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View Poll Results: Do you still use MPEG2 in 2019?
Yes 26 44.83%
Yes, for simple content (tv shows, etc) 4 6.90%
No 30 51.72%
I don't know what MPEG2 is... 3 5.17%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 58. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 15th July 2019, 19:15   #21  |  Link
SeeMoreDigital
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I think it would be useful to have x262 encoding working with VirtualDub2, especially as we can now save directly to the .mkv container...
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Old 15th July 2019, 19:45   #22  |  Link
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Who do you think would want or need to encode MPEG-2 to MKV?
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Old 15th July 2019, 19:55   #23  |  Link
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Thanks Groucho for the binaries.

I took a quick look at the help, leaves me a little confused. The help always refers to x264, is this just sloppiness? And then I do not see the option to output an m2v elementary stream, are the devs serious about this? Dunno, looks I will stick with HCenc and FFmpeg for my MPEG2 encoding needs...
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Old 15th July 2019, 20:06   #24  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by manolito View Post
I took a quick look at the help, leaves me a little confused. The help always refers to x264, is this just sloppiness? And then I do not see the option to output an m2v elementary stream, are the devs serious about this? Dunno, looks I will stick with HCenc and FFmpeg for my MPEG2 encoding needs...
This seems to produce a perfectly fine mpeg2 elementary stream:
Code:
x262_32 test.avs --mpeg2 --output test.m2v
If you need the full help:
x262_32 --fullhelp > x262.txt
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Last edited by Groucho2004; 16th July 2019 at 14:15.
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Old 15th July 2019, 20:16   #25  |  Link
SeeMoreDigital
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sneaker_ger View Post
Who do you think would want or need to encode MPEG-2 to MKV?
It's not necessarily about the container. But having a container the correctly supports b-frames is useful.

And once the elementary MPEG-2 has been extracted it can be muxed into other containers...
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Old 15th July 2019, 21:47   #26  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SeeMoreDigital View Post
It's not necessarily about the container. But having a container the correctly supports b-frames is useful.

And once the elementary MPEG-2 has been extracted it can be muxed into other containers...
Yep. In my case, I mux MPEG-2 files with BBC BMX in mxf. I was actually using ffmpeg to mux audio and video before, but I found out that some softwares are just too "pretentious" in terms of specifications and refuse MPEG-2 files muxed with ffmpeg but accept them if I mux them with BBC BMX (I'm looking at you AVID!).

By the way, thanks for the updated binaries, Groucho!

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Originally Posted by SeeMoreDigital View Post
I think it would be useful to have x262 encoding working with VirtualDub2, especially as we can now save directly to the .mkv container...
+1
Although I've automatized everything via bat, it would be useful to have it available on VirtualDub as well. For the records, by "VirtualDub" I mean VirtualDub2 Filtermod of course.
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Old 15th July 2019, 23:28   #27  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Groucho2004 View Post
Here are the r2633 builds (32 & 64 bit). Input is Avisynth or stdin.

Standard disclaimer:
I have not tested these at all and take no responsibility if your computer blows up or you grow excessive nose hair using these binaries.
Thanks for this!
Already trimming them so they can regrow in the process.
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Old 15th July 2019, 23:44   #28  |  Link
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MPEG-2 is still absolutely mainstream, widely deployed, and utterly critical in professional workflows, mostly in broadcast. Just a few examples:

- OTA broadcast via ATSC is still MPEG-2.
- Many cable systems still use MPEG-2 for linear channels due to legacy settop boxes (often live transcoded from the "real" AVC used by the rest of the system). Lots of cable VOD is still MPEG-2 as well.
- Many legacy HD and SD linear channels are originated on satellite via MPEG-2
- DVDs are still very much a thing.

- Most linear TV channels play MPEG-2 files out of their video servers. IMX is common for SD, and XDCAM HD422 is common for HD.

That last one I know a ton about as I worked on the ingest / workflow side of broadcast for many years. Most channels have huge libraries of content in their "house format" which tends to be MPEG-2 based for simplicity and consistency with files ingested 10+ years ago. You change as little as possible when taking channels to air. Storage is definitely expensive, but the businesses tend to prefer spending the money on the old file formats since it mitigates risk elsewhere.

Thankfully nobody doing OTT streaming uses MPEG-2, because as we all know it's utterly outclassed by 2+ compression format generations and 20+years of development. Things move slow

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Old 16th July 2019, 13:30   #29  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by manolito View Post
I took a quick look at the help, leaves me a little confused. The help always refers to x264, is this just sloppiness?
Do you still have any doubts?
I would like to know why x262 isn't a pure MPEG-2 encoder yet...
not sure whether it's impossible to get rid of the H.264 encoder parts, or whether the developer was just too lazy

Anyway, I only knew that x262 suckED in the beginning... but yesterday and today I gave a second chance to the binary.
Well, it's much better now, I have to say. It does not limit the GOP length, accepts the linear quantization scale and custom matrices as well, and is fast.

*THUMBS UP*
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Old 24th July 2019, 11:34   #30  |  Link
outhud
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Hi Sparktank, I needed to encode for DVD recently, and used HCenc also.

Interested to try x262, are there any comparisons available comparing x262 with HCenc? Or have you found any result from your own testing?

Last edited by outhud; 24th July 2019 at 11:37.
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Old 24th July 2019, 19:54   #31  |  Link
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I'll be doing some testing within the next couple weeks. I just need cannibalize my computers. The old one has the really good drive that does UHD-BD's.

From some limited testing yesterday, it's quite decent but needs a lot of tweaking.

Quote:
Originally Posted by filler56789 View Post
Anyway, I only knew that x262 suckED in the beginning... but yesterday and today I gave a second chance to the binary.
Well, it's much better now, I have to say. It does not limit the GOP length, accepts the linear quantization scale and custom matrices as well, and is fast.

*THUMBS UP*
Have any scripts to share? Some feedback on the source types (grain,noise,flat,animation,etc)?
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Old 24th July 2019, 21:20   #32  |  Link
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Have any scripts to share? Some feedback on the source types (grain,noise,flat,animation,etc)?
Not yet. I ran just a couple of test encodes in a VERY unscientific way ...
but the visual quality AND the small filesize were similar to the results produced by the (already-old) Mainconcept Reference MPEG-2 Encoder.

Last edited by filler56789; 24th July 2019 at 21:21. Reason: typo
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Old 24th July 2019, 23:40   #33  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by filler56789 View Post
Do you still have any doubts?
I would like to know why x262 isn't a pure MPEG-2 encoder yet...
not sure whether it's impossible to get rid of the H.264 encoder parts, or whether the developer was just too lazy
x265 was basically forked and refactored away from the reference HEVC implementation, IIRC. x264 might have been developed similarly in the early stages, but I don't know that for sure. x262 was basically a set of changes to x264's already-mature codebase which allowed it to encode MPEG-2.

So to use an analogy, x264 and x265 are like cousins. x262 is like x264 grew a second head.
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Old 23rd August 2019, 19:08   #34  |  Link
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I haven't made MPEG-2 content for delivery in a while, but it still gets used for older sources and some pre-distribution workflows.
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Old 20th October 2020, 15:36   #35  |  Link
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The last time I used MPEG-2 was to convert a few DVD9 films to DVD5
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Old 21st October 2020, 07:32   #36  |  Link
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Since you're resurrecting the topic, speaking of MPEG-2, will the FFMpeg encoder ever be properly multi-thread?
It's painfully slower than it could be right now on my 28c/56th... Sure, I can run multiple encodes at a time but still...
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Old 29th October 2020, 10:32   #37  |  Link
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Since patents on mpeg2 have now expired I expected a renewed interest in this free codec.
Curiously, despite the age, still mpeg2 video encoding offers many free alternatives to pick: x262, HCenc, ffmpeg and, if you have a recent intel cpu, qsv encoding (through ffmpeg as well). And all them can run cross platform (HCenc runs smoothly under linux using wine).
It would be great to see a great, comprehensive comparison (speed-wise, quality-wise, feature-wise) among them all.
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