On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, Dik Takken wrote: > > -q 4 is the practical limit with 5 being the usual value used. > > You mean that -q 4 can also trigger encoder bugs? I would like to get this
Ooops - I was unclear on that point. >= 4 is fine - by "practical limit" I intended to say that "4 or greater has not been observed to have problems". Values less than 4 (i.e. <=3) have been reported to have errors. You have mentioned seeing artifacts (induced by the errors in the DCT/iDCT) at -q 1 and 2. There has been a report or two mentioning the same problem with -q 3 (at least on IA32 systems). The Altivec routines have code to check for overflow and then redo the calculations to avoid the problem. > one straight: Which q values can lead to encoding *errors*, not artifacts? errors == artifacts in this case. The arithmetic overflow/truncation is not only an error but it causes visible artifacts. > I guess this method is safe, because it does not push mpeg2enc into > encoding really close to the b value, which leads to artifacts and spikes. It's not that the peak and average are too close (or the same). It's that the quantizer scale ('qscale') at -q 1 thru 3 can cause arithmetic errors (overflow) in the MMX/SSE routines. There will always be spikes until a two pass (or back up and retry) method of encoding is used. > > think there is a mention about "values below 4 are extremes" in the > > 'howto'. > > It said I should only use those values when I know what I'm doing. Well, I :-) > didn't because it didn't say what would happen. :) Now I know. :D It does > tell about the danger of artifacting, but it does not mention that it can > lead to encoding errors. Hmmm, "errors" in encoding (often) show up as visible artifacts ;) Artifacts are things present in the output that are not part of the original input, in other word: error. It's better to leave the qscale at a more conservative level and process the data before it enters the encoding process. An 'unsharp' filter might be one thing to try (don't think there is one at the moment - I have some notes based on the Gimp unsharp filter but I haven't created any working code yet). Cheers, Steven Schultz ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Sybase ASE Linux Express Edition - download now for FREE LinuxWorld Reader's Choice Award Winner for best database on Linux. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5588&alloc_id=12065&op=click _______________________________________________ Mjpeg-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mjpeg-users