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TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress BBS [ Sorted by thread creation date ]
Since my aged Athlon X2 needs > 13 hours to transcode a Full HD h.264/VC1 stream to PAL MPG2 with VBR/2passes, I considered buying a Spursengine card (Leadtek) and the TmpgEnc Plugin. However some reports here and there indicate that the encoder settings are somewhat limited when using the Spursengine plugin and also the resulting quality is worse. It also looks suspicious that the CPUs used for comparison are low end to mid range and that the test settings always include additional filters. Besides only numbers for CBR encoding are given and there's no word about limitations or quality issues.
So in a nutshell:
1) How many frames per second will the Spursegine plugin approximately reach for transcoding Full HD h.264/VC1 streams to PAL MPG2 with VBR (1 pass and 2 passes) and high quality settings?
2) Is the quality comparable to that reached by the CPU encoder with the same (or if not possible: high) settings?
3) Is 2 pass VBR encoding possible at all with the Spursengine plugin?
4) Can the motion prediction settings be influenced with the plugin and if not: which is a comparable (quality wise) setting for the CPU encoder?
5) Is scaling done by the Spursengine or the CPU? If it's done by the Spursengine: are all scaling filters (e.g. Lanczos) available?
Sorry can't answer all your questions because but I know that SpursEngine is only capable of 1 pass encoding. If you prefer quality over speed, then you will need to use CPU encoding.
Scaling is done by SpursEngine when you are upscaling SD to HD using the Super Resolution function. I believe it's a proprietary scaling filter that you can't change.
Keep in mind that these are not limitations of the plug-in, but of the SpursEngine hardware itself. Any computer or software that uses SpursEngine will have the same limitations.
Thanks for the reply. Anyway, I decided to update my system to a Core i7-920 (@3.15GHz) in the meantime and now the conversion flies. It's a speedup of at least factor 5-6 compared to my X2 4200+ with the same quality settings.
I didn't do a fair comparison with exactly the same stream, but my last conversion of an h.264 Full-HD movie to MPGEG2 PAL needed only 1h30min with 2-pass VBR and "high" motion prediction setting.
Admittedly, the update was about 600€ while the Spursengine + Plugin would have been around 230€ I think, but I figure the value for the money is still much higher even if the general system speedup (+increased RAM size) due to the upgrade and the lesser quality settings of the Spursengine are ignored.
Indeed I can barely remember a performance boost of this dimension in any of my last harware upgrades. I guess the only one to come close was that from a 486-33 to a P90 back in the old days.
The video I need to convert is either 1920 * 1080 interlaced (from a AVCHD camcorder) or 1440 * 1080 interlaced (from HDV camcorder).
I want to achieve very high quality at about 12 Mbps.
I would expect H.264 to be the best format (best quality, future-proof standard); however I am a bit frustrated of my results so far compared with WMV9 Advanced Profile (VC1) at the same bitrate ! My perception is that while VC1 gives a somewhat softer image compared to H.264, it does a better job at keeping the details of blurred backgrounds or areas with low contrast ! Yes: for me with full HD at 12 Mbps, H.264 looks somewhat crisper/sharper on foregrounds and contrasted objects, but shows more artefacts (blocky patterns, loss of detail) in the shades and soft backgrounds, and this makes the image globally a bit less appealing to me.
I use H.264 with default settings, except 2 B-frames and CABAC.
I guess I can improve that by fine-tuning some encoder settings, but I find the TMPGEnc Xpress 4 help files lacking good info.
Any suggestions to achieve the best results with interlaced HD video with H.264 (and prove me that it is equivalent or better than VC1) ?
are you using spurs engine h.264 or the normal h.264 in tmpgenc4 ?? But for HD either 1920 or 1440 by 1080. i use 16Mb/s H.264 and the results are fantastic, i think you should just up your bitrate a little try 16MB/s and you'll be fine. for 720p i use 8MB to 11. But then again i like a very clean/crisp image.
There must be something fundamentally wrong with the settings I use, or the setup, because at 12 Mbps, the same clip looks very good with VC-1 and "awful" with MP4 AVC (using the built-in TMPGEnc Xpress 4 encoder i.e. Mainconcept); when I say awful, I mean the kind of result I would expect from a 6 Mbps bitrate, not 12 !
And there seems to be a consensus on the Internet to say that H.264 (AVC) should be equal or better than VC-1 at any bitrate.
Will try a test with X264 and see what I get from that.
As a side note, I have the same difference (in favour of VC-1) with SD material at lower bitrates (1 - 2 Mbps): MP4 AVC looks somewhat sharper for contrasted foregound objects, but really awfully blocky for textured/blurry backgrounds and degrades. Strange b/c the general feedback is that H.264 is less prone to blocking artefacts than VC-1 in the same circumstances....
Hello,
I now you have Firecoder blu (based on spurs engine). For normal dvd pal (sd) bit rate 3000 kb/s is good? The quality of image in normal tv color, not plasma not lcd, is good like a commercial dvd?
i would only have the cuda option on if you are actually using it ( and you only use cuda for filter options, like sharpening,resizing, ect ) if you are simply encoding i would turn it off as it can make your encode slower. i turn it off and use the spurs plugin by its self.
I'm using tmpgenc4 w/ spurs engine but there are some settings i would love to have that include :
*2 pass variable bit rate ( with spurs hardware mpeg2/avc H.264 encoding)
*2 pass constant bit rate ( with spurs hardware mpeg2/avc H.264 encoding)
*The ability to set any resolution, and not just choose from the avaliable resolutions
*Better quality when using lower bitrates. Encoding SD video using avc H.264 hardware encoding is unacceptable under 5Mb/s [using avc at low bitrates is why h.264 is a chosen codec]. (Although this may be greatly imporoved if the 2pass constant/variable bitrate was implemented using 2-3 Mb/s).
*the abiliy to output avc H.264 hardware encoding with different audio formats not just AAC eg: dolby digital(AC3),uncompress audio(PCM), MP3... ect
*when exporting as Mpeg2 hardware encoding NTSC dvd the ability to export as 3:2 pulldown playback. So 23.976p is played back as 29.97i
*Motion search precision fucntion to be implemented into with spurs hardware mpeg2/avc H.264 encoding
If any of these are in an update, i'm sure more people with buy this product and those who have it like me will get ALOT more out of it.
Regards Martin Wichtmann (africanmarty@hotmail.com).
i recieved a reply ( i sent this same message to the tmpgecn people ) and it reads :
"Unfortunately this is not possible with the current hardware implementation of the SpursEngine. All the settings currently available are what the SpursEngine processor is capable of and since it is a wiredsystem it is not possible to disgress. Maybe a future implementation will provide a more flexible approach into encoding but for now this is all we have."
If the dvd has to 2 audio streams, for example normal soundtrack + audio commentary. Is there a way to keep both audio streams when converting to Divx?
I know TMPGEnc Express does interpolation in deinterlacing.
What I'm wondering is if I'm converting some 15fps video to 30fps... will TMPGEnc Express just double existing frames? Or will it generate new intermediate ones?
I think if you're going from 15 fps interlaced to 30fps progressive, then it will generate new frames. But if you're going 15fps progressive to 30fps progressive, it will probably just double existing frames. You'd probably have to go from 15fps progressive to 30fps interlaced for it to generate truly "new" frames...they'll just be interlaced frames though.
I've only done 30fps interlaced to 60fps progressive and it looks great.
I've bought an MP4 player a time a go. It's a generic model from the supermarket here in Belgium (Bluesky). This MP4-player was bundled with a program "Avi Converter". You have tu use this program to convert a video to the right codec, resolution, etc. But I'm not satisfied with the results of this program (Sound is not at the same time as the video,...). So I want to use TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress for this job. But I don't know which settings I have to configure. I've uploaded a small video: http://www.2shared.com/file/6558211/7839e988/iPhone_Commercial_Parody_The_Daily_Buzz.html This video is converted with "Avi Converter". Can someone tell me which settings I have to configure?
What kind of MP4 player is it? As in the make and model number? Knowing what it's specs are will help determine the best video format and settings. Did it come with an instruction manual or is there a company name and model number anywhere?
Just going from your AVI, it's XviD, 20 fps, 320x240, video bitrate 310 kb/s, audio is MPEG-2, 128kb/s stereo CBR.
what are the results for a MacPro System? There are two models, the Quad Core Nehalem Single Processor 2.66 Ghz and the eight core dual Processor 2,26 GHz,.. Anyone tried this configuration? If so, what OS do you use?
Does the stnadard NVIDIA graphics card support CUDA? It´s a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB.
Is it possible to use the WinFast accellerator board?
The GeForce GT 120 is on the list. However, be advised that not all cards have been tested with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress so download the trial first and see if it works before you buy it.
Trial Download: http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/download/te4xp.html
Are you talking about the WinFast PxVC1100? You can use it with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress as long as you have the SpursEngine Plug-in which is sold separately (unless you buy the bundles). http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te4xp_spurs.html
I´ve done some testing with a Mac Pro System running BootCamp and WinXP Pro 32. The System is a dual xeon 2.26 GHz and it has 20 gigabytes RAM (Win XP uses only 2 GByte or so) and the GeForce GT 120 graphics card. This system is actually used as a final cut pro editing system under OSX an so it has a AJA Kona LHi HD capture card and a 8x1 TByte external Sonnet RAID; these weren´t used during the tests.
TMPGEn 4 runs fine on this system. I own the 3.0 version running on an rather old AMD type PC; so one can expect major speed improvements. In fact, i tried to encode the same 90 minute SD movie on both machines with identical settings; MPEG 2 PAL 16:9, 5.7 MBits average, highest motion search precision and some noise reduction (set to small, about 35 units) The old pc finished after more than 26 hours; the Mac Pro under Windows in 2 hours and 40 minutes.
However, i was unable to activate CUDA. I tried installing all the latest drivers from the Nvidia homepage. Still showing CPU = 100%, CUDA = 0%. I haven´t had the chance to run a test with the leadtek accelerator board. but i will try this in the near future. maybe the grphic card in the mac is just a little to weak to support encoding systems.
When prefiltering some HDTV Material with the noise filter, the spatial filter works fine, but the temporal filter immediately turns the video to black, if the noise reduction amount is more than zero. maybe this is a bug .(Input file was a HDTV 1080 25i QuickTime with AJA Codec.
Hi I have a MKV file which opens in TMPGEnc, I want to convert to AVCHD in TMPGEnc 4.0 Express. Can anyone tell me the settings or can't this be done, does this program only import AVCHD?
I think to output AVCHD with XPress 4 is not possible yet, but may be in future could be, I recommend you to output with Blu-ray output template or mpeg-4 AVC in HD for a high quality files.
Thank you for your answer, I now Canoous brand is very very good, I work whit edius, gratefull. Why only 5-10 % ? The problem is the cpu?
Whit your firecoder how many time I will save?
Thank you Ottudali for your test,
you are very kindly. I would buy Winfast Pxvc1100 to convert only Mpeg2 to H.264 files like your test. I think the time to transcoding is similar to your firecoder blu.
SpursEngine focuses on speed rather than quality and its built-in encoder is not as good as TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress' encoder. I'm guessing test 2 took longer as well?
If you want maximum quality, don't use SpursEngine. Use the BluRay output profile as you did in test 2 and choose 2-pass encoding, VBR.
If you really want to use SpursEngine, there aren't that many things you can do. You can try changing the DC component precision to 10 bit, and you can try decreasing the GOP maximum frames number under the Advanced tab, and I think that's about it. Bitrate is at the maximum by default I believe. You can also try constant bitrate, but that will make your output file huge.