Convert Videos to 60fps in just a few clicks (Page 8 of 8)

Hey, so I just discovered a couple weeks ago that my first gen Intel Atom netbook actually has an IPS screen that looks way better than the TN screen on my AMD E-350 "not"book.  So for hour+ long videos, I've been using the netbook instead.

Problem is, the first gen Intel Atom is too slow to decode h.264 in software at the display's native resolution (1024x600) and the graphics is old enough (Intel 945GMA) that it lacks hardware h.264 decoding.

So I've found out that xvid actually works great on my netbook at 60fps with a resolution of 1024x600, so I already re-encode certain videos.

However, I noticed that NGP doesn't have a GUI option for xvid (though ffmpeg supports it), so because I don't know how to use ffmpeg commands, I have to re-encode the video a second time in xvid after NGP's own video encode.

It's worth noting that VP8 should also be decently lower in CPU utilization than h.264, but the program I use for encoding (Avidemux) doesn't include encoding support for it, so I've never tried a native 60fps 1024x600 video in VP8.  VP8 in particular would be useful for creating webms, though xvid would be useful simply for its fast encoding (relative to x264).

Another thing I discovered is that my netbook actually supports a refresh rate of 65Hz maximum with the stock EDID (I also did a bunch of tests and yes, it is not dropping or repeating any frames at 65Hz); this is important because custom resolutions are impossible in Windows with the Intel 945GMA, and its video playback performance in Linux is dreadful.

Doing some math, with "Uniform" interpolation, I discovered that 50fps videos slightly slowed down to 48.75fps would only need to display 3 interpolated frames for every source frame to hit 65fps - that would have considerably less artifacting than interpolating 50fps to 60fps (which requires 5 interpolated frames for every source frame).

...but NGP doesn't support custom frame rates, so I have to instead tell it to slow down the video by 90% to 45fps and then interpolate to 60fps, and then afterwards manually speed up the video playback speed to 65fps.

Another thing NGP doesn't seem to be able to do is slow down or speed up the audio like one could do in, say, Audacity by using the lossless "Set rate" function to a lower sampling rate (for 50fps with 48000Hz audio played back at 48.75Hz, you'd need the audio at exactly 46800Hz).  However, the audio part is very easy for me so it's not that big of a deal that it's missing.

So ideally, I would love you forever if NGP had GUI options for:

- xvid and/or vp8
- interpolating to a custom frame rate
- slowing down and/or speeding up the audio (with or without optional pitch correction)

Oh, and NGP's background colors don't work well with Windows' high-contrast themes that use white text.

I had this problem myself with v1.4, but trying v1.32 instead worked perfectly fine, so try that (the media encoder is very similar between the two).

Interestingly enough however, when I reinstalled and tried v1.4 again just today, it worked just fine...I wonder if v1.32 installs something that v1.4 needs?

Didn't realize that you can actually change the stuff there; I thought it was for copying and debugging and stuff.

Not true - Xvid in particular is supported in MP4.

VP8, yeah, but WebM is just a subset of MKV.  Also MKV works for Xvid too.

I've no idea how to do this via scripting...

Yeah, it's really quite hard to see the script text with the background image (see attached screenshot).

Will it makes encoding slower?  Even with the fastest settings, I'm only seeing like 0.3x realtime encoding speed on a 1024x600 48.75fps video with 1.333x interpolation on my 4.6GHz Pentium G3258 (though presumably encoding to Xvid would make things faster).

Oh, yeah, GPU acceleration was not being used because for some reason it's actually slightly slower with it enabled.

1. I was running overclocked at 4.6GHz, which is 43.75% faster than stock clocks.

2. My CPU is only a 2core/2thread CPU, and this sort of task loves multiple threads (Ryzen would be a beast!).

3. Haswell, the architecture used in the Pentium G3258, launched 4 years ago.  If your CPU is also 4 years old and you're getting around 2x faster performance vs my stock clocks, then I'm going to guess you're using a Haswell quad core like the i5-4670.

So I was doing a bunch of tests via Avidemux between the Xvid Mpeg4p2 encoder and the ff Mpeg4p2 encoder.

Not counting the likes of single and double-pass encoding, it seems like the settings that encode the quickest also perform the worst when playing back the video and vice-versa.

Basically, if you want the fastest encode, use the ff encoder with thread count set to "auto" (since it defaults to two) and quantization set to "mpeg".

Conversely, if you want the fastest decode, use the xvid encoder with quantization set to "h.263".

EDIT: Oh, and for whatever reason using an MP4 container results in slightly better decoding performance than an MKV container without compression.