Quaddicted.com Forum

Spirit

Administrator

Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Random notes:

Obviously trilinear filtering is a must and anti-aliasing is a good addition.

640x480 is good.

webm looks good with "-b 2500k", comparable to H264 but ~1/3 bigger. 1500k should be good enough for most uses. Obviously H264 beats everything but it is evil. 2 pass with webm did nothing to improve.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

That's did not work as intended. ffmpeg uses the -b only as rough(!) guide I guess. 1500k has up to 2500k in it.

Don't forget to use a lighter gamma (hello negke). gamma 0.7 works well.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

ffmpeg -ab 128k -i demo.avi -vcodec libx264 -vpre medium -b 1500k demo.mkv

gamma 0.7
trilinear textures

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

To capture 1920x1080 on a smaller desktop, use nvidia-settings Display Configuration -> Advanced -> Panning (2000x1300 works well, otherwise if capturing a window part of the image will be cropped).

ffmpeg -i cap.avi -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k -vcodec libx264 -preset slow cap.slow.mkv
works well...

Let's me capture in 75% realtime. Encoding takes a long time. Much too long. 2fps. Medium looks about the same, 4fps...

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Increasing gamma in ffmpeg: -filter mp=eq2=1.2:1:0
(gamma, contrast, brightness)

Looks very bad. So rather capture with different gamma if you need it.

And a note for myself. Encoding like above (gamma 1 captured in-game, straight encode to H264) looks very much like gamma 1 in-game.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Note to self: Requiem does not record sound properly over loads. Video is fine.

"ossrecord -s48000 -b16 -c2 -d/dev/oss/oss_hdaudio0/loop0 test.wav" only works once, "soundoff && soundon" resets it.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

To cut off everything after 10m11s:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -t 00:10:11 -acodec copy -vcodec copy output.mkv

Sprit

Guest

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Note to self: requiem does capture with correct gamma in window mode, -gamma 0.7 DOES capture with that.

edit: It also seems to work in fullscreen. I do not remember why it did not do that earlier.

negke

Moderator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Still too dark :]

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Concat with ffmpeg is a pain in the ass. Avidemux does it well.

-----

I am I/O bound on capturing. ~60MB/s on sda SAMSUNG HD154UI, ~80MB/s on sdb WDC WD20EARX. CPU and GPU are relaxed when capturing. CPU is 100% when sitting in the console. Someone gift me a SSD please.

Encoding is CPU bound since I use x264. AMD Phenom II X4 945 95W (C3) could be ~100% faster. Someone gift me a better CPU please. http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cp … x264&lang=

Uploading is OH LOOK 6MBit/s! Nevermind all above. :(

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

To append multiple files in Avidemux, drag and drop them from a file browser window.

Appending mkv files works fine.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

AMD 240:
ffquake q1tm2_lev-normal-SpiritQuaddict.avi
real    24m13.629s
user    42m32.007s
sys    0m22.882s

Sprit

Guest

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

i5-3470

real    6m19.205s
user    23m41.643s
sys    0m5.540s

wow :))

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

I cannot append with avidemux anymore, sound gets borked. :(

"mencoder middle_____-Mar-23-2013-18*.mkv -oac copy -ovc copy -o test.mkv" = broken

The -i filelist concat demuxer version of ffmpeg seems to work. http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/How% … es#demuxer . The "name|name2" is NOT the demuxer!

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Or not, the ffmpeg way gives me problems in mplayer when it gets to the quickloading bits. mplayer stops there. vlc plays them but shows a brief black frame. Maybe that file is bad?

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

If you are concatting with ffmpeg, make sure the input files have the same audio characteristics. My problem was that I had files with both 44.1 and 48 kHz.

negke

Moderator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Whatever you use for the audio, please lower the volume/normalization settings by at least 1/3.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

I compared to other Quake videos on Youtube and it seems ok.

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

On second thought, you are right. volume was set to 1 where 0.7 is the default. I will use that from now on. Thanks!

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Huh, capturing video on a headless server is easy!

XAUTHORITY= # maybe not needed?
Xvfb :2 -screen 0 800x600x24 &
export DISPLAY=:2.0
darkplaces-sdl +playdemo 1 +cl_capturevideo 1 # ugly dp video capture as test

Audio is missing as the server has no soundchip. Maybe there is a way to use a dummy device?

I did install "xorg-server-xvfb xorg-twm xorg-xclock xterm xf86-video-sis xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit xorg-apps", some of which were probably not needed.
Seems like other engines like to use XFree86-VidModeExtension which is not available with xvfb. Tried so far: tyr-quake, tyr-glquake, requiem

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

On debian jessie, even in lxc

aptitude install xvfb libgl1-mesa-dri libegl1-mesa-drivers quake darkplaces mesa-utils

xvfb-run -s "-screen 0 640x480x24" darkplaces +playdemo 1 +cl_capturevideo 1

For sound load modprobe snd-dummy on the host, restart the container. :o)

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Sensible video encoding settings for Quake

Triggered by GoT:

Testing 10 bit and aq-mode=3 for darker scenes.

ffmpeg -i terra4-Jan-06-2012-181058-SpiritQuaddict.avi -ss 0 -t 120 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 20 terra4.mkv

with combinations of

-pix_fmt yuv420p10le

vs

-pix_fmt yuv420p

and

-x264-params aq-mode=3

vs none.

Conclusion: Nothing spectacular. 10bit was ~2% smaller but also looked worse in some places, better in others. aq-mode=3 indeed makes details in dark places better but also adds almost 20% of file size. Just choosing a crf +1  leads to similar improvements... Spirit, stop wasting your time on this kind of stuff again. ;o)