10-16-10 - Image Comparison Part 10 - x264 Retry

Well I've had a little bit more success.

I still can't get x264 to do full range successfully; or maybe I did, but then I can't figure out how to make the decoder respect it.

I think the thing to do is make an AVISynth script containing something like :

AviSource("r:\my_soup.avi")
ConvertToYV12( matrix="pc.709")

The pc YV12's are supposed to be the full 0-255 ones, and then on the x264 command like you also do "--fullrange on --colormatrix bt709" , which are just info tags put into the stream, which theoretically the decoder is supposed to see so that it can do the inverse colorspace transform correctly, but that doesn't seem to be working. Sigh!

One difficulty I have is that a lot of programs don't handle these one frame videos right. MPlayer refuses to extract any frames from it, Media Player Classic won't show me the one frame. FFmpeg does succeed in outputting the one frame, so its what I'm using to decode right now.

Anyway these are the some of the links that don't actually provide an answer :

Convert - Avisynth
Re FFmpeg-user - ffmpeg & final cut pro best format question
new x264 feature VUI parameters - Doom9's Forum
MPlayer(1) manual page
Mark's video filters
libav-user - Conversion yuvj420P to RGB24
H.264AVC intra coding and JPEG 2000 comparison
H.264 I-frames for still images [Archive] - Doom9's Forum
FFmpeg-user - ffmpeg & final cut pro best format question
FFmpeg-user - Converting high-quality raw video to high-quality DVD video
FFmpeg-devel - MJPG decoder picture quality
FFmpeg libswscaleoptions.c Source File
YCbCr - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

log rmse :

ms-ssim-scielab :

There's still a large constant error you can see in the RMSE graph that I believe is due to the [16-235] problem.

It should not be surprising that --tune stillimage actually hurts in both our measures, because it is tuning for "psy" quality in ways that we don't measure here. In theory it is actually the best looking of the three.

NOTE : This is counting the sizes of the .x264 output including all headers, which are rather large.

1:

call x264 -o r:\t.mkv r:\my_soup.avs --preset veryslow --tune psnr %*
call ffmpeg -i t.mkv -sws_flags +bicubic+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int -vcodec png tf.png

2:

call ffmpeg -sws_flags +bicubic+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int+full_chroma_inp -i my_soup.avi -vcodec libx264 -fpre c:\progs\video_tools\ffmpeg-latest\presets\libx264-lossless_slow.ffpreset r:\t.mkv
call ffmpeg -sws_flags +bicubic+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int+full_chroma_inp -i r:\t.mkv -vcodec png r:\tf.png

I think I'll just write my own Y4M converter, since having my own direct Y4M in/out would be useful for me outside of this stupid test.

ADDENDUM : well I did.

added to the chart now is x264 with my own y4m converter :

I actually was most of the way there with the improved ffmpeg software scaler flags. I was missing the main issue - the reason it gets so much worse than our jpegfnspaq line at high bit rate is because "fns" is short for "flat no sub" and the no sub is what gets you - all subsampled codecs get much worse than non-subsampled codecs at high bit rates.

Even using my own Y4M converter is a monstrous fucking pain in the ass, because god damn FFMPEG won't just pass through the YUVJ420P data raw from x264 out to a Y4M stream - it prints a pointless error and refuses to do it. That needs to be fixed god damn it. The workaround is to make it output to "rawvideo" with yuvj420p data, and then load that same raw video but just tell it it has yuv420p data in it to get it to write the y4m. So my test bat for x264 is now :

call dele r:\t.*
call dele r:\ttt.*
c:\src\y4m\x64\release\y4m.exe r:\my_soup.bmp r:\t.y4m
r:\x264.exe -o r:\t.mkv r:\t.y4m --fullrange on --preset veryslow --tune psnr %*
call ffmpeg.bat -i r:\t.mkv -f rawvideo r:\ttt.raw
call ffmpeg.bat -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 1920x1200 -f rawvideo -i r:\ttt.raw r:\ttt.y4m
c:\src\y4m\x64\release\y4m.exe r:\ttt.y4m r:\ttt.bmp
namebysize r:\ttt.bmp r:\t.mkv r:\xx_ .bmp

The big annoyance is that I have the resolution hard-coded in there to make rawvideo work, so I can't just run it on arbitrary images.

FYI my_y4m is currently just doing PC.601 "YUV" which is the JPEG YCbCr. I might add support for all the matrices so that it can be a fully functional y4m converter.

I was going to use the Y4M reader/write code from MJPEGTOOLS , but it looks like it's fucking GPL which is a cancerous toxic license, so I can't use it. (I don't actually mind having to release my source code, but it makes my code infected by GPL, which then makes my code unusable by 90% of the world).