Ned Scott Wrote:So your best bet to watch anime this season in XBMC is to find "8-bit" versions or follow one of the options here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Hi10P_playback
Or to transcode from 10-bit to 8-bit yourself (which is what I do). Even if you use one of the 10-bit options, all decoding has to be done on the CPU and many HTPCs don't have a powerful enough CPU for high-resolution 10-bit material (since they were built with the idea that all decoding would be offloaded to the GPU).
Best bet for transcoding is to use
Handbrake - either
0.9.5 or the latest
nightly. Start with either the Normal or High Profile (preferred if your hardware supports it) preset, and then adjust to find the combination of quality, size and time to transcode that works best for you. Note that you can mouse over most options to get an idea of what they affect.
I aim to transcode 720p (or 1080p reduced to 720p) at ~30fps on my machine (i7-860 - 4 cores, 8 threads). This means I can set an episode transcoding, watch another episode and the transcoding is finished by the time I'm ready to watch. Particularly good if I'm marathoning a series - set all episodes transcoding, and start watching 30 minutes later ...
Some specific suggestions I have to improve playback and reduce filesize whilst maintaining quality (but some will reduce transcoding performance):
Picture: If you download 1080p material you can reduce it to 720p here by setting
Anamorphic to
Loose and changing the width to
1280. This will greatly improve transcoding performance and reduce file size, and the chances of seeing the difference on your TV is minimal.
Video Filters: Detelecine and
Decomb can be off if you know that the source material doesn't need it (which should be the case with most fansubs). It's safe to leave them on, but reduces transcoding performance slightly. I leave them on.
Video:
Framerate: Use
Constant framerate -
Variable is the default, and
should work fine, but I've found that some sources combined with some playback software can produce jerky playback when transcoded with
Variable framerate.
Quality: Use
Constant Quality. I find RF:20 gives indistinguishable results from the source in nearly all cases, with reasonable file size and transcoding time.
Advanced: Many settings to play with here, and it's here that you can potentially exceed your hardware's capabilities (if you've got recentish nVidia hardware, everything is OK).
Reference frames and Max. B-frames: The defaults for High Profile of 3 and 3 are fine - higher values
may give smaller filesizes. I use 6 and 5. I've tried higher values but just found slower transcoding for no size or quality improvement (esp. if
Adaptive B-frames is set to
Optimal as it should be).
Motion Estimation Method: The default
Hexagon method is OK, but
Uneven Multi-Hexagon is definitely better, for a smallish penality to transcoding time.
Subpixel ME & Mode Decision: This has one of the largest effects on file size and transcoding time. Since I have a big beefy transcoding machine I use
9: RD refine in all frames. I would suggest not going below
6: RD in I/P frames.
Psychovisual Rate Distortion and Trellis: For animated sources I set this to 0.50 and 0.00 respectively (i.e. in the options list at the bottom,
psy-rd=0.50,0.00).
Ned Scott Wrote:XBMC will eventually be updated with a newer version of FFmpeg (the heart, so to speak, of our video player) and gain Hi10P support, but not until XBMC v12 (Frodo) due out next year.
I'm hoping it will be included in the nightlies shortly after the Eden final release, but whether I'd be able to use it on my HTPC is the question ... might be able to swap it's CPU with another machine, but then I've got to consider cooling and noise again ...