VFS Blog

The Board Is Back

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:54:18 -0500

The 2ch-style BBS has returned, displacing the "Blog" link above. If you're reading this, I'm assuming you know where the blog is. And no, I'm not interested in putting up a more feature-rich board like phpBB or VBulletin. Such boards are rubbish, and I refuse to use one, let alone admin one.

~bytex64

Things I Have Learned

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:25:06 -0500

I was going through the old episodes, and I was rather astonished at their poor visual quality. Even the "good" versions had blocking artifacts and tons of ring noise. Part of this was my video capture system, but most of it was my inexperience with using encoders. Here's a short list of the classic blunders I've committed:

Capturing directly to MPEG-4 - I naïvely captured footage from my camcorder with lavcodec's MPEG-4 at a paltry 1200kbps with 128kbps MP3 audio. As a result, most of the source footage has blocking and ringing artifacts. Capturing direct to a compressed codec isn't a great idea to begin with, but doing so at a mediocre bitrate is just asking for trouble. If you're targeting YUV 4:2:0 codecs like XviD or H.264, you should be capturing to something like ffvhuff or FFV1 with PCM or FLAC audio. Those are compressed lossless codecs that are efficient on CPU and better on disk space than raw YUV capture.
Editing with MPEG-4 - If you're using a lossy compressed codec for post-processing work, your output will only be as good as your editor's decompressor. Even if it's perfect, decoding soaks up CPU time that could be used for previewing effects. And for codecs like MPEG-4, which is designed for playback, seeking to places other than an I-frame can be slow. Using MP3 audio seems to cause problems with Cinelerra, especially in an AVI container.
Rendering to MJPEG - Even after I had the space to dump gigs of raw YUV, I was still using MJPEG as my final rendering format under the assumption that quality 100 meant lossless encoding. It doesn't. Furthermore, MJPEG uses the RGB color space, which means my footage was being converted from YUV 4:2:0 to RGB and back to YUV 4:2:0 when encoded to XviD. Each colorspace conversion step not only wastes CPU, but loses a small bit of color information.
Not RTFM'ing - There are about ten billion encoder options just for XviD and x264, and I figured that the defaults were fine. Well, a little googling has enlightened me to things like trellis quantization that are turned off by default, but can greatly improve image quality. And for anyone using x264 in FFmpeg, Robert Swain's FFmpeg x264 encoding guide is required reading.

So now that I'm much wiser, I've decided that it would be best to re-render and re-encode the old episodes to bring them technologically in-line with the new episodes. I just got done with the first episode, which is uploading now. It wasn't as straightforward as I thought.

For some segments, I found that Cinelerra had lost important projector/camera keyframing information, and some stuff, like the cinelerra files for the original VFS intro, have likely been lost forever (but I'll bet they're still sitting in Peoria on Jukebox, the computer I used for the first episode). Thankfully, I still had the MJPEG final render. The worst part is that the credits were completely corrupt, and I didn't have the music. So I downloaded another illegal copy of Exotic Birds' "Dance With Me," and re-did the whole thing from scratch. I'm betting you won't notice the difference, though. :)

You can, of course, get the originals from their home on the Internet Archive, but the new and improved versions will make their home here, segmented and H.264 streamed right next to the new ones. I hope you have as much fun re-watching them as I did.

And man, were we a bunch of nerds. :P

~bytex64

We're Back

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:55:10 -0500

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Since the last episode of VFS, nearly everyone involved has graduated and/or moved on. Without them, producing more VFS seemed an impossible task, and I gave up on it. But my experience with my job has taught me an important lesson: On the internet, distance is irrelevant. Amazing things can be done by dedicated people who have never met face to face. So I thought to myself, "Surely there are other semi-talented people out there who would like to help!" I replied to myself, "Of course! And don't call me Shirley!" So I finished the VFS bits I had sitting on my hard drive, threw in some new stuff, and here we are. :)

VFS has also been moved to the Dominion of Awesome. Why did we move? VFS started life as my (and Leech's) project, so it was natural to put it on my website. As VFS grew, many other people got thrown in the mix, and it wasn't entirely mine anymore. That was a good thing. :) The move is a reflection of that change in attitude — VFS has become more than just my pet project.

There are also some organizational changes. Episodes will be, if at all possible, released monthly with an episode number of YEAR.MONTH. The new episode, therefore, is 2008.5. Also, due to the varying formats, each segment is available separately. There is also a flash player that will play the segments in sequence with MPEG-4 AVC streaming video (falling back to crap-ola Flash 6 video if you don't have the latest Flash 9 plugin). There are also RSS feeds for the downloads which should work with your favorite podcast aggregator, or with a plain-old aggregator if you like to download things manually.

Some folks may have noticed that I'm actually releasing 2008.5 a day early. Frankly, I've got everything in place, and I'm tired of waiting. Mark this day well, it may be the last time VFS is ahead of schedule. :P There's also still a lot to be done with the site, like add a forum, move the old VFS stuff here, and figure out a way to coordinate work over the internet. That last part is going to be the hard one.

So watch the new episode, let us know what you think (mail to vfs@bytex64.net), and if you're feeling creative, check the contribute page.

~bytex64