AVCHD to PC conversion challenge!!

Dare

Cincinnati? Suuuuuure, no prob.

Mine look perfect. What are you doing wrong?

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LG GGC-H20L Super Multi Blue Blu-ray & HD DVD ROM Drive
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kamspy

Letting Ripbot do it.

We should continue this continue this conversation via PM. I'm not sure if archival is in the forum rules.

dcristescu

Dare,

I have yet to try them on my home setup.
In the meantime could you please detail your setup?
I understand that all 3 versions are played OK on this setup - I stress: do they lag any part? are there jittery frames, frames that are slightly delayed?

Also could you give me a rundown of the codecs you have?
Possibly the way in which you acquired them?

Thanks

Dare

I don't have any problems playing them at all. The separated fields clip in particular is 1440x540 @ 59.94fps, and it plays butter smooth.

Are you having problems playing them back? Could you describe what's happening? I think you said you're using the K-lite codec pack, right? You should already have all the codecs you need. You should also verify in your ffdshow Video decoder configuration that H.264 is set to libavcodec.

If your DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) isn't functioning, chances are you can forget about playing these files. You need hardware that has HD video acceleration, and you need it to be activated in the driver.

__________________
LG GGC-H20L Super Multi Blue Blu-ray & HD DVD ROM Drive
58 31

mobiushky

Yes and yes.

I have the HDR-SR11. Same camera smaller HDD. I play the native files on my PC using Nero Showtime with not a hint of stutter or sync issues. Full glorious HD.

There are 2 things at work. Let me sum it up this way, I have 2 video cards on my machine. One is the onboard ATI HD3300 (I have a 790GX motherboard) the other is an older X1950XT from ATI. I have 3 monitors. One is off the X1950XT, the other 2 are off the HD3300. When I play video on the HD3300 monitors it is perfect. Like watching HDTV. When I slide the program over to the monitor off the X1950XT, jerky city. Video starts to lag audio and it looks like crap. Why? ATI included native hardware BD decoding in their line of HD video adapters. The HD3300 is not the top, but it is currently the top HD onboard video on the market. This is not a gaming card, it's made for HD video. It has an HDMI port built in. I also upgraded to a quad core AMD, but the processor is hardly touched when I use the HD3300 side.

So first, your processor is not up to snuff for AVCHD files (native blu-ray btw), second your video card is not helping in any way. Not much you can do about it. I have install NO codecs on my machine. The Nero Showtime on the HD3300 is all you need.

Now that I've thought this through, I have an HP laptop with a BD player in it. I has an ATI HD3200 video card in it. I just installed Nero on it, I should try watching the video there and see what happens.

__________________
DRM is roughly the equivalent of poking you in the eye, repeatedly.
----------------------------------------------------
Main Setup:
Pioneer PDP-5070HD
Pioneer VSX-80TXV
Dish Vip622
PS3 (120Gb), someone tried to tell me my BD player could play games too, what an idiot.
Logitech Harmony 1000 remote
All Klipsch speakers

Bedroom Setup:
Sony KDR-40XBR4
Dish Vip622
PS3 (80Gb, no BC) I think I have too many PS3s.
Sony Commander RM-AV3000

dcristescu

First of all, I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to reply to this issue.

It's been a growing experience, advanced by many trials and tribulations on my behalf, and also by your input and knowhow.

I've first concluded that my setup had some faults. Mainly, it being rather on the higher end - Core2Duo 1,66GHz, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 8600M GS 512MB VRAM, with support for PureVideo - the quality was way too low to leave alone, so it turns out that my drivers were rather old and modded (as in laptopvideo2go). Luckily, I went to NVidia's site and they had just released a latest driver version.
With it installed we got some signs of life.

With Windows Media Player 11, the combing artifacts were removed on playing the native Sony m2ts file, but the clip took twice than it's length to show, the frames were not missed but played at half the speed.
With Media Player Classic, the clip had decoding artifacts galore (not deinterlacing artifacts), like fragments lagging and multiplying, but, HELLO!, the motion was very smooth and fluid, as if happening right there, seeing it live.

This and the insistence some of you had on specific players led me to investigate, and I found out that the two major video chip manufacturers have developed parallel technologies for hardware acceleration - ATI with AVIVO I think, and NVidia with PureVideo (HD).
These technologies I guess use unusual interfaces with the player so WMP and MPC, that were not designed with support for these technologies (MPC is trying at least), do not handle them very well.
Among the players advertised with PureVideo technology are PowerDVD and WinDVD.
Went and installed those. Alas WinDVD does not recognize the m2ts file, and to my surprise, PowerDVD plays the clip but in an insatisfactory way - lagging and jittering. I've checked and rechecked - the option to use Hardware Acceleration is checked and it confirms by mentioning PureVideo.

This is still an outstanding issue. But, I'm thinking I am not the only one with it, as I've tried to play the clip on another GeForce 8800M, and a desktop with ATI Radeon. The same questionable quality.
Furthermore, led me to question your quality standards, I'm afraid. As I will detail upon later on, the only clip with 95% quality was the Separated Fields one obtained by Dare (I guess he won the challenge, yay, though I'm not sure 1440x540 is very HD, but at least it is something, KUDOS). The other two had the lagging and jittering, hickups in fluidity.
Is it possible that everyone is rather indulgent with their appreciation? Could mobiushky, Dare, juankerr, kamspy and mshulman accept the lagging I see? I don't know, seems rather far fetched. As a comparison, I'll give a link to a DVD quality version of the clip with the same lagging, does everyone accept the output? Do you find it OK or lagging? Let me know.
As I said this is an open direction for this thread. How CAN we get the Fields_Separated.mkv quality on m2ts native clips? On my setup I achieve the fluidity (and on MPC to boot) but the decoding is bad.

Also, I suppose mobiushky and others get the same quality on all players, perhaps they have an ATI that has better drivers, BUT can anyone with an NVidia (preferrably laptop) card play the m2ts files? either on all players, or on a specific player but fluidly, without lagging?

Another direction for this thread regards converting.
W T F
Do I have a wrong conception about reencoding or what??

Cause, save for one case, every converted version of the clip I have made or seen was very sucky.
Dare, a few days back, converted the clip to three versions which he kindly posted. He said that two of them should play out the same. Only one was very very good - not equal to the camera rendition but very close - Fields_Separated.mkv. The other two suffer from lagging and influidity. As I said Dare did mention there was one that was especially good. The camera when put to playback the clip renders it at worst like Fields_Separated.mkv.

I'm at witts' end. I figured, this is heavy sh*t. Let me first get the footage onto a viable playable format like dvd. So I wanted to downsample the clip to SD quality, hoping that at least now I should expect good motion. I don't think there are limits to the movement of a camera when shooting for DVD. However I've used Roxio, SUPER and a ton of other small programs to transform to DVD a bluray m2ts file. ALL were poor quality. The image was blurry (expectedly, standard definiton) BUT(!!) the motion was still lagging, skippy, as oposed to the fluidity of the original clip played with the camera.

The paramount of consumer editing I hear is Adobe Premiere. Went on and installed CS4. Imported the clip, made a sequence and exported it to DVD High Quality, Progressive, PAL. The output is:
http://rapidshare.de/files/45944677/...ce_01.m2v.html

People, is this an acceptable DVD clip??

NOT.



So I would like to extend the challenge and ask for a new clip: a good DVD quality conversion of my AVCHD m2ts file. The link to the file is in the first post. Is anybody up to it? I expect the motion to be the same fluidity as the one in Fields_Separated.mkv (link in a previous post by Dare).


This in theory should be very possible. I don't care how the clip is played back, I want the information compressed in it transformed to a clip that plays out on any computer with a DVD drive. There are no fancy requirements for DVD playback on a computer. Also a converter gets the information, through however long calculations - this is not done in real time, from the source, and takes its time to encode it at standard quality in another clip. There are no time pressures, right? This should work for either the uncompressed raw frames either the most computationally compressed source. Why do the converted clips play laggingly? It's not like hardware gets in the way - conversion can take however long!!

Set me straight, people, what am I missing?

Man, this is a big ass post . . hope people get here :S


Thanks for your time,
If anyone wants to discuss further livelier, I can give you my yahoo im account.

dcristescu

Hello?

Why is everyone silent?
Did I scare people with such a lengthy post?

I like to think it's not tedious reading.

mobiushky

Just saw the response. That was a long one and there is a lot going on in there.

I'll start by stating I'm no expert. I can only tell you what I have learned. You mentioned trying several different players, but you didn't mention which versions. Did you try WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-Ray edition? IF so, maybe you are seeing the same issue as WMP has with DVDs. When the disc is inserted, it will play the DVD. But if you try to play a .vob file off the pc it won't. (But if you change the vob to .mpg it will)

From what I have read in reviews and write ups, ATI is the better at handling HD video. Not sure why.

Like I said before, I use Nero 9. It has a module called Showtime. When I double click on a .M2TS file, showtime opens up. When I play the video on my HD3300 video card, it is flawless. Believe me, I am picky. It doesn't look quite as good as my fully calibrated Pioneer plasma, but its good enough for a PC. I see no artifacts, no jittering, no audio/video sync issues, etc. My main monitor is a 1920X1080, 24" Viewsonic.

I have an Asus M3A78-T motherboard (with the AMD 790GX chipset) that includes an HD3300 video card on-board with HDMI output. I have an AMD Phenom 9850 Black edition running at 2.5 Ghz. I have 8GB of RAM (OCZ PC-800 on Vista 64-bit ultimate). I recently added a WD Caviar Black edition 1TB drive to store my video from my camera. But I was using (and still have) a Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive as the main. (Also have a 500Gb MyBook running off the eSATA port on my mobo). I use Sony's Picture Motion Browser to download the videos off the camera and Nero 9 Showtime to watch them. I do a TON of video editing on my machine. (Using Pinnacle Studio 9 Ultimate) I typically bring up Pinnacle on the main 24" monitor. On the right side I have a 15" HP monitor that is also connected to the HD3300 on-board. The left is a 20" Viewsonic hooked up to the ATI X1950Xt. On the left I open up file browsers to find music and video files. On the 15" I open Nero 9 Showtime to pre-view my video before adding it to what I'm working on.

In most cases I watch the video on the 15" because I don't really need to see it perfectly. BUT, I will also slide the showtime over to the main monitor and set it to full screen to watch some of the videos. Especially if I want to show them off to someone.

I can't explain why you are having so much trouble. I can only explain how my set-up works.

__________________
DRM is roughly the equivalent of poking you in the eye, repeatedly.
----------------------------------------------------
Main Setup:
Pioneer PDP-5070HD
Pioneer VSX-80TXV
Dish Vip622
PS3 (120Gb), someone tried to tell me my BD player could play games too, what an idiot.
Logitech Harmony 1000 remote
All Klipsch speakers

Bedroom Setup:
Sony KDR-40XBR4
Dish Vip622
PS3 (80Gb, no BC) I think I have too many PS3s.
Sony Commander RM-AV3000

dcristescu

whoa, that's some fancy setup

i'm no expert either, but it sounds like professional

so you have them flawless

i can't stress enough - is the moving footage taken on your sony equal in quality on the little screen on the camera as on your high end pc output solution? - no lagging frames while panning no nothing?

take for instance the dvd conversion i've uploaded
how is it compared to the playback of the original native m2ts?

oh and that's another thing, why don't you give your 2 cents on the other issue of my thread: can you convert the clip to a dvd quality version?


i'll restate the 2 issues so that they are clear:

1. can anyone with an NVidia GeForce XXXXX XX card play the following clip flawlessly on their machine?
   
   http://rapidshare.de/files/45751720/...5611.m2ts.html

1. can anyone convert the original clip to a full quality DVD resolution version? one that has no lagging frames or jittering?
   

many thanx, everyone

mobiushky

The pc is a result of me being a tinkerer. I like to constantly upgrade and update. I'll be replacing the X1950Xt at some point with a new ATI HD, probably the HD4750.

My profession is electrical engineering. Video editing is a hobby, but I do it a lot now. My daughter is in a youth theater group and I am the designated videographer for the group.

I would call the video flawless. I haven't calibrated my monitors, and I don't watch them full screen a lot, but the quality is as good as the screen on the camera. No lagging frames, no audio sync, no artifacts, nothing. That is ONLY when I have the video on one of the 2 monitors that are fed by the HD3300. When I put the video on the monitor fed by the X1950Xt, it drops frames and has lagging issues and sync problems and eventually the video looks like it's in slow motion but the audio is not. Can't stand that. The ONLY difference is the video card that is doing the decoding. Nero 9 supports AVIVO and so does the HD3300. The X1950Xt does not.

I can't download the video from here at the office. I'll check it out at home.

So about conversion. I don't. That's why I haven't given my 2 cents about it. I don't ever convert my m2ts files to something else. I just watch them as is. When I create videos, I use Pinnacle to edit my raw footage into movies. When I'm done, I will either output the finished movie to BD format on a DVD or reduce the quality to DVD quality and burn it to a DVD. When I'm done, the videos are smooth and no problems. I just finished and distributed about 40 DVDs to parents and have had no complaints. (Actually the opposite, they are all very happy).

I have a PS3 as my main BD player. So When I finish a video and burn it to BD format on a DVD and play it in the PS3, the result is exactly the same as if I hook the camera directly to the TV.

I can't really answer your 2 questions because I don't really have any experience. I don't really buy Nvidia cards anymore. And I don't convert my files. Not sure exactly how to help you there.

__________________
DRM is roughly the equivalent of poking you in the eye, repeatedly.
----------------------------------------------------
Main Setup:
Pioneer PDP-5070HD
Pioneer VSX-80TXV
Dish Vip622
PS3 (120Gb), someone tried to tell me my BD player could play games too, what an idiot.
Logitech Harmony 1000 remote
All Klipsch speakers

Bedroom Setup:
Sony KDR-40XBR4
Dish Vip622
PS3 (80Gb, no BC) I think I have too many PS3s.
Sony Commander RM-AV3000

mobiushky

According to Neros site, here are the requirements for AVCHD playback:

I can tell you from experience, the X1950 is not enough.

__________________
DRM is roughly the equivalent of poking you in the eye, repeatedly.
----------------------------------------------------
Main Setup:
Pioneer PDP-5070HD
Pioneer VSX-80TXV
Dish Vip622
PS3 (120Gb), someone tried to tell me my BD player could play games too, what an idiot.
Logitech Harmony 1000 remote
All Klipsch speakers

Bedroom Setup:
Sony KDR-40XBR4
Dish Vip622
PS3 (80Gb, no BC) I think I have too many PS3s.
Sony Commander RM-AV3000

dcristescu

i know!!!

alas i'm pretty much fit

i have
-2 GB ram
-nvidia geforce 8600m gs with 512mb video ram
and a core 2 duo with 1,66 GHz

but during playback the cpu is not fully busy
so it shouldn't be the cpu

i don't know
pls try the clip at home, see if it's good or bad
and if you can spare it try to convert better than it
- you say you reduce the hd footage to put on dvds - have the same process on the 1 min clip

tx

mobiushky

I downloaded the m2v clip and it's not good. very jerky. I haven't downloaded the m2ts file yet will have to wait until rapishare will let me. I don't want to pay for something I'll never use.

Also sitting here watched a clip of my daughter in karate sparring. Lots of action, panning motion etc. No problems. It's smooth and clear.

__________________
DRM is roughly the equivalent of poking you in the eye, repeatedly.
----------------------------------------------------
Main Setup:
Pioneer PDP-5070HD
Pioneer VSX-80TXV
Dish Vip622
PS3 (120Gb), someone tried to tell me my BD player could play games too, what an idiot.
Logitech Harmony 1000 remote
All Klipsch speakers

Bedroom Setup:
Sony KDR-40XBR4
Dish Vip622
PS3 (80Gb, no BC) I think I have too many PS3s.
Sony Commander RM-AV3000

kamspy

That CPU is just under the minimum specs.

Could be an issue.

Also, I don't think there's a program that directly transcodes AVC-HD into DVD format. So you'd have to transcode it more than once (at least).

The results will never be good with that much lost data. I don't think DVDs will be a viable option when sharing these videos.

Maybe get some 4GB flash sticks and putting the AVC-HD .iso file on them for sharing with friends and family.

I don't think there exists a program that will convert AVCHD into DVD with any quality retained.

Dare

Sorry you're having so much trouble playing your video, dcristescu. Unfortunately, your problem with your laptop could be just about anything, if it isn't your video hardware or drivers. It could be your audio hardware or drivers, or a glitch in your hard drive bus, or disk fragmentation, or bad RAM, or a virus. Try playing it on another friend's computer.

I'm using an nVidia GeForce 7900 GS, which is low end, and it plays perfectly smooth with low CPU utilization. I'm also using the ATi video built into the motherboard in the other room, and it plays absolutely perfectly there too. I can't replicate your problem, even with my budget gear.

FWIW, that's how your video was shot. I didn't change the resolution. That's just how interlaced video works. The way I encoded the 'separated fields' clip gives you the same result as what the video hardware would have produced by deinterlacing the interlaced footage, if it was working properly. I just did the deinterlacing step on the encoding end, and gave the hardware a break. That's why I said they should look the same. There's no reason they wouldn't.

It's pretty difficult to make a computer deinterlace desktop video at all, much less properly. They'll deinterlace DVDs just fine, but the player is a canned environment that you're not allowed access to for other things. I think you're better off encoding with separated fields, just for compatibility.

All you have to do is get your playback bugs worked out.

__________________
LG GGC-H20L Super Multi Blue Blu-ray & HD DVD ROM Drive
58 31