@Warp, fair enough, give me an example of an obscure standardized codec that can compete with Mpeg 4 AVC quality.
@sgrunt, I produced a sine wave to match the duration of my Ninja Gaiden test video, encoded and packed with the video. When I opened it via directshowsource with Avisynth and extracted the audio, there was a weird pre-echo of sine and then silence at the beginning with a total length of 59 ms and 22 ms of silence at the end of the file, when truncated the audio track would be at its original length.
It looks like you werent full of it after all. Interesting. Could this be corrected on the ffdshow audio decoder by adding 59 ms delay? Not that its a big deal anyway. I cant notice the subtle delay.
MPEG 1 has been superseded by MPEG 2, MPEG 2 has been superseded by MPEG 4 part 2, MPEG 4 part 2 has been superseded by MPEG 4 part 10 which is H 264. They are direct ancestors of one another. Using an outdated codec that has been the state-of-the-art standard a long time ago as an example of an obscure codec that you can find on the ISO/ITU website is a pretty retarded argument to make IMO.
And yes, that delay exists. Measured[1] at 2624 samples for NeroAACEnc -q 0.50 and 4672 samples for NeroAACEnc -q 0.25.
Prove it. Nero encoder only please.
I don't really understand what does it matter if it might not be a standard officially recognized by some international standardization committee. What's important is not that it's standard, but that it's popular and widely supported. (I'm pretty sure you could search an official international standard for a really obscure audio format which basically no media player supports. The argument "but it's standard" wouldn't be of much help.)
If a standardized format is obscure its probably because it once was a standard a very long time ago, like MPEG 1. Independent works like OGG are not reliable because they are built by enthusiastic hobbyists, not professionals. MPEG on the other hand always works to build and improve upon new standards that are guaranteed to be widely supported and continuously developed.
Does Vorbis have the advanced features of AAC, like SBR, or parametric stereo? No? Thats what I thought.
Vorbis is the equivalent of what the Snow codec is to x264. Its a great idea and all and good to see so many young people today into intellectual hobbies like these, but wavelet codecs have failed to compete with the impressive quality that the official DCT-based H264 standard has demonstrated. So I find it foolish to support it until it can demonstrate otherwise.
Never mind, I figured it out. I was still using the outputs from the NHML Transform script instead of following the instructions for the NHML Fixup script. I assumed there was a common denominator, looks like I was wrong.
Thank you Ikari for this great tool.
Because you have helped me, I feel it is my duty to give something back to this site. I can only offer you my sincere advice to not use the low quality setting you are currently using for AAC. Use -q 0.35 instead of 0.25. If you must use 0.25, add -LC to disable SBR whos artifacts especially stand out for the kind of waveforms NES audio has.
And please just ditch Vorbis and OGM entirely, it SUCKS.
Are you sure? The desync is quite subtle (but definitely there, at least with some players).
Positive. MP3 does have a delay, not much, but a delay nonetheless which makes it a bitch to do a waveform subtraction for quality comparison because you have to know exactly how many samples at the beginning to delete to allign it with the original wav. With AAC I have never had that problem.
If you did, you are pretty damn special, because I couldnt screw up an AAC audio track even if I genuinely tried.
On command line (you can also use batch files):
lua NHMLFixup-v7.lua <video> <audio> <timecodes> [tvaspect]
Yes, Vorbis is a horrible and non-standard codec. I dont know what you're talking about with AAC needing to be delayed to sync or whatever. I have muxed hundreds if not thousands of videos to MP4 with AAC, both HE, LC and Parametric Stereo and none of them were ever out of sync. The only time it was out of sync was when I tried the DeDup method you guys seemed to have moved onto here.
Anyway, can we please get back to the original topic. How do I use NHML Fixup with Lua? I have the .lua file, what do I do now? Double-clicking does nothing and I have no idea what Lua is.
MKV is not standard, MP4 is and I follow the standard. You wouldnt hear jiggles in AAC audio if you disabled the SBR feature by adding -LC to the script. OGG should be abandoned, as it is a horrid format.
From your very own written guide which tells me to do:
MP4Box video.mp4 -nhml 1
MP4Box audio.mp4 -nhml 1
NHMLTransform.bat -i video_track1.nhml -t times.txt -o video2.nhml -ia audio_track1.nhml -oa audio2.nhml
MP4Box -add video2.nhml -add audio2.nhml -new encode.mp4
I didn't change it, that is the default on the DeDup help file. You guys dont even have a guide for DeDup, but whatever, I have changed it to yours, re-encoded and tried again. I'm still getting Error importing audio2.nhml: Bad Parameter. Why?
It used to be so much simpler in the past. If it wasn't for nesvideos, I never would have been the knowledgable encoder that I am right now, and I have been made aware of the new --deldup feature but it doesn't seem to be available in x264 but in other codecs.
I have figured out the Dedup avisynth plugin (which you guys have no guide on) but I can't figure out how to make my MP4 vfr. I have the timecodes and I tried tc2mp4 but then the muxed audio was out of sync and I couldn't find out why.
I understand that there are two tools authored by people on this site, NHML trasnform and NHML fixup. I have no idea how to use fixup because the post assumes I'm familiar with Lua, which I'm not. WIth NHML transform I have been getting a "bad parameter" error, first with audio in my ninja gaiden encode and then with video on dragon warrior encode.
Help would be appreciated, and please return the guides to how they were, simple and step-by-step, not the confusing and fragmented mess it is now.
Thanks.
