SVP3:Manager
This is a legacy SmoothVideo Project (SVP) ver.3 user manual.
Used abbreviations:
- SVP - SmoothVideo Project ver.3.1 package
- FRC - frame rate conversion - a process converting frame rate frequency, frame interpolation
See also:
Contents
The icon
The SVP Manager is being controlled via a context menu of the SVP icon in the notification area:
- a right-click opens the main SVP menu
- a double click opens the settings of the currently active profile
- the current status of the SVP Manager is shown by popup as well as by color and animation of the icon itself
- yellow - waiting for video playback
- green - video is bein played using frame interpolation
- red - SVP is stopped
SVP Manager allows to access the settings in different range depending on the chosen interface type - "basic", "advanced" or "expert".
Initially the interface is set to basic view, which allows the beginners to change the frequently used parameters and not bother about fine tuning. Advanced users may use the advanced interface and finally experienced users should use the expert interface which opens the access to insecure and experimental SVP parameters.
Basic options
These menu entries are shown in Basic interface.
| Video profiles | Shows the configures profile list. The last used profile is indicated by a half bold font. Selection of a profile name to edit the profile parameters.
For details see section Managing profiles. | |
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Create new profile. It is useful when a smooth playback is required with special settings, which differ from standard profiles.
To create a new profile it is necessary to provide the frame size and frame rate of the source video. | |
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Remove one or many configured profiles. | |
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Calls a window with the system performance test and profile reset to one of the defaults delivered with SVP. | |
| Interface type |
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| GPU-acceleration (OpenCL) | Allows to enable or disable the GPU acceleration to enhance calculations.
If the GPU entry is not active, it means that no compatible GPU has been found on the system. Having a powerful CPU and a weak GPU it makes sense to disable GPU acceleration in order to use the CPU on full performance not getting slowed down by the GPU. To check the system performance with and without GPU acceleration the test package SVPmark may be used. | |
| Stereo mode (3D) | Allows to set manually that the video currently played is in stereo pair format. This is necessary because for stereo pairs a specially adopted mode is required. Possible values:
In the most cases the mode is set automatically on aspect ration and file analysis for special tags, such as "HOU" or "SBS", but in some cases it is necessary to switch the 3D mode on or force 2D mode for an incorrectly identified video as 3D. A clear indication of 3D mode faulty enabled on a 2D video is a clear vertical or horizontal line in the exact center of the frame. | |
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For systems with active shutter 3D glasses it is necessary to choose the view sequence:
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| Frame crop | Sets the frame cropping mode.
Automated frame analysis for black borders and cropping them allowing all other modes to be combined with enabled "auto cropping":
Show the full frame:
Crop frame to aspect ratio:
Crop the frame by 4 pixel from each side. This may be useful for video with black lines or artifacts on frame edges (usually on DVD or camcorder capture).
Crop to fit frame resolution:
Set the cropping manually. This will open a dialog to set the fields to crop and on top of the video a corresponding frame will be shown::
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| Outer lighting | Turns on black border lighting, meaning the spaces between the video frame and screen borders. Prior to use it is necessary to crop all the black borders and artifacts along the video frame edges. Possible values:
The best explanation is a picture: | |
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The width of the lighting line in percent of the frame size. In "point-to-point" mode the lighting is "glued" in the way that the resulting frame size (width and height) don't differ from the original size in order to exclude additional scaling of the frame.
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Allows to choose one of the four preset lighting parameters or set one manually. The lighting is defined by 4 numbers which physical meaning is described on the technical insights page.
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| Use SVPlight | This will appear only if a separately downloaded extension SVPlight is installed which allows to switch on hardware LED lighting. | |
| SVPlight settings... | Opens configuration window of SVPlight. | |
| Language (Язык) |
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| Information | ||
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Shows details about resolution and screen refresh frequency, original video and FRC parameters. This information is always required in help requests in our forum. | |
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Opens a performance graphs window.
On hover the cursor over the graph the average values will be displayed.. | |
| Settings | ||
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If turned on, then a periodical check for SVP updates will be performed via the Internet | |
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Allows to add Manager to the list of programs loaded on Windows start. | |
| Help | ||
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Opens the project donation page. Collected funds are spend for web hosting and project development. | |
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Opens the About SVP... windows, showing the SVP version date and number | |
| Exit | ||
Advanced options
These menu items are shown in addition to "Basic options" if the Advanced interface type is chosen.
| Video delay | This is used on permanent delay between video and audio. It is necessary to figure out a value which fixes the delay. If audio comes after the video, positive values should be used and negative otherwise.
Important: this parameter will not help if the delay is growing. |
| Demonstration mode | This is used to demonstrate the possibilities of SVP and also to compare the original video and video after FRC.
When activated the picture will be divided in two halves vertically. The left half shows the half frames of the original video and the right half shows half frames of SVP processed video. Since the speed of SVP algorithms depends directly on the frame size for which additional frames are generated, enabling this option will almost double the processing speed (because only the half of the frames will be processed). |
| Tearing test | This is intended to validate the motion stability.
Turning on the tearing test a colored vertical line will be added to the video, which steadily moves side to side. The test becomes successful if the colored line had moved steadily without jumps or stops. This means that the system is configured correctly for a comfortable watching of smooth video. If the line is jumping, stopping or jiggling, then it means that not all frames are displayed on the monitor or the frames are displayed not steadily. Probable causes for frame loss or unsteady rendering:
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| Video player process priority | Watching a video with motion smoothness effect it is recommended to close all other applications, to make the most CPU time available for the resource hungry algorithms of additional frame calculation. If additional applications are run in parallel the smoothed video may slow down or even stop.
The default player priority is already set above average, which can be increased to high, which may exclude slow-downs and stops but may slow down the activity of all other programs running. Possible values:
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| Video repair | |
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Forces the frame rate to be doubled independently of the current profile parameters in case when a video with variable bit rate is being processed. |
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In this mode every second frame will be dropped before FRC. For example it can be useful for videos captured from a video card. |
| Screen selection | Per default SVP increases the frame rate to the vertical refresh rate of the monitor (usually 60 Hz). To be able to do this the refresh rate has to be determined for the monitor the video will be displayed on.
In this mode the SVP will attempt to find the monitor the video is displayed in and determine the vertical refresh rate of this monitor. In most cases this will be enough, but on some systems it is not possible to determine the rate correctly or some players can't find their windows. In these seldom cases it is possible to set the refresh rate manually.
Shows a window with a list of connected monitors, their determined vertical refresh rate and the possibility to set the rate manually. Attention: if an incorrect rate is entered, the video on the smoothed video screen won't work correctly, ripping, loosing frames and with other problems. |
| Information | |
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Opens the last automatically generated Avisynth script, which performs the smoothing algorithm with selected settings. |
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Opens the list of all activities executed by the Manager since program start. If SVP works incorrectly, this file helps finding the cause of the problem and fixing it. |
| Settings | |
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Enables messages over the video frame about the Manager status, cropping parameters and warning about low performance.
Output of multi-line OSD messages has additional demand on the CPU time and can lead to over-all performance drop, smoothness loss and a possible loop of them: high CPU load -> low performance -> Display of OSD message -> high CPU load .... In such cases it is recommended to lower the profile settings and in cases of high CPU load to turn off OSD messages. |
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Opens the hot keys modification window , allowing to change or even disable the hot keys. |
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This temporarily stops the execution of FRC algorithms. It can be required to speed up the navigation throughout the video file in order to find a specific scene or make a preview. |
Expert options
This menu entries are shown additionally to the entries in "Basic options" and "Advanced options" when the Expert interface is chosen.
| Processing threads | Sets the number of threads for intermediate frame calculation.
In the most cases the automatically set value is optimal but for strong multi-core systems (over 12 cores/threads) the thread number needs to be set manually, because it directly influences the RAM usage. See also technical details. Possible values:
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| Turn off on seek | Sets the behavior during the video seek. Fast forward (actually a mouse click on the players timeline) does often lead to different problems such as player hang ups or frame blinking during a long time. This setting helps avoiding those problems:
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| Video repair | |
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Enables the corresponding setting in the ffdshow filter. It is sufficient to set up the deinterlacing parameters in ffdshow once and then switch them on or off from Manager. When deinterlacing is used with frame duplication it is handy to use "To screen refresh rate / 2" profile settings "Target frame rate". |
| Profile selection method | The profile is selected automatically based on played video parameters - frame size and frame rate. But it is possible to change the profile selection here.
For details refer to Managing profiles. |
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Forces the algorithm to search for suitable profile along profiles with same frame rate as in the played video and only if that fails the search will be performed along all profiles. |
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"Pixel rate" (product of the area of the frame by the number per second) of the profile should not be greater than or equal to the stream size of played video in order to ensure that for the improvement of the video smoothness is guaranteed enough system resources. |
| Generate AVS scripts | |
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Generates a ready to use script for saving the video with increased smoothness, whilst the current settings FRC are applied. Selecting this menu item the user will be prompted to save the AVS script to disk. To open and run this script it is required that 'SVP Manager' has been turned off, or his work suspended. This script is perfect for opening it in programs like MeGUI, MediaCoder, VirtualDub, etc. |
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Generates a ready to use script to save the video with increased smoothness, while the current FRC aare applied. This filter is designed to open it in the 'XviD4PSP' program. |
| Показать | |
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Opens the general SVP configuration file containing all settings. Some of them are not available from the menu. Generally, editing of these settings is not required. 'Do not edit this file if you are not exactly sure why and what you are doing.' |
Managing profiles
Profile - a set of settings that are used when videos are played with certain parameters : frame size , frame rate .
In the SVP included ten sets of FRC setting profiles in the FRC, depending on the performance of the system, wherein each set has four profiles set :
- Video is less than or equal to the standard definition DVD -720x576
- More than the DVD, but less than the standard 720p-1280x720
- More than 720p, but less than cropped 1080p( i.e. video format 21:9) -1920x800
- Everything over 21:9 1080p, including standard 1080p-1920x1080
On video playback the appropriate profile is selected automatically. If the parameters of a specific video differ from those specified in the profile, the profile is selected with the closest values of these parameters . Selection is simply the value of video in Mpixel / s (the product of the frame , in pixels, the number of frames per second) or in frame rate , and then on the stream value.
To control the algorithm selection profile , there are two settings for automated profile selection ( only available in the interface type "expert"):
- 'Exclude profiles with different frame rates' - causes the algorithm to search for suitable profiles in the first place among the profiles with the same frame rate as that of the playing video, and only in case of failure - of all profiles. The search stops at the first suitable profile is found.
- 'Choose one with nearest pixel rate' - when the setting is disabled the search is performed by calculating the stream of the current video and search for a profile with the closest stream parameters. Enabling the setting the algorithm imposes one more condition: the flux profile must be greater than or equal to the playback video stream to make sure the that for the improved video smoothness is guaranteed enough CPU performance.
Last selected profile is highlighted with bold font in the list.
Selecting a menu item with profile name opens Profile Settings modification window.
You can add your own profile, which is necessary if you want smooth playback with special settings that are different from the settings of the standard profiles. To add a profile, you must select the menu item Video profiles -> Add ..., and to remove an unnecessary profile select Remove .... To create a new profile, you must specify the frame size and frequency. Adding a profile during video playback these values will be preset automatically.
It is possible at any time to return to one of the ten standard profile sets by menu item 'Reset to defaults', followed by an performance test and choice of the best set of profiles .
Hot Keys
The hot keys are set by default that way, so they don't interfere with hot keys of popular video players. All key combos can be modified or disabled.
The hot key modification window is called via menu Settings -> Change default hotkeys.
| Action | Default hotkey |
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| Opening SVP windows | |
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Ctrl+Win+A |
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Ctrl+Win+G |
| Turn SVP setting on/off | |
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Alt+Ctrl+Win+P |
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Ctrl+Win+B |
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Ctrl+Shift+Win+B |
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Ctrl+Win+M |
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Ctrl+Shift+C |
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Ctrl+Shift+Win+G |
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Ctrl+Win+O |
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Ctrl+Win+D |
| Smoothness validation | |
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Ctrl+Win+T |
| Other | |
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Ctrl+Win+I |
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Ctrl+Win+Q |
