OBS branch with AMD VCE support.

[jackun]

Yes, it is a bit stuttery right now, although it should be fast enough for 1080p@60. As in few post before, fixed QP lead to more stutter, but CBR was bit smoother. Buffer management is messed up or something.
Logs have profiling timings in them, so for the whole encode time should stay below 16ms for smooth capture.

 

[PoznanskaPyra]

Ok this is test on 2 cams
1. OBS + VCE 3000kbit/s
2. OBS + i7 3930k 6000kbit/s

jackun
Do you change h.264 preset to slow or medium?

 

[jackun]

Presets have no effect. Most VCE settings should be on their speediest (well, few more settings maybe can be dialed back).
If profiling is accurate then 1920x1080 frame takes about 11.5ms which is over 80 fps. But yuv444 to nv12 conversion on my AMD FX8320 wants to stay at 4+ ms and plus other stuff push the encode time over 16,6 ms aka not 60 fps. Sigh... I'll try to hack some OpenCL into that :P

 

[jackun]

I remember that I could record 720p 60 FPS with VCE and it was stable 60 FPS, no drops, but now I can only get to 57 FPS.

Try new build.

 

[TheReaperV11]

@UP
I tried, still 57 FPS on 720p, however when 1080p it at least holds 50+ until I select scene with full screen monitor capture (drops to 20-30 FPS), on the main scene I have resized monitor capture and there's 50+ FPS. This might be Windows 7 problem, but I have disabled Aero.

I don't know if it might be my GPU fault, but I don't think so. Why? I have HD7850 and PoznanskaPyra has HD7870 as far as I know. Pyra, how much FPS did you set? (Pyra, ile FPS'ów ustawiłeś?) If he set 30 FPS than I don't have to much problems with that too but it would be nice to be able to stream 60 FPS ;)

The best thing is that it almost doesn't impact to game performance, I didn't notice any bigger FPS loose when streaming :D
I hope you will make it work better, wish you luck :)

 

[ZeroWalker]

If possible could you upload some clips with different bitrates using AMD VCE?
I don't mean youtube, simply Sendspace or something, as i am rather interested in how the encoder fares.

If you have time to spare so to speak.

 

[TheReaperV11]

Here's recording 1080p 30 FPS with quality 2. It's smooth, but the quality is... meh...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_kErmN6PVTiajIyUVc0blBZNmM/edit?usp=sharing

Second recording 1080p 30 FPS but with quality 10 is uploading and it's goin to take more time 'cause it's 175 MB and transfer is only 200-300 KB/s (it should be at least 1 MB/s... dat Google)

1080p 30 FPS quality 10
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_kErmN6PVTiQ3p6Qlp5R2lTa00/edit?usp=sharing
It looks great but it's unwatchable because of FPS :(

When recording both films FPS in-game was the same (I think :P)
I also updated my drivers from 14.3 to 14.4 but it didn't bring any change, still max. 57 FPS :(

 

[ZeroWalker]

Not really sure what the "quality N" stands for, i always go by CRF for quality control,
so here i will look at the bitrate and judge.

I watched the first one, as as you say the quality is what it is, can't judge the encoder much by that though, the bitrate is just 3k, usually you want to have like 10-20k for it to look pretty transparent, and of course Default preset or better (Not super fast).

Which version of AMD VCE do you have?
From looking it up there should be 2 versions, one for the 7k generation, and one for the newer Rxxx, but only for some as most of them are rebrands of the 7ks.

 

[TheReaperV11]

Quality stands for the thing that's under Enable CBR checkbox (but you have to disable CBR to make it active)... maybe it's called different in English, I'm using Polish version and I'm to lazy to change language, but not to lazy to translate on my own :P

Where can I check version of VCE?

EDIT: It's called Quality Balance :)

 

[ZeroWalker]

You missunderstood what i meant, i was talking about the meaning behind "Quality".
For example, CRF is a kind of quality control, and usually CRF 16 for HD content is "Transparent", when you know the CRF values you get the heck of it.

Quality is some kind of other measurement (frustrating that the name is "Quality";P).

Well if you translate on your own you probably train yourself better anyway, so you should thank that laziness;)

Here you can check: http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2014/02/19/introducing-video-coding-engine-vce/
Or atleast you should be able to identify it.

EDIT:

Looked at the other video.

Indeed, it looks great, and at about 28mbps.
How come it lags though?

higher bitrate causes more work to be done, but i don't think it matters That much, is it a limit in the Hardware Encoder perhaps, or does Quality change the speed Preset?

As your in game was the same, and it's encoded by a hardware encoder which makes it pretty much untouched by the system, i can only conclude that something made the encoder not able to encode fast enough.

 

[XeiZ]

No quality balance IS crf just in a different scale, though i wouldnt be 100% sure about VCE i think he is just using the UI element. For example NVENC and QSV dont have adjustable crf, so i doubt VCE has it. I would really try to look for comparisons yet since the implementation is still a work in progress and things might change as they have with quicksync and nvenc in the past. Let him get a stable and smooth running version out and THEN start the comparisons.

 

[TheReaperV11]

It seems that bitrate is now more stable, in the first video the highest bitrate that I've seen using VLC was ~5800 Kb/s so it's better than 10 000 Kb/s :D Maybe I will now make short test-stream because it seems to be more stable now :)

EDIT:
I don't know why higher bitrates make it laggy... But I surely won't stream with 20 000 Kb/s :P
I identified VCE version and it's VCE 1.0 so for 78xx 79xx and other ones :)

 

[ZeroWalker]

Ah, okay well then it's pretty much what i thought it was, except the possibility of it changing the preset.

Hmm, didn't know they didn't support CRF, that's a bit sad, do you happen to know the Bitrate limit they support, would really like to be able to record at 50mbps to force transparency even if the encoder isn't able to keep quality check compared to x264.

True enough, if the settings and all that aren't what they should be, comparisons of this in terms of quality isn't judgeable, guess i will ask for more when those are completed.

 

[TheReaperV11]

If we are talking about recording - do you know how to resolve problem of importing recording from OBS to Camtasia Studio 8? It seems that it's a common problem, but maybe you know how to resolve it? Sometimes Camtasia reads theese files but mostly - it doesn't

 

[ZeroWalker]

You mean importing the local recorded file?

Never used Camtasia Studio 8, so can't really tell you much.
OBS however seems to pretty much follow the basic rules of MP4, so can't really see any compatibility issues occuring.

What is the issue at hand, what happens when it doesn't read?
The problem may be the decoder, but somehow doubt that as it would probably just cause frame skips when editing or problematic accuracy.

 

[TheReaperV11]

Well, Camtasia is very selective with files, recording from Fraps - ok, no problem, MP3 from Audacity - ok, no problem... MP3 from net - well, sometimes there are files that Camtasia doesn't like :P
When I try to improt it just shows a window where is something like that: Could not import a file, cannot decode (I don't remember it now :C)
If it was some strange file I would understand, but why doesn't it want to import MP4 from OBS while it can import MP4 rendered in Camtasia (for ex. intro)?

 

[ZeroWalker]

Hmm, MP3 is extremely common and all follow the same specs as far as i know.
There could be some damaged files etc, but as far as i know it's very robust.

Hmm, it may be solvable, bit it depends on if Camtasia decods everything itself, or can rely on other decoders.
For example Lav Filter: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191

If you can install that and see if it works, then all is good.
Hopefully there is a way to let others handle the format, and just let Camtasia take the RAW data, i am pretty sure After Effects does that, but of course it still limits the formats the application supports.

 

[TheReaperV11]

It doesn't help :/
I think that Camtasia has own codecs :c
Yup, just checked installation folder and there are some files with "enc" and "dec" in name so I quess these are them

 

[ZeroWalker]

I see. hmm, it may be worth a try to use MkvMerge to remux it to .Mkv.
It may be the container itself that causes problems, header info and stuff like that.

 

[TheReaperV11]

Well, it surely takes long time to remux and I don't want to add more time to 3 hours of editing a gameplay to YT
I tried to convert it in VLC to MP4, it took a long time, but it helped even if it was from MP4 to MP4 lol :P