RMVB: Why not use it?

[Maceart]

Question is, not everyone can afford 300 gigabyte hard drives in order to burn out so much data.

The other bottleneck with RMVB is the system requirements. While not as high as H.264, it needs at least a 1 ghz processor (although that isn't saying much) and 128 mb ram.

[ladholyman]

Because I have CDs left to burn on?

[JRY_RY]

what real can do except bring the smaller file size?

it was designed for online stream media after all...

therefore, I against it.

[jpwong]

Originally Posted by Starks

As an encoder, I can't understand why we can't put the CDs of the past behind us and venture deeper in our skills and explore the possibilities of lower filesizes. Why are we so afraid?

Ultimatly it's catering to the lowest common denominator of leech. It's the same reason some groups continue to dual release rather than sticking with the new codec. Because loads of people are still using hardware unable to meet continuing advancements in computer technology.

Though you have to admit, a lot of the old 175-177MB have dropped it back to 170MB which wastes less space on the DVD, but is still CDR friendly.

As for lower filesizes, I once read in a thread some time ago that most encoders are of the agreement that 175MB was too small a filesize for most series, but they didn't want to reduce the per CD episode count of shows. While I don't know if it's true or not, most everyone seems to be opting for more quality (or larger resolutions) rather than reduced sizes with h264. Also when you consider the widespread availability of broadband, most people no longer care about smaller sizes anymore (well, except those of us who's ISPs have bandwith caps still).

[xat]

Originally Posted by Starks

Arbitrary filesize caps such as 175MB and 233MB are a consequence of our reliance on archaic 700MB CDs for storage and a reasonable denominator to divide the space to maintain quality. With DVDs in the mainstream and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray on the way, why haven't we adapted to a more efficient division of disk space?

Those sizes have proven to work depending on the content, and they certainly are not arbitrary (you point this out yourself: they're a denominator based on the max capacity of a CD). I'm sure there's a bit of leeway wrt to file size, but you could say part of the reason is to affirm the fact that many, regardless of what is mainstream right now, still use CDs (including myself).

As an encoder, I can't understand why we can't put the CDs of the past behind us and venture deeper in our skills and explore the possibilities of lower filesizes. Why are we so afraid?

Please. There's no base to that last sentence. See: h264. It's slowly being injected into the community with <175mb encodes, and I have full faith in its becoming a normality. The crutch is on the users who are unwilling to embrace the switch, not on encoders who are afraid (which, AFAIK, there are none).

[Farix]

Also when you consider the widespread availability of broadband, most people no longer care about smaller sizes anymore

Be careful about making assumption on broadband availability. The fact is, it is not as widespread in the US as people dupe themselves into believing.

[guest]

Originally Posted by Farix

Be careful about making assumption on broadband availability. The fact is, it is not as widespread in the US as people dupe themselves into believing.

That may be true in general population. But we are talking about people who downlaod fansub anime here. A 60-year-old man lives in a retirement home with a dial-up usually doesn't do this.

[TheFluff]

To clear out some confusion:
RMVB is a container. Like MKV, or MP4. Incidentally, it stands for Real Media Variable Bitrate (the Real codecs used to be all CBR since they were intended for streaming, and the old RM (real media) container only supported CBR, hence the name of the new one).

The codec that Starks is referring to is most probably RV40, aka. Real Video 4. It's a proprietary codec, but it's suspected in media guru circles that it's actually based on H.264. Now, I haven't done any scientific testing of the CPU usage of RV40, and I don't intend to do so either, but from what I can tell, RV40 is only slightly (a few percent) faster than same resolution than h264 (with all quality the bells and whistles) decoded with libavcodec.

I don't see any reasons for using either RV40 nor RMVB. I do, however, see quite a few reasons NOT to use them:

rmvb.whynot:
- Proprietary. AFAIK, there are no other tools that can edit it than Real's own, and there doesn't seem to be any interest in developing any. MP4, MKV and even AVI all have a rather nice selection of editing tools to choose from.
- AFAICT, no encoder-controllable VFR. There seems to be a DeDup/WMV-like forced VFR, but as far as I can see, there's no matroska-style timecodes.
- Only very limited softsub support (yes, there are fansub groups who use this) - I have reasons to believe that SRT and SSA without fonts works.
- No chapters.

rv40.whynot:
- Proprietary (see RMVB). There are no decoders except Real's own. MPlayer can play the format, but only if you have a copy of the appropriate Win32 DLL, which is probably highly illegal to play around with, at least in the US. As I've understood it, you are basically committing a crime just by using the decoder if you don't use it with RealPlayer. Another amusing part of the EULA is that it's explicitly forbidden to encode videos you don't have the rights to use.
- Doesn't offer any real advantages over H.264. While I haven't done any real tests, a small investigation tells me that it doesn't perform much better than x264 does for general-purpose encoding, if it indeed performs better at all.

Originally Posted by Starks

Lest we all forget, the AVI container was created by Microsoft...

Yes, that's why we use MKV nowadays. :-)

Originally Posted by Zero1

This was probably because back in the days when you had OGM and MKV, you might get an OGM give you an explorer.exe crash and the newbie leecher being like "non AVI = crash". Perhaps they had an incomplete/unstable build of FFDShow which would cause something to go ass up with one of the streams in the MKV or OGM and they would just assume it was MKV/OGM's fault.

There's this nasty bug in the last available version of OggDS (i.e. the one that has been used ever since people started using OGM for real encodes, until Haali finally implemented Ogg functionality in his splitter) that seems to randomly crash Explorer if shmedia.dll is registered.


And PLEASE, let's not go into the quality-versus-size argument again. We've been there, and I believe I speak for a majority of us when I say that down that path lies madness.

BTW, speaking of really small encodes, I know a guy who specializes in encoding anime at 25 MB/ep with x264 and HE-AAC. Surprisingly, it's actually quite watchable (especially on small screens). 32kbit HE-AAC with PS and SBR is actually acceptable... (in the sense that you can hear what people say and listen to the BGM without puking) All you bandwidth whores, PLEASE go explore the limits of x264 before rushing to Real just because it was "ZOMG ULTRA COMPRESSION GET" back in '97 or so.


EDIT: did some quick tests with RealProducer Basic (Plus costs $200 and I'm too lazy to warez it, and AFAICT there's no additional encoding features in Plus), and from what I can see, it can't compete with x264 at ALL. Looks about the same (or worse) encodes only slightly faster with max quality, and makes bigger files in "100% quality, VBR" mode. Decoding speed isn't very impressive either, it's on par with libavcodec's h264 decoding.

[Mgz]

people stick with mp4/avi/mkv because there is sooooooo many tools avaible to work with it..uhmm honestly I don't know any tools to create rvmb, maybe Helix and RealAnime? O,o

also with xvid/avi/ogm/h.264 there is some player out there that support it..dunno any player that support rmvb except some smart phone from Nokia O,o

also seeking time for rvmb file is horrible and unstable , which is very crucial to anime watcher to skip the 1st 1:30 mins OP song in the beginning of the show

[Access]

Realmedia codec was somewhat popular until divx3 came out, 1999 and before it was in wide use b'cos it was the only codec that could get episodes down to 30mb or less. But their codecs have always lagged behind the norm in terms of offering a balance of quality, resolution, sustained framerate, etc. It was just the best codec that could get things that small, compared to .vivo or other even poorer attempts. With digisubs the original codec of choice was divx311alpha (and rarely MPEG-1) but I don't remember anyone ever choosing .rm. Sure you can get smaller files, but the perceptual resolution of their codec has always been 1/4th that of any other codec; some of their newer attempts have approached about 1/2 perceptual resolution but it's still poorer than most everything else out there.

Also propietary in generally does equal bad in this type of thing, propietary codecs often don't develop as quickly as the standards; realmedia has constantly been behind the norm to begin with; nor do users get the wide array of tools of choice of players... there's just no reason to go with something prpietary.

[Dis]

The reason why Chinese (In China) uses it is because of it's smaller size...
1) HD Space Issues (People in PRC doesn't earn that much most earn around US$200 monthly)
2) Bandwidth issues (Smaller files, less bandwidth and faster to DL and complete)

If you ask me about my fav Codec I would have to say mine is WMV9...
Biggest File Size, but most stable codec...
Unlike DivX/Xvids with frequent code revisions and updates...
As for H264...
It's still in the early stages...
And the CPU Usage is insane...
Reminds me of how I upgraded my CPU from PIII667 to AMD 1.5GHz to play Videos encoded in DivX5 years ago when people upgraded their PC for Warcraft III and Neverwinter Nights...

It's wasn't untill DivX5 then we started getting 640 x 480 encodeds of Decent Quality...

[Sides]

Originally Posted by Zero1

I suspected it would natively use VFR, just like WMV (forced VFR is a cheap trick IMO). If VFR is what gives RMVB the "edge" over H.264 encodes, then it should be noted that you can produce much VFR H.264 encodes in MP4 or MKV, and also is more flexible; you can override bad decisions so that you don't decimate more than you want (with stuff like WMV you have no say in what gets chopped out).

Well i was actually talking about pre - realmedia 9,
and before helix tools was made avalible.
IIRC vfr cannot be overwritten by the realmedia tools at that time,
since it was of the main component of the compression technique.
VFR is actually nice feature today, but at that time it was demonised in some way.
I reckon it was due to the fact you cannot convert it to mpeg1/2 that easily,
due to the lack of the directshow splitter.

Basically what i was trying the say is, that it miss the train.
When they decided to release realmedia 9 and the helix tools/sdk,
xvid, or other mpeg4-asp codecs, was already used by many people
and pretty much advanced.

[Farix]

Originally Posted by guest

That may be true in general population. But we are talking about people who downlaod fansub anime here. A 60-year-old man lives in a retirement home with a dial-up usually doesn't do this.

Are you so sure? There plenty of people who are stuck with dialup that would wish to download fansubs, but the current file sizes makes it extremely inconvenient, taking a day or two to dedicated downloading just to get one episode. So they just don't even bother unless they are really dedicated. That is why I see the trend of larger file sizes with AVC encodings when the codex can achieve smaller files sizes for the same quality as current XviD encodings being rather detrimental to the community as a whole. The larger encoding will put those encodings well out of each of those who do take the time to down fansubs over dialup.

Remember that broadband availability isn't the same obstacle as processing power. It is rather easy to buy a newer, more powerful computer. However, broadband availability is something that is often beyond the users/downloaders control.

[Scep]

To me the obvious quality difference is its size. I download a video that day, the original size was one gig. Pissed with my slow bitcomet, i went to a site and downloaded the rmvb direct. The quality seriously sucked. When i compare it with my avi, its pretty obvious which one's quality is lousier. And i use 1024, not 1280, but even so, the quality difference is obvious. Sure, it was one gig to 150, but most fansubbers who reencode it reencode into 30-70 mgs, thats when the quality gets really bad.

Imo the current anime community are mostly using broadband. Most of my friends who are 56k use youtube, lol. I remember the days when downloading 8 mbs took 3 hours XD

[physics223]

I actually don't mind RMVBs at all if they're the only format available for download with some obscure anime, like Gambler Legend Tetsuya, for example, with Chinese subs. For the most part, however, I love MKV, OGM, and AVI. 'Nuff said. RMVB is simply for the most part a pain in the ass because it's proprietary; besides, didn't you know that RealAlternative is illegal? If you want to view RMVBs or RMs, you must use that shoddy RealPlayer bundled with some weird adware. It also takes up a lot of memory.

Oh, and the best codec is AVI. LOL, j/k. (I may be stupid, but I'm not THAT stupid. I personally think XviD is the best, and for audio, I think AAC will do.)

[Zero1]

People seem to be missing the point when they are quoting facts and figures about connection speed, DSL, 56k and such.

The primary concern for me isn't how fast someone's connection is at home, but rather the distribution of the file.

As you know download speeds are a whole lot faster than upload speeds, I pull ~600-700KB/s down and ~55KB/s up. Before I switched providers it was ~240KB/s down and ~30KB/s up.

Hold that thought and turn your attention to bittorrent. Some say it has been the making or breaking of the so called fansub scene; some say it has enabled worldwide distro in a much more efficient way, some say it has taken away the "personal" side of leeching where you would go along to someone's channel and wait in a queue for days, maybe get chatting to people there.

Either way, bittorrent has no guaranteed speed. You might get a torrent with 300 seeders with a total speed between 10-18MB/s; more than enough for even the fastest connection (Remember that connection speeds are quoted as megabits (Mb/s) per second, that combined speed I gave is megabytes per second (MB/s), which you would multiply by 8 to get the megabits value).

However; it is not uncommon to find dead, or poorly seeded torrents. Many times have I seen torrents creep at 10KB/s or less (a few seeds and many leechers for example), also bear in mind that unfortunately, not everyone leaves their clients open to help distro.

So as you can see, it's not simply the case that everyone has fast down speeds therefore large files are acceptable, in reality the distribution of these files is much more the deciding factor.

So yeah you might have 24Mb/s ADSL, but how does that benefit you downloading a 300MB+ fansub by a small group with only one or two people doing the initial distribution? Not much when you consider other people will be sapping the upload speeds of the seeders meaning that if the two seeders had 60KB/s uploads, you wouldn't get a full 120KB/s download.

Well bittorrent isn't the be all and end all, what about IRC distro?
It's simple, larger filesizes means it takes longer for the bot/person to upload, which means the queue gets longer and longer as they wait for the upload to complete. It might take you more time to download a file, but in the long run these "bit more times" add up and people really start to suffer down the line.

A less important side effect (but one I like), is that I have less burning to do, meaning less wasted time. Also means less discs taking up space or less searching when I'm looking for a certain episode. Of course I'm not suggesting we should sacrifice quality for filesize; use your initiative, see what you can get away with and always use the best settings available to you.

Also, smaller files with H.264 tend to take less CPU usage to decode. This is down to the entropy coding. In laymens terms, think of unzipping a 200MB file and a 400MB file; less data to decompress, except in video playback the CPU is given a certain amount of data to decode in a time period, if there is too much to decode in a certain time (for example a slow CPU), it will lag and skip.

[bx510]

I hate it mostly because REAL player is garbage.

[guest]

Originally Posted by Farix

Are you so sure? There plenty of people who are stuck with dialup that would wish to download fansubs, but the current file sizes makes it extremely inconvenient, taking a day or two to dedicated downloading just to get one episode. So they just don't even bother unless they are really dedicated. That is why I see the trend of larger file sizes with AVC encodings when the codex can achieve smaller files sizes for the same quality as current XviD encodings being rather detrimental to the community as a whole. The larger encoding will put those encodings well out of each of those who do take the time to down fansubs over dialup.

Remember that broadband availability isn't the same obstacle as processing power. It is rather easy to buy a newer, more powerful computer. However, broadband availability is something that is often beyond the users/downloaders control.

How about we make it into a poll? I don't know how, though.

Everyone I know who would even bother downloading anything has broadband. Those who don't have broadband simply don't care about technology that much, i.e., they don't download just about anything, big or small.

That raises another question though, should fansub groups take into account of ppl's opinions who don't download much due to lack of interest, dial-up, or wahtever reason that is? Like you said, they are put off by slow connection. Fansubbing isn't for profit, that is, fansubbers don't have to take into account of expanding the market. Therefore, even if 90% of ppl are still using dial-up but they don't download anime for whatever reason, should fansub groups try to get them to download? Why?

If we are to make a poll, we should break it down to 1) do you have high-speed internet access? 2) do you donwload fansub anime? 3) how often or how many ep do you download? 4) how do you rank your knowledge of technology, fair, average, or poor?) 5) if you don't download anime, have you tried before? Will you try again? --> This last question is to see if there are really that many people who use dial-up want to download anime. Maybe then we will get some real answers.

[LytHka]

Originally Posted by guest

Those who don't have broadband simply don't care about technology that much, i.e., they don't download just about anything, big or small.

Your missing the point. Even in a technologically advanced West (or North), there are areas where broadband internet simply isn't possible, due to lack of ADSL(2+), VDSL exchanges and so on... it could just be that there are no broadband providers in the area.

[guest]

Originally Posted by LytHka

Your missing the point. Even in a technologically advanced West (or North), there are areas where broadband internet simply isn't possible, due to lack of ADSL(2+), VDSL exchanges and so on... it could just be that there are no broadband providers in the area.

What is the percentage of those areas in the whole?

That really doesn't matter. The point is, should their opinions count when they don't download for whatever reason because fansubbers are not out there to get money for what they do?

I hope this explains my questions better. I don't mean to sound heartless. I am trying to see what is going on here.