Codecs not supported

[deepvisual]

Hmm so, V3 doesn't support any of the codecs I use. - apple intermediate or DVX

so have we abandoned alpha channels??

[Paul Gotch]

ProRes 4444 is the spiritual sucessor to AIC and supports an Alpha
channel. QLab 3 will play ProRes 4444 but file sizes are huge.

-p
--
Paul Gotch
--------------------------------------------------------------------

[Chris Ashworth]

Paul has the answer.

In general, QLab 3 supports much fewer codecs than QLab 2 because it no longer uses QuickTime. It now uses AVFoundation which has more limited support for codec.

In general I think this is actually a good thing, but there are a few head scratchers when it comes to codecs apple doesn't support in AVFoundation. (Animation is one.)

C

(mobile)

[Joel Webster]

"In general, QLab 3 supports much fewer codecs than QLab 2"

This answers an issue I've encountered with a number of QT movies that play fine in v2, but have occasional glitchy audio dropouts (and no sound at all in one file) using v3. 

Although I provide a spec, the actual data comes from a variety of production companies,some of which don't seem to know how to follow instructions. Up to now, however, there haven't been any problems or any great stress at showtime <--- big, huge thumbs up to QLab. 
I don't have time to mess with lots of files right before an event - which is when I receive a lot of the the data.
Whilst I don't have the data to hand right now, I'll post details about the files I've been having issues with after I've looked at it again. Might be useful to build a list of what CODECS work and what don't as we transition.
It would be a real shame not to be able to use v3, as overall it seems really GREAT so far. Still no proper scrubbing for rehearsals...

[mic pool]

Could someone post a link to a definitive list of supported codecs please.

This is not something I want to get caught out with and needs to be documented

Thanks

–––––––––––––––––––––––––

Mic Pool
Sound and Video Designer
www.micp.tv
m...@micpool.com
07711 308549
_________________________

[mic]

Hi Chris,

first of all, thanks for this great update. I'm testing all and will write some impression asap.

Just a quick thoughts about codecs: considering also that there's less codecs supported - i also see this as a not strictly negative things - are there plan to support Hap? I think it could become *the* first choice codec for many of us.

regards

michele

[Paul Gotch]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 03:31:07AM -0700, mic wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> first of all, thanks for this great update. I'm testing all and will write
> some impression asap.
> Just a quick thoughts about codecs: considering also that there's less
> codecs supported - i also see this as a not strictly negative things - are
> there plan to support Hap? I think it could become *the* first choice codec
> for many of us.

AVFoundation doesn't support thirdparty codecs, QuickTime Player does
use AVFoundation but uses a private framework called LegacyMedia
Bridge in order achieve this which is not available to non-Apple
applications.

As far as I'm aware AVFoundation supports the following codecs and
derivitives:

ProRes
H.264
PhotoJPEG

In order to use thirdparty codecs either QTKit has to be used which
brings back all the video problems in QLab 2 or the application has to
be written to directly use some other API than the provided system
abstractions

In order to use hap Chris would have to bring back the use of QTKit or
fork the source code from https://github.com/Vidvox/hap-qt-codec in
order to build hap support directly into QLab without using QuickTime.

It should be noted that there *no* advantage at all in using hap unless
the application is written to offload the decode of hap on to the
graphics card. I've no idea if it's possible to do this and also
support all the other things that QLab can do with video.

[mic]

Hi,

thanks Paul for the technical answer.

Do you - or any other - know how Hap compares to ProRes in term of performance? Seem there's no info on ProRes on VIDVOX site where they talk about Hap performances, just refers to other codecs.

I'm in particular interested in codec with alpha support.

ciao

michele

[Andy Dolph]

Ok, I'm curious.

What is hap? Where is it commonly used? Why is it preferable?

Thanks,

Andy 

Sent from my iPhone

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[Paul Gotch]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 09:31:09AM -0400, Andy Dolph wrote:
> What is hap? Where is it commonly used? Why is it preferable?

AFAIK it was developed and is mainly used by the VDMX VJ software. Its
gimic is that it does no decompression on the host CPU and as far as I
can tell works by sending compressed textures to the GPU then having
the GPU decompress and display them.

[Christopher Ashworth]

On May 10, 2013, at 3:53 AM, mic pool <m...@micpool.com> wrote:

Could someone post a link to a definitive list of supported codecs please.

I'll work on getting a good list in our documentation. 

In the meantime, here it is straight from the code, along with the associated caveats:

// Check for known supported codecs.

CMVideoFormatDescriptionRef format = (CMFormatDescriptionRef)track.formatDescriptions.lastObject;

switch ( CMVideoFormatDescriptionGetCodecType( format ) )

{

    // Note: Many "codecs" listed in programs like Compressor are actually variants of these.

    // e.g. XDCAM formats are actually MPEG-4. Therefore these comments should not be treated

    // as a definitive user-facing list of what is supported.

    case 'mp4v':    // MPEG-4

    case 'mp2v':    // MPEG-2

    case 'mp1v':    // MPEG-1

    case 'apcs':    // ProRes 422 LT

    case 'apco':    // ProRes 422 Proxy

    case 'apcn':    // ProRes 422

    case 'ap4h':    // ProRes 4444

    case 'avc1':    // H.264

    case 'apch':    // ProRes 422 HQ

    case 'h263':    // H.263

    case 'jpeg':    // Photo-JPEG

    case 'dv5p':    // DVCPRO50 PAL

    case 'dv5n':    // DVCPRO50 NTSC

    case 'dvpp':    // DVCPRO PAL

    case 'dvcp':    // DV PAL

    case 'dvc ':    // DV/DVCPRO NTSC

        break;

    case 'rle ':

        _codecError = [@"Animation codec is not supported. Please use ProRes 4444 for videos with an alpha channel." copy]; break;

    default:

        _codecError = [@"Video codec is not supported. Try ProRes 422 LT, Photo-JPEG, or H.264 as alternatives." copy]; break;

}

[Freddy Komp]

Hi there,


Just came back from a bit of a tour around the web on the topic of HAP (amongst others here, where they worked on getting Hap into Jitter) -

Chris, any plans to look at an implementation outside of AVFoundation of Hap? The Alpha-channel and performance perks do seem quite intriguing...


Cheers,

Freddy

[Christopher Ashworth]

Hi Freddy,

We haven't dug in to HAP yet but thanks for the reminder!

-C

[Greg Leeper]

Any more news on when or if HAP w/ alpha will be supported?  I'm looking for better ways to playback & support alpha... 

[Christopher Ashworth]

Hi Greg,

No news at this time.  Haven't had time to work on it yet.

-C

[Tracy Evans]

Here is an interesting article on Hap. Any opportunity to look into this yet Chris?

http://createdigitalmotion.com/2014/06/push-pixels-harder-open-hap-video-codec-now-on-windows-and-mac/

I am running into CPU limits on some widescreen videos I am playing. I would imagine shutting much of the decom to the GPU would help quite a bit. 

[mic]

Hi,

here's some fresh new on Hap: AVfoundation ion Yomesemite supports tardy parts codecs - and this allows apps that already switched from Quicktime to use it: http://blog.anomes.com/post/107113138047/native-hap-support-in-64-bits-mode-yosemite

This should make QLab able to support it in 64 bit on Yosemite

ciao

michele

[Freddy Komp]

Hi,

On Monday, January 5, 2015 at 5:41:09 AM UTC+10:30, mic wrote:

here's some fresh new on Hap: AVfoundation ion Yomesemite supports tardy parts codecs - and this allows apps that already switched from Quicktime to use it: http://blog.anomes.com/post/107113138047/native-hap-support-in-64-bits-mode-yosemite

This should make QLab able to support it in 64 bit on Yosemite

I haven't upgraded to 10.10 yet, can anyone confirm or deny that this works out of the (Yosemite) box with QL3? And if so, share experience/stats about performance? If I recall it correctly, this would allow for a much more resource-conservative implementation of alpha channel integration? Or do the good folks at F53 need to do anything before this works?


Cheers,

Freddy

[Andy Lang]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 6:01 PM, Freddy Komp <busy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, January 5, 2015 at 5:41:09 AM UTC+10:30, mic wrote:
>>
>> here's some fresh new on Hap: AVfoundation ion Yomesemite supports tardy
>> parts codecs - and this allows apps that already switched from Quicktime to
>> use it:
>> http://blog.anomes.com/post/107113138047/native-hap-support-in-64-bits-mode-yosemite
>>
>> This should make QLab able to support it in 64 bit on Yosemite
>
>
> I haven't upgraded to 10.10 yet, can anyone confirm or deny that this works
> out of the (Yosemite) box with QL3?

QLab 3 does not currently support Hap. This does make it theoretically
possible, but it's not simply plug-and-play. Hap support would require
a lot of under-the-hood work to implement in QLab. It's something
we're definitely interested in exploring in the future, but at this
point, I can't make any promise as to if or when it might happen.

Hope you all have a great weekend,
Andy

[Freddy Komp]

Hi Andy,

I hope I wasn't sounding nagging, I had clearly misunderstood what was communicated about this issue earlier, where it sounded to me like QLab3 supports everything that is supported by AVFoundation (in my head I imagined something comparable to standard decoding methods exposed in AVFoundation for all codecs it supports), and that the issue with HAP was that it wasn't part of the subset of codecs AVFoundation supports. My bad :).

Have a nice weekend, too,

Freddy

[Andy Lang]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 5:27 PM, Freddy Komp <busy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I hope I wasn't sounding nagging, I had clearly misunderstood what was
> communicated about this issue earlier, where it sounded to me like QLab3
> supports everything that is supported by AVFoundation (in my head I imagined
> something comparable to standard decoding methods exposed in AVFoundation
> for all codecs it supports), and that the issue with HAP was that it wasn't
> part of the subset of codecs AVFoundation supports. My bad :).

Not nagging at all, Freddy; it's something we're interested in looking
into, too, as it has some exciting implications!

There is a misunderstanding here, but it's not about what QLab
supports, but about what the release of HapInAVFoundation means. Hap
is not built into AVFoundation, it's a third-party add-on. And while
it now works through AVfoundation, it is fundamentally different in
how it works from other codecs, both in terms of what type of frame
data HapInAVFoundation is currently built to provide, and in how its
track data is read. These differences are currently incompatible with
how QLab handles video data, so it's not as simple as ticking one box
to enable Hap, or just installing HapInAVFoundation to enable it.

I hope that clears it up!

-Andy

[Freddy Komp]

Thanks, informative indeed :)!

Cheers,

Freddy