Comments

astral_supreme wrote on 10/10/2002, 1:59 AM
Im just curious....what encoder do you think is better than the main concept?
fetch wrote on 10/10/2002, 2:53 AM
To be honest I'm not quite sure, but I've been having problems where media player brings up an error when I try to 'seek' on MPEG-2 files that were encoded using TMPGEnc. Also I encoded a file last night in VV3 to MPEG-2 using the built in MainConcept and I can honestly say that the quality is no where as good as TMPGEnc (blocky, grainy scenes). But this is just my opinion and others in this forum may agree/disagree.



jetdv wrote on 10/10/2002, 9:34 AM
I would agree with this UNTIL I changed the setting in the Main Concept encoder. One change that MUST be made is the "Quality" slider. Mine was defaulted on 15. It MUST be on 31. Other changes to make include:

Change the minimum bit rate from 192,000. Mine is now set to 2,000,000 and a maximum of 8,000,000. The average is changed depending on the length of the video. Also, change the DC Coeffecient to 10 bit.

With these changes, I believe the Main Concept encoder equals or exceeds the output of TMPGenc.
astral_supreme wrote on 10/10/2002, 8:27 PM
Thanks for the info.....I to have captured "grainy" but still have hope and will try these settings. Camera=canon xl1s and radeon capture card. 800 mhz processor.
MCTech wrote on 10/11/2002, 2:37 PM
Hi,

The only MainConcept codec installed at the system level is the MPEG decoder (not the encoder). The decoder will not directly interfere with any other company's MPEG encoder. If you are having encoding problems, my guess is that they are decoder-related. For example, if you are re-encoding an existing MPEG file with another MPEG encoder, that encoder will need to decode the frames. If the encoder has trouble reading from our decoder, it might not decode them with the quality they should have. Our decoder is a standard DirectShow filter, so any program should be able to access it.

Since there do seem to be issues with other products that can't access our decoder, we are looking into ways to rectify this.

The problem is that whenever a company develops a DirectShow MPEG decoder, it is necessary to assign it a priority, or "merit". This determines how likely it is to be used by any program needed MPEG decoding services. Our is set to a relatively high merit so that it will always be used in Sonic Foundry products. The reason for this is to eliminate potential issues that could come from using other decoders. For example, if someone was using Company X's decoder and the quality was bad, that person might think that Vegas is encoding poorly -- when in fact it's the decoder that is the problem.

We're working on a couple of possible ways around this issue. I'll keep you posted shortly.

Mark Bailey
MainConcept
fetch wrote on 10/12/2002, 1:02 AM
Mark, thanks heaps for that information. One thing I noticed when I encoded an avi to mpeg2 using TMPGenc and then playing it in Windows Media Player 8.0, I was unable to use the 'seek' progress bar to move to a scene. When I went into file >>properties of WMP, it displayed the Audio & Video Codec as MainConcept. Before installing VV3 it use display Cyberlink Codecs (powerdvd).
I got around the problem by doing the following:

Rename these 2 files in your Sonic Foundry Folder (normally located here:
D:\Program Files\Sonic Foundry\Shared Plug-Ins\File Formats\MCMPEG)
mcdsmpeg.ax
mcspmpeg.ax

Now my mpeg2 files use the Cyberlink Codecs and I'm able to seek.

Are you able to tell what affect(if any) renaming those 2 files will have on the Mainconcept decoder/encoder.

Thanks again.
MCTech wrote on 10/13/2002, 7:12 PM
Hi,

Renaming those two files won't affect the encoder, and the renaming does effectively disable the decoder.

There is one possible problem. Those files are registered in the system, so they should really be unregistered instead of doing this. We are evaluating how to best achieve this -- for example, whether to create a utility for this or to simply give "raw" instructions for unregistering them. In the meantime, I don't think there should be any harm done by having them registered and renamed.

More details coming shortly....

Mark
MainConcept
SonyTSW wrote on 10/13/2002, 10:30 PM
Vegas can handle the unregistration for you. Just drag and drop those files into Vegas, then click No to unregister them. Should you want to register them again later, drag and drop them into Vegas and then click Yes to register them.

Caution: Be very careful about what files you have selected to unregister, as you are making them unavailable to other applications on your system as well.
fetch wrote on 10/14/2002, 1:46 AM
SonicTSW, I'm a little confused, what files are you referring to that I drag & drop into Vegas?. Where do I drag & drop to (timeline?).

SonyTSW wrote on 10/14/2002, 11:48 PM
Drag and drop those .ax files that were mentioned above (mcdsmpeg.ax and mcspmpeg.ax). Just drop them onto the timeline, Vegas treats them specially (no, they won't become part of your Vegas project).