Choppy Playback Of Anime


Nekki

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May 9, 2005
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I'm a fairly new GP32 owner, and although I've had a fair amount of success with encoding video files for the GPCinema 1 (I have a Blu+, overclocked to 160mhz), I'm struggling with getting fansubbed anime to run smoothly.

Files that are originally encoded at 30fps reduce down to 15fps fine and run nice and smoothly. However, the majority of the files are 23.96fps, and no matter what I do, I can't get them to run smoothly. I've tried various different frame rates, reducing sound quality etc to try and get things to run properly, with no success.

Can anyone offer any advice, help or tips?

Thanks in advance.
 
try going through one of the various GP32 encoding tutorials on the interweb..

that's all the help I can give
 
tekt5 posted on May 9 2005 at 10:28 PM said:
try going through one of the various GP32 encoding tutorials on the interweb..

that's all the help I can give

Thanks, but I've already tried every turotial I can find. Sadly, none of them seem to deal with the exact problem I have. I'm only asking for help as the last resort.
 
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You should always reduce the number of frames by dividing by a whole number (usually 2), so your 24 fps files should be reduced to 12 fps. If you're using vdub just select decimate by 2. With your 30 fps files you could even try decimating by 3 to give you 10 fps, which might still look ok.
 
What bit-rate are you using or how many megabytes per minute are your movies coming out at ?. Are your anime files coming out at the same megabytes per minute as your movie files ?.

What settings and codecs are you using ?.

Trooper
 
Hmmm... I use Movielink, because I got sick of tutorials and stuff.

I don't reduce the FPS and I manage to get it running great except at very rare instances, such as scrolling titles or something (for the beginning and end of a show)
 
When you're using VirtualDub, always use the "every 2/3 frame" option, NEVER use a fixed frame rate! Since it's a LCD-display, you don't have to use a too high framerate, 10-15 are enough. This is caused by the rather slow LCD-technology according to a CRT-device. So the films will merely blur (which is kinda "hardware-deinterlace"... :)) A higher rate has the advantage to be better at films where the pictures change quickly (e.g. action films) but due to more frame the picture quality is lower. A lower framerate is better for "slower" films (e.g. dramas, lovefilms, etc.) since there are less frames overall thus resulting in a higher picture quality.

Examples:
a: 10 min film at 10 fps = 6000 frames overall
b: 10 min film at 15 fps = 9000 frames

When you're decode them to 10MB (without sound) each picture have:
a: 13,66 kbits
b: 9,1 kbits

Which codec you'll prefer (Divx or Xvid) is regardless, I prefer Xvid. For a better quality and better size-controlling you should you 2-pass encoding. I for myself encode the videos at something like 1MB per minute (with sound) but that's a matter of taste (and ofcourse overclocking abilities of your GP32).
 
Oh, I've forgot something really impoertant: Always resize your movies to 320x240 pixels! I've got strange results using smaller resolution. If you have a movie with black areas at the upper and lower border, crop them out, resize them to your specific size (eg. 320x176) with the resize-filter in VirtualDub and then "resize" them to 320x240 (there are two fields to give the end-size in the resize dialog in VirtualDub, can't remember the name at the moment.)
 
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. Here's a quick run down of what I've tried so far:


Halving the frame rate - I've tried this before, with no success. It works great for the 30fps files, but comes out very choppy on 23.96fps.

Decimate by 2 - suprisingly (for me at least), it came out slightly worse than halving the frame rate myself.

Using Movielink - for some reason, I wasn't able to produce anything usable with Movielink, but I didn't spend too much time with it.


As for the questions some of you have asked:

My 30fps files generally come out at about 1.5mb per minute, and play great

My 23.96 files usually hit somewhere between 0.8 and 1mb per minute, depending on quality.

I'm encoding using the recommended version of XviD (Koepi's Build?).




NB: Whilst typing this, I had a little bit of a breakthrough. Because I couldn't think of much else to try, I switched to decimate by 3, and the results are the best yet. It's not the smoothest encode ever, but it's far better than anything I've done at a higher frame rate. Plus, the file sizes are so small, I can ramp up the quality to near perfect levels and still get a sub-20mb file!
 
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