Allegiance Training Videos - Google Video

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 11:42 am

i'm not sure about adding music to them..

perhaps 2 versions, one with music, one without, then we can decide which is better.

General_Freak · Post by **General_Freak** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:26 pm

Don't add music, to keep the file size down.

Grimmwolf_GB · Post by **Grimmwolf_GB** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:33 pm

Holy moly, what did you do with the divx vid. It froze my system until the video ended. I could not even move my mouse! I have a 2400+AMD, so it is not too shabby, yet the video just killed my computer...

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 1:21 pm

The colours in the vid are a bit odd. Screenshot

QUOTE Holy moly, what did you do with the divx vid. It froze my system until the video ended. I could not even move my mouse! I have a 2400+AMD, so it is not too shabby, yet the video just killed my computer...[/quote]

CPU utilization is at ~10% for me. I'm running a lower end dual-core Opteron, so I don't think its your processor Grimm. Maybe something with your codec(s)?

jess_i_74 · Post by **jess_i_74** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:43 pm

Have a link:

http://share.edge-of-reality.de/GreenHawk/AMP2/

parcival · Post by **parcival** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 4:44 pm

For game capturing you can try Krut.
Free, open source and alive project. Get the latest release here.

For video stream compression I use X.264 (free, open source too) as a codec. It is the best AVC codec I have ever used and I tried a lot. Best way to use it is through MeGUI (free,open source too /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" /> you will find it in the same webpage). Since you have a fast machine choose the HQ insane profile (you will get it through the autoupdate of MeGUI) and just modify the bitrate.

For audio I use WinAmp AAC encoder (through MeGUI too, not through WinAmp).

Upload a small video (100MB-200MB, sorry slow connection) somewhere in raw uncompressed format (audio and video) and I'll give you a hint of what I am talking about.

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 8:35 pm

x.264 is insanely good. But you need a matching computer to play it as well. Thats an advantage of the DivX codec - playback is relatively light on the CPU.

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 5:38 am

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Jan 29 2007, 03:35 PM) x.264 is insanely good. But you need a matching computer to play it as well. Thats an advantage of the DivX codec - playback is relatively light on the CPU.

Of the two samples I posted at filefront.com, the WMV is actually better quality. (I could probably wring out some better results from the DivX version.) It's still a bit CPU heavy at 800x600 though. I'll be sure to test these on my 1Ghz box just to make sure. My "play" box is a dual-core Athlon 64; quite speedy!

Regarding music: it probably won't make the filesize much larger. It's more likely to reduce the overall quality of narration though, depending on the music style and levels. Audio compresses very well; I can go all the way to 48Kbit and still get decent audio. Voice is quite compression tolerant.

Regarding the DivX version grinding to a halt... the DivX codec I'm using on my system is DivX 5.2.1 from Pinnacle Studio, though I use VLC (videolan.org) to play most DivX content I create. Maybe you have post-processing enabled?

Regarding Krut... never heard of it; anyone care to share a sample capture from Allegiance? I'm a bit hesitant to break out yet another capture utility now that Fraps is working well.

On the colors: Those are a bit lighter than I expected. I did some heavy gamma correction during the render to make text (chats, etc) legible. I'll probably resort to using the snap-zoom effect to point out onscreen text when necessary, and worry less about overall readability of the text in the video.

So the big question: are those a good quality vs. size tradeoff at 800x600? Any thoughts on the text readibility?

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 5:55 am

Text readability is good. I didn't realize that you did gamma correction on those videos. I use VLC for playback as well.

I did some testing on a 1280x720 video of The Incredibles. Playback on VLC takes ~40% of CPU on my Opteron165 (20% of each core - didn't know VLC was SMP optimized...). Considering the fact that older CPUs might not have things like SSE2 (which help the decodes a lot) or video acceleration of decoding (which help as well (7% in my tests)), we might have to skip that codec.

Your DivX video OTOH is 5% of CPU. /blink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":o" border="0" alt="blink.gif" />

parcival · Post by **parcival** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:24 pm

OK, you can see what I am talking about here.

1024x768 25fps video compressed at 1000kbps with X.264 (a little low but OK quality).
Mono sound at 44KHz at 40kbps using WinAmp AAC.

30secs --> 3.942.743 Bytes

For this file I get no more than 50% CPU utilization to my Mobile AMD Sempron 3100+ (single core at 1.58GHz). Fairly decent given the high resolution.

I think VLC is all you need to play it but I am not sure (I use Media Player Classic, ffdShow and Haali Media Splitter --> All here!).