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Hybrid Encode Script

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Posted: 3/10/2011 1:53 AM
(Edited: 6/23/2011 3:10 PM)

Post subject: Hybrid Encode Script

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

The following is the thread for an AVS script that can produce HD, SD, and 512kb encodes all in one. See here for the actual script and more information. Although I was considered the apparent heir to this script originally created by Flygon, I know very little about encoding and how it works. I simply use it daily on many runs. Some people think my contributions are great, some people think they are terrible, some people think the good outweigh the bad. Simply put, I don't care. I know well that there is no gifted encoder that is going to produce output for this site at the same rate that I do, and even if a huge percentage of my encodes were completely corrupted, getting the many runs that are fine to a vaster audience than people who use torrents or archive.org is essential. I know what I do is helpful, and on a site that is powered by user contributions, you have to take what you get, or do the job yourself. From this point forward, I am giving this script to the community. It is to be maintained by everyone who sees flaws in it. It is to be documented by those who have the knowledge to do so. It is to be used by people like me who think it's a solid script for getting a lot of work done. All support should be addressed in this topic, and I will only help with its usage if it's either here or on the IRC channel, and even still, I'm probably not the most available or knowledgeable person on the subject, so please direct your questions at the community, not my directly. Enjoy!

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 3/10/2011 2:52 AM

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Flygon

Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria

Your avatar is the exact same as one of my former close friends MSN icons. cbell and I had a falling out when Yggdrasil Online died.

Posted: 3/10/2011 2:50 PM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Well, it's a great album. But, let's not get too off topic.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 3/18/2011 7:29 AM

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Flygon

Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria

Well, I'm baffled. Why aren't people posting about how lavish this script is? Because it's lavish!

Posted: 3/18/2011 5:21 PM

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nesrocks

He/Him

Player (247)

Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil

Dehacked once made me a batch file with some parameters for encoding and it helped me a lot. I'm gonna grab this precious script and I'm sure others will too. And count me in the list of people waiting for your package to be released.

aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios

Posted: 3/20/2011 4:37 PM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

FODA wrote:

Dehacked once made me a batch file with some parameters for encoding and it helped me a lot. I'm gonna grab this precious script and I'm sure others will too. And count me in the list of people waiting for your package to be released.

Thank you. Check the first post again for some updates. Also, instead of making a package like I mentioned earlier, me and FerretFaucet are going to attempt to make a program with a GUI that produces high quality encodes based on some easy to make config. I've been around here for about a month, but even I can tell that encoding is much more convoluted than it has to be. I'll keep you posted on this development.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 3/20/2011 8:46 PM

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Scepheo

Player (146)

Joined: 7/16/2009
Posts: 686

If you manage to get a hold of him, I suggest contacting Raiscan. He's been working on somewhat of a web-based automated version of the program you're trying to make. Perhaps he could inform you about the progress he's been making and give you some tips. If I'm not mistaking there is a google code page for the project, if I remember the name I could let you know. Also, if you need any help, I'd be glad to help. I completely lack the patience to finish any TAS longer than 5 minutes, but I enjoy programming and, depending on what language you are going to use, might be able to finally make a proper contribution to the site.

Posted: 3/20/2011 8:48 PM

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Flygon

Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria

Brandon wrote:

I've been around here for about a month, but even I can tell that encoding is much more convoluted than it has to be.

Would you believe me if I said it was even worse before Aktan came along?

Posted: 3/21/2011 10:20 PM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Scepheo wrote:

If you manage to get a hold of him, I suggest contacting Raiscan. He's been working on somewhat of a web-based automated version of the program you're trying to make. Perhaps he could inform you about the progress he's been making and give you some tips. If I'm not mistaking there is a google code page for the project, if I remember the name I could let you know. Also, if you need any help, I'd be glad to help. I completely lack the patience to finish any TAS longer than 5 minutes, but I enjoy programming and, depending on what language you are going to use, might be able to finally make a proper contribution to the site.

I don't see how a web-based system is possible given the nature of the program, but I certainly will try to get in touch with him. Also, I made a small update to the code in the first post.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 3/22/2011 9:34 AM

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Raiscan

Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom

Hi guys, nice to see you all again :) The idea behind my (admittedly ill-worked-on) auto-encoding project is the following:

Take a user's movie file (where 'user' is an actual user OR a tasvideos.org submission page)
Parse and generate subtitles for imprinting from movie file
Assertain ROM used (automation difficult for some movie formats)
Load ROM and movie up with appropriate emulator/settings and capture (limited support in many emulators)
Stop at a certain point (automation difficult)
Send to encoding script to compress optimally
Present to user in meaningful way (as well as any feedback to the program, e.g. "this encode ends too early", "this encode is too blurry" etc.)

At the time of conception, we already had many encoders stepping up and encodes were being created quicker than submissions were being viewed by judges, let alone accepted, and as such development never really took off. So, where would your script fit in? Well... I actually made an avs a while back (which I'm not sure if flygon's script is based on or not) which determined optimum dimensions and quality. The purpose of this was to automate step 6. Your script would be extremely useful as a replacement to this, as it provides greater flexibility than anything I could ever write and provides every single parameter that an automation system would need to alter. Perhaps I should resume my work after all? :)

<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs

Posted: 3/22/2011 6:24 PM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Thanks for your reply. I'm only really interested in making the encoding process simpler, not the dumping / pre-encoding (Subtitle config, etc). Nothing I am proposing is particularly hard, but it requires work from people who can make a good GUI, and considering I mainly do web backend engines, I don't think I am that guy. FerretFaucet seems to be interested in helping with that area, but I think he's a bit preoccupied right now. The main goals are:

Make it easy to create / load config that stores the information used for encoding. This makes it easy to hold onto our encoding information for future use in case something goes wrong. It's pretty silly to save an .avs for every encode.
Make it easy to create / load a queue of processes. For example, I should be able to tell it to create an HD, SD, and 512KB from a particular config file in that order. This way, I can set up fifty dumps for encoding, let it run over a vacation, and come back to see them all done.
Encode based on that queue using a .avs template and a library of files bundled with the installer. Once we have the other steps done and make a prototype using the script in this topic, I suggest that the experts take a look at the template and give their feedback. I'm not writing this program because I'm good at encoding; I'm writing this program because everyone should be using the best script available, and I know we have talented people here to help create this script.

Let me know what you could help with.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 3/22/2011 9:43 PM

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FerretFaucet

Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA

And I'm back in the world of the living! The script is now capable of fully encoding a 512, SD, and HD video with a single click, moving all the files to a subfolder, and performing subsequent cleanup with only a configuration file. I'm currently working on automatic PAR detection and queuing.

Posted: 3/22/2011 9:59 PM

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Nahoc

Editor, Experienced player (860)

Joined: 8/12/2008
Posts: 845
Location: Québec, Canada

Really looking forward to that project!

Posted: 3/23/2011 2:35 AM

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Scepheo

Player (146)

Joined: 7/16/2009
Posts: 686

I suggest you make available some console default settings. The settings that, on average, are best for the given console. This way, someone who doesn't know to much about what each encoding parameter does can simply select PSX (of course, only if they are encoding a PSX movie) and press go. Although this will clearly often result in sub-optimal encodes, these will do just fine for submissions that still need judging. Then the more experienced encoders can create highly compressed movies for the actual publications.

Posted: 4/1/2011 8:00 AM

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FerretFaucet

Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA

Well, I figure after nearly 40 hours of no sleep, now would be the perfect time for a sneak peak of what I've been cooking up. [URL=http://i.imgur.com/hHIX0.png]

[/URL] After several rewrites, I seem to have a solid code base. There are still a lot of kinks to work out, but I figured I might as tell you what IS working:

Fully queued encoding with logging. If an encode fails for any reason but lack of disk space, it moves on to the next encode in your queue with a big friendly error message for you.
Fully configurable settings when it comes to encoding software. Program locations, encode settings, the full shebang. (Well... only if you're handy with INI files at the moment, but that'll improve.)
No past encode settings of yours will be lost again; all the parameters necessary to reconstitute your AVS file will be waiting for you, and ready to encode again at the click of a button.
Easily organizes your encode collection after every encode you do. It can automatically move the files to personalized locations based on the filename and other factors.

So that's the good news. It works. Now for the not so great stuff. There's still a hell of a lot of work to do. I've gotten most of the major features I wanted in there; queuing, automatic PAR detection, automated AVS generation and the sort, but it's far from complete. I certainly need to fix a few things (Such as UI windows being accessible to a non-coder) before I'm going to release an alpha to the community at large. What I'm looking for from you guys are feature requests, UI recommendations (I know mine is horrendous right now; I use it for debugging), criticisms, and anything else you can think of. Thanks guys! Edit: Removed the oversized picture with a linked thumb nail. Second edit: By the way, not an april fools joke. Also, if you're wondering why the percentage in the 512 encode stopped at 12% and continued later, it uses an algorithm to determine if it has enough time to rip and transcode the audio files before the first video encode is done. It continues encoding, it just cuts off on the display.

Posted: 4/1/2011 10:42 AM

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NitroGenesis

He/Him

Editor, Experienced player (556)

Joined: 12/24/2009
Posts: 1873

It autodetects the PAR? :D

YoungJ1997lol wrote:

Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.

Posted: 4/1/2011 10:51 AM

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FerretFaucet

Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA

NitroGenesis wrote:

It autodetects the PAR? :D

Through a bit of hackery, indeed it does!

Posted: 4/6/2011 10:57 PM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Updated; check line 118.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 4/18/2011 11:33 PM

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Dada

Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands

I've made a minor modification to the script to remove the logo code (since I'm using a video logo). Here's the script I'm using. My question: why does it end up with a video of size 1792x1344? The source is 256x224. edit: since I only need 3584x2688 I modified the script again. edit 2: [01:45am] Aktan: dada_: can you do me a favor and mention in that thread that multiple pointresizes hurt?

Posted: 4/18/2011 11:49 PM

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Aktan

Publisher

Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283

Dada wrote:

[01:45am] Aktan: dada_: can you do me a favor and mention in that thread that multiple pointresizes hurt?

Here I'll show some examples. First picture is point resize to 384x336, and then 768x672. Second picture is directly to 768x672. http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2291/15then2.png http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/3843/76666934.png It is very obvious that the second picture is better.

Posted: 4/28/2011 4:08 AM

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Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Are you suggesting an improvement to the script? I'll take it if you have one.

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 6/23/2011 3:23 PM

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Aktan

Publisher

Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283

Changed Lanczos4Resize to Lanczos with taps=2 since 4 is too sharp and introduces a lot of ringing artifacts.

Posted: 6/23/2011 10:26 PM

Quote

Brandon

He/Him

Editor, Player (191)

Joined: 11/21/2010
Posts: 914
Location: Tennessee

Aktan wrote:

Changed Lanczos4Resize to Lanczos with taps=2 since 4 is too sharp and introduces a lot of ringing artifacts.

Oh, an improvement? Well then, you know more about encoding than I do, so I'd be a fool not to use this improved version. I will. Now everyone will use this improved script. See how this makes a lot more sense than a single maintainer?

All the best, Brandon Evans

Posted: 6/25/2011 4:05 AM

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