbs reliable. You gotta figure that they might want to check email, use VOIP or whatever. The connection you describe is just about like all the people that use my web. And people don't like to have their connection completely choked, no matter how important we think our webs are

even at 100mbps, with HD you could only experiment with 50 users max (safely anyway)[/B]

My servers are happy giving up 50 megabits and that is really pretty good. In EDTV (dvd) rez that would give 25 users each.

Like I was saying about true HDTV rez is 8-10 megabits, and that is minimal.

I'm sure the cable companies and telcos will be using unicasting to cover local areas with CATV broadcasts. This is a technology that we probably will never have.

I know you can stream pretty close to DVD quality at 2 mbps, but HDTV hellabig.

Divide out the lowest HDTV resolution (1280X780 @ 60 frames/sec progressive) is a boat load of data compared to 720X480 @ 30 frames/sec interlaced.

A year ago, I was streaming at 230 kbps. Now it's 500 k. Who knows about next year?. 500k is getting to the point of where you'll forget you are watching a webcast once in a while.

[yeshuawatso]

rockouthippie, You just had to kill my dreams with reality. Well the question that is boggling me right now, is how Verizon and AT&T are bring 10mbps lines out to houses, and are expecting to hit full HDTV (see IPTV)?

I was watching an HD channel on my friends Satelite Dish, and noticed the encoding pixels while watching the game (49ers vs Chiefs). Truthfully, the HD didn't look much different from some streams I've seen on the net when there was a lot of movement.

Truthfully, I guess the web may never see an HD channel.

[slavas]

why not? codecs are being improved, bandwidth always increasing...

[Smelter]

Im watching free over the air hdtv with a hdtv wonder and a 19 inch wide screen that does 1440 X 900, and there is nothing online that even comes close. seriously. Somebody is getting cheesed on there hd service.

[yeshuawatso]

I was meaning any time soon. Although codecs are getting better, they are all being based on compression methods that are being used by everyone. Look at how many versions of h264 are floating about. Or how about the man mpeg4 codecs.

Maybe if you can compress an HD signal to about 3mbps then you may be able to get a pretty good looking stream. DVD quality seems to be the height of today though.

[rockouthippie]

The CATV/IPTV aren't going to have to worry about this. They'll unicast off of routers located local to the service recipient. They aren't going to be able to do planet wide HDTV broadcasts by multicasting.

So, well they could use 20 megabits if they felt like it. I think the HDTV cable around here must be doing something like that because it's encoded in MPEG2.

By being able to use unicasting, a feed can be brought into a neighborhood with one stream and then relayed to all of the service recipients.

We aren't gonna get that toy.

Originally posted by yeshuawatso
Although codecs are getting better

Codecs don't really matter. "Better" codecs mean that they hide errors better. The only way to xmit quality video is to have the bandwidth. Codecs don't give us any new miracles.

Considering in 4 years, I've gone from 768k DSL to 15 megabit fiber, maybe we will have the bandwidth.

I have been using a new encoding profile, not based on wishful thinking. At 400k, I found that optimal was 256X192 @19fps.

For any of theses codecs, that's gonna be in the ball park.

Artifacting is the ugliest thing in a video I think. I had to drop the resolution and frame rate down to these values to eliminate it.

I think you'd find that VP6 and H264 act almost the same as the mpeg4 variant I am using. (wmv2 which is basically microsoft flavored mpeg4). VP6/H264 might "look" better, but in truth you are hiding artifacting, not eliminating it.

[slavas]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
Heres some tests of some particularly acid test video. You'll notice at 2000kbps, these recordings are certainly not perfect. I actually think the mpeg4 looks a little better.

http://retrovision*****blackhawk.x264.avi
http://retrovision*****blackhawk.mpeg4.avi

I could actually stream this fast off my dedicated servers.

Another thing to notice is that with a 3800 Athlon 64 X2, x264 processed the video at 15 fps. The mpeg4 processed at 90 fps. It's clear that there is no way that x264 could handle real time encoding at this resolution with any machine I ever saw.

x264 - core 50 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2005 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=0 ref=1 deblock=0:0:0 analyse=0x1:0 me=dia subme=7 brdo=0 mixed_ref=0 me_range=4 chroma_me=0 trellis=0 8x8dct=0 cqm=0 chroma_qp_offset=0 slices=1 nr=0 decimate=1 bframes=0 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=0 rc=abr bitrate=2000 ratetol=4.0 rceq='tex^qComp' qcomp=0.50 qpmin=2 qpmax=31 qpstep=3 ip_ratio=1.25

this is way far away from optimal settings for x264

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by slavas
this is way far away from optimal settings for x264

Yeah, a lazy encode. Optimization still gives us the point of diminishing return. The point is that we can't transmit HDTV with our garden variety servers, and our viewers can't watch with their garden variety DSL.

No how.

Of course, 4 short years ago, you couldn't do DVD quality.

My connection was 160k/384k DSL and a year before that I was using a modem.

The backbones have a speed limit too. It seems to be about 5 megabits in a tcip socket. DVD yes. HDTV not yet.

[yeshuawatso]

Gardens...great metaphor

[rockouthippie]

I think DVDs look really good on an upsample DVD player. EDTV gives enough resolution that you'd still get the true nuance of how ugly Brittany is

http://www.tmz.com/2006/09/27/rosie-...worst-looking/

Yike!.

[yeshuawatso]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
I think DVDs look really good on an upsample DVD player. EDTV gives enough resolution that you'd still get the true nuance of how ugly Brittany is

http://www.tmz.com/2006/09/27/rosie-...worst-looking/

Yike!.

No comment there....

[rockouthippie]

I looked up the specs on BlueRay/HD-DVD. They say the bitrate is up to 54/37 (respectively) megabits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueray

I've been looking toward what would be a more reasonable. You could easily send 100% (give or take) mini-dv (480x480) in a couple of megabits. Those cameras are getting down to the consumer price range.

Used pro units are getting cheap too, as the switch to HD happens.

HDTV is cool. But in a lot of ways.... TV is the same old crap, just clearer

I like HDTV for sports and nature shows, but mostly it doesn't matter. I'm still using a 39" JVC tube set I bought 12 years ago for $1000. Call me a late adopter or a movie critic, but I just haven't watched stuff lately that made me want to rush out and spend a couple grand on a new TV. The ol JVC is still an extremely high quality NTSC TV, and it'll do for a while longer.

Projection TVs mean bulbs every year at hundreds a pop. Plasmas aren't big enough yet. I doubt either will demonstrate the longevity of CRTs yet.

I'll wait a bit, probably until I don't have a choice. The JVC will blow up or the technology will require change. In any event, time only makes things cheaper and better.

[yeshuawatso]

OK, so I've been sitting on this topic for a while and realized that I needed to see what the some of the big boys were pushing out of their cables.

I have Cox HD Service and 24.1 LCD DVI computer monitor that I double up as a HDTV. Because this is a computer monitor, I believe it is ruining the HD experience. All the HD content that I have seen so far, has just as many artifacts and problems as some of the video you see on the Shoutcast YP. Only difference is it is larger pixels.

rockouthippie, the bit rates that you mentioned in the HD-DVD is pretty much the same bit rate that Cox is pushing to my front door (and they say we can't faster download speeds, conspiracy anyone?). Anyway, Cox provides me with a Motorola DVR (DCT6416 III) that has a nifty FireWire port in the back for exporting to VCR recorders and even some HDTVs. You also can connect your computer up to it as well. Unfortunately, the drivers for doing this only works with 32bit systems so using my Sun Ultra 40 x64 workstation monster for some importing won't work. But using my G3 iBook and it's firewire port will. And with a little SMB configuration, I can push the files straight from the DVR to the monster for working.

Long story short, I was able to get my hands on mpeg-ts 2 HD video. I then imported this video directly into NSVate for encoding. Since this VP6 codec won't allow any video over 1280x768 (at least on my machine it wont) I stuck with the 768 resolution. Yes I know the real HDTV standard is 720p but I wanted to be different...er, lazy. Anyway, my first test was astonishing. I was able to get a one (1) minute file at around 2.5Mbps looking better than some DVDs (not at all parts mind you). The result is below. The file is only 15MB and the quality is pretty damn good. I compared it to the 1080i source and there wasn't much damage done to the down conversion.

The original source file, which was also only one minute, was around 178MB so getting the file size down to 10% is an accomplishment for me. You guys let me know what you think.

HD Test 1

[Smelter]

The video looks great!

I still suggest getting an pci HD tuner for your computer, and enjoy the full glory of your lcd's native resolution. It looks so good, I wont buy cable again.

[yeshuawatso]

Buying an HD tuner for the computer wouldn't help much as the Digital Signals from Cox are encrypted and need a card or some form of digital decrypter to work. Over the air HD would work, but then again, I'm on a 64bit system and drivers are still scarce. And before any of you suggest that I just use a 32bit OS on my system, I would have to say no. My comp has 8 gigs of RAM on it and only XP Pro x64 or Vista 64 bit will let me use it (With the exception to some 32bit Linux distros). Using XP Home, Pro, or Vista 32bit would only give me 4 Gigs of RAM to work with. 4 gigs may be enough for some of you, but I'm still paying for 8 so I might as well as get what I'm paying for.

Plus the export from the firewire is exactly what is coming in from Cox. No transcoding or degrade of quality exist. The LCD I have is pretty much the same as a normal HDTV with the exception that I can use it as a computer monitor (max resolution is 1920x1200).

Now on normal TV (480i) the quality does get degraded as the set-top box from motorola has to convert the analog signal into a digital one and it's digital encoder on the unit will make you puke. But this tread isn't about normal TV, it's about HDTV.

Thanks for your input though. What type of monitor are you using to view the video on (LCD, CRT, your television, etc.)?

[Smelter]

lcd 1440 X 900

yeah I do over the air hdtv

Never a block unless I lose reception.

[Inedible Bulk]

1920x1200 monitors minimum at about $600 which means very few of your viewers are going to watch it at 100%

[yeshuawatso]

Originally posted by Inedible Bulk
1920x1200 monitors minimum at about $600 which means very few of your viewers are going to watch it at 100%

Hey, a guy can wish, and where did you find a monitor my size for that cheap? Mine was $1,200 and I'm still paying for it. I would be more than happy to return it for one half the price. Preferrably with the same features I have now.

[bored_womble]

a very nice demo indeed.

BW

[toqer]

I'm now broadcasting 5 FPS shy of 480p at 500kbps.

[yeshuawatso]

Originally posted by toqer
I'm now broadcasting 5 FPS shy of 480p at 500kbps.

Huh?