actually with MP4CAM2AVI (which is a free and great app) i can already and without any loss of quality convert all MP4 files to .avi files...my concern is about the fact that for mp4 files created by the sanyo HD1, the newly created .avi files crash all the players i tried to read them with...

and i guess there is a codec problem or something (i have WMP10)

Avi
 

IMO, you have to try with the software provided with the HD1 (Unlead Photo Explorer). It is supposed to work ;-) as described in the user guide.
I think you can get a free trial for it on the unlead www server or ask to Joseph.
May be its a kind of mp4 encoding not yet supported by MP4CAM2AVI.

Luc-Henri

ok merci l'ami !

but i tried to download the free trials of Ulead photo explorer and Ulead Video Studio but for some reason, despite multiples tries it won't let me download (it says busy network since 1 hour !!

i did register to the Ulead site as you need to do that to download...sent an email to the site.

Joseph did u try to convert you MP4 files into .avi yet ?

do they work with Windows media player ?

@Marc : you should try some well know and robust (and open source) MP4 tools like mp4box or mp4UI, or perhaps the latest alpha AVIMuxGui, which should give you more flexibilty and information about the mp4 files you're trying to convert.

i'm seeing that mp4cam2avi is hosted on sourceforge so i suppose it use the gpack library like the softwares cited above, but since september 2005, there might have been some updates.

@Jospeh (or anybody with a HD1 ;)) : Could you take some shoot while running or something with the HD1 ? i want to use it for some sport shooting so i would like to see how the compression engine behave with high moving scenes and so far we only have seen still or slow scenes. Thanks for spending your precious time for us !

With earlier Xacti models MP4CAM2AVI was considered preferable to the bunlded ULEAD software for converting - because MP4CAM2AVI did not re-encode, just repackaged.

The bundled ULEAD did re-encode and caused image degradation...

It's covered in a thread I read earlier today at Xacti.co.uk

http://xacti.proboards3.com/index.cg...ead=1080897747

It's unfortunate, therefore, to hear that MP4CAM2AVI is thrown once the MP4 is HD.

I guess that British site will be a good place to watch for finding out how to burn Pal DVDs from the 30p footage.. once it's users get their hands on the HD1.

HD1 bug
 

Luc-Henry:
yes, lots of jaggies on branches in the "\" direction. Also with rooftops, or the cap of the child eating the icecream. I doubt that endianity is responsible for such an issue. It could be a trick to save bandwidth, as if resolution was halved in the "/" direction. But to me it rather looks like if 2 DCT components had been mistakably swapped in the HD1 encoder. I think I will wait for this issue to be solved before ordering this little gem! Is there a way to contact Sanyo support about this?

Encoder bugs
 

Emmanuel, I understand that I have the same artifact than you. So no reasons to incriminate the PCs hardware.
I don't know if it is possible to fix a bug of the mp4 chip embedded with the HD1. Is there some kind of firmware update for it ? Or, if the guilty code is hardware coded, is there a software tier-level to provide a turnaround ?
I doubt than Sanyo engineers could have been ignoring this mistake. I am far to be a compression expert, but, cannot this to be an artifact related to motion compensation fonction (I try to remember where I read it can give some aliasing artifacts ) ?

Luc-Henri

Hi and thanx, i looked on the sourceforge site and the version of MP4CAM2AVI i have is the latest (2.27)...

Thanx Graham for the comments, i will ask the question on this british site also...yeah it's very unfortunate that the mp4 from HD1 don't work with MP4CAM2AVI , the BIG advantage of MP4CAM2AVI is really the fact that there were no loss in image quality...and it is so fast to convert, really unbeatable on that field !

by the way , i tried to convert an mp4 from the Xacti C6 with MP4CAM2AVI and it worked so i guess it has to do with the HD1 files...i guess if i can't solve this problem i will have to buy the xacti C6 instead, but the optical zoom is only 5 X on the C6 (10 X on the HD1)

to come back on the Steven comment, yeah Joseph, as for now you have showed us numerous clips shot in very ideal (stabilized) conditions, but would you try to make some shootage in more normal (motion) conditions please, if you have any time.

Thanx

Well, it happens on perfectly static images (see the rooftops on OC2.MP4). And besides, I have never seen such a kind of strongly anisotropic artifacts on any MPEG-like codec so far. Have you? Moreover, it does not look like the ringing usually associated with heavy quantization of DCT coefficients.

i downloaded the trial version of Ulead video studio....awful application !

in regards of video editing, this thing is even slower than windows movie maker and seem a bit difficult to navigate...

regarding the ability to reckonize MP4 files, it's NO ! then i tried to input Sanyo HD1 avi files converted from MP4CAM2AVI into it but it crashed...

i didn't manage to see the way to convert mp4 to avi but it may be only available from the other application from Ulead (Photo Explorer which i didn't download)

anyway, stay away from Ulead Studio video, it will take more than 1 gigabyte from your hard drive and don't justify at any point this sacrifice !

i already removed it from my system !

Joseph how are u gonna edit all your HD1 files ??

ok - someone posted a link to stevesdigicams but not the exact link for a 720p clip . Here it is

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2006_...1_samples.html

It's a handheld shot with a fair amount of action. I think it looks great. What's he doing that the others aren't ? Kurth

I have been busy with work and have not be able to do any more tests. Now that the HD1s are out I'm sure there will be a bunch of testers soon. I have Vegas 6, but have not done any editing with it yet. In fact I am trying to figure out how do the basics today. It seems a bit tricky...

About the bug with the MP4 program, report it to the sourceforge site, I'm sure they will love to upgrade it to HD.

About the bug with the HD1 footage, if everybody with a HD1 reported it to Sanyo then they might do something about it (there are a few more bugs to, but starting your letter with this one would help). Organisations have a habit of ignoring something until the same thing is reported by X amount of people.

Marc, about your system crashing, sounds strange, you might try reinstalling mainboard software and Graphics.DSP drivers with the latest (could even be the XP installation).

i don't think it has to do with XP as those crashes only happens with .avi files converted through HD1 MP4 files...for me the problem comes from MP4CAM2AVI with HD files...

but it's a good idea to leave a post on the sourceforge site, i tried to find a forum there yesterday but couldn't find anything which seems updated regularly...

will try again later

Emmanuel,
I was refering to this hint (User Guide P 77)
"When using a tripod, the docking station or other means to stabilize the camera, please turn the motion compensation function off . If the
motion compensation function is enabled when it is not actually needed, it
may result in an image that appears unnatural."
When you look at the image captures of the clips, with a huge zoom in we can see also steps on the "/" direction, but they are twice smaller than these of the "\". Could be a kind of compromise to reduce data size ?, as you said before.

Luc-Henri

But it is worth looking at, it might be some part of Windows, or the drivers, that has only has been used for the task, that would be why it doesn't turn up anywhere else. As I understand there is problems with the Ulead product to, which seems strange. So reinstalling things one at a time might help )through honestly XP is the last thing to try).

I have been using MP4CAM2AVI with mp4 files from my Sanyo C1 a lot. It´s a great app becouse only recodes the audio stream to pcm and video stays untouched. I use Vegas (now version 6) to edit and export to mpg2 DVD compilant.
Now with my HD1 the edit process it´s a bit tricky, becouse if you put the mp4 files of the HD1 directly on the editor, it eats ram like crazy (1 GB ram or more with only 3 or 4 clips....). Don´t tried in other video editors...

The solution is to convert the mp4 files to hd avi files. I use Matrox HD codec (one friend of mine give´s it to me) and eo video for bach-encode of all files, but this metod is time consuming, and space wasting becouse the bitrate goes up to 100mbit/sec!.

Pd: Marc. You must to have Quicktime 7 to manage mp4 files from HD1 properly. For me the bug with MP4CAM2AVI is that it sees the files of HD1 like 640 x 480 standard files, and the resulting video is of that resolution, showing only a portion of the full original screen. (only boy and icecream witout sorrounding for example).

Regards!.

HD1 jaggies
 

Ah OK good point. Do you know if any of the clips posted so far has been taken without motion compensation?

Almost all the clips i took with with motion compensation off. I'm not sure about the very first set, but I think it was off. One later set of clips I made a point that it was on and hand held.

HD1 directional jaggies
 

Thank you Joseph. So apparently there is currently no way to get rid of these artifacts... Too bad. May be as reviews start to pop out on the web we will learn more about this "feature", and get some answers from Sanyo.

HD1 directional "jaggies"
 

Looking in details at zoomed screenshots of the OCx.MP4 samples it seems pretty clear that something is wrong within the macroblocks for patterns oriented along the "\" direction. For instance, instead of having
\
_\
__\
___\
You get something like
/
_/
__/
___/
where "/" is 4 pixels high. So I guess it is definitely a bug with some DCT components/coefficients...

Thanks Rafael for your feedback. I do have Quicktime 7 installed. Don't you regret the purchase of the HD1 in regard to the difficulty to manage and edit those mp4 files ?

especially if you compare with the easyness of MP4CAM2AVI...

i mean, if editing video clips , which is one of the more basic stuff to do when you own a digital camera, is a nightmare then what is the use of having a High Definition camcorder in the first place ???

really i wonder...

Turnaround : Dutch angle
 

Emmanuel, we only have to turn our future HD1 around it's anteroposterior axis to definitively avoid or minimize the "\" ;-)
Seriously, I am afraid you could be right for the bug, Sanyo must know it, so I don't realy understand (Is this cam officialy distributed somewhere ?)

Luc-Henri

@Marc : I looked at the MP4Cam2AVI and it looks like that the code for mp4 parsing do not depend on a specific library, and for some reason it doesn't work with the files we have here (HD has nothing to do with this, the code is just assuming too much things). So i suggest you to use a tool like MP4Box (it works perfectly, i just tested) to demux the mp4 track to AVI. Unfortunatly (or fortunatly :D), it's a command-line tool...

Use :
MP4Box.exe -avi 1 MT9.MP4 to demux the video track (1) to avi
MP4Box.exe -raw 2 MT9.MP4 to demux the audio track (2) to raw aac

you can find this tool here or here

For those interested by the profile used by the encoder, the mp4 clips are encoded in Simple profile@L3, which means pretty much no options that helps quality (like bframe, qpel or GMC). I encoded some raw 720p samples @ 9Mbits and unfortunatly, Mpeg4 SP is not efficient enough at this level. You need at least b-frames to have something correct at this bitrate... It would be cool if we could hack the max bitrate somewhere in this firmware :D

Steven, great to hear there's another option to convert MP4 to AVI - though it's slightly over my non-technical head.

Could you just clarify that MP4Box doesn't re-encode, i.e. that there is no loss?

Thanks.

Graham

Wow great news steven, but what is a command line tool (i guess it's this kind of thing that has to do with the Dos menu of my PC ?

i downloaded the file that you talk about (MP4box.7z) but i have to confess i never saw such extension and don't know what to do with it...

would you explain to me cause my knowledge is kinda limited
that's so cool that we can have a tool to convert HD mp4 to AVI

is it as easy as with MP4CAM2AVI, and what about image loss quality ?

thanx again (and what means "demux" the video track ?)

Well i went on google to try to get more info on mp4box, but it seems a bit complicated to manipulate for those not familiar with the command line tools

Yes, you have to use it in a "dos" mode. Use Start > Execute > type "cmd" to have the windows command line. From then, it's like in the good old DOS days.

"7z" is the extension for the "7-Zip" format, it's supported by the 3.40+ Winrar software, but it's an open format so free tools are available at http://www.7-zip.org/
Use the rareware link for an older version (which works too) in plain zip format.

Now the technical explaination :)
First you have to make the distinction between the codec used to compress a video and the "container" used to store this compressed stream. AVI and MP4 are two standards that discribe how to put video and audio streams in the same file (this processus is called "muxing"). That mean going back and forth between this two format cause no quality loss because it's just ordering the compressed data differently. Now what's confusing here is that "MPEG 4" is a whole standard that describe how to compress video AND how to store it, so you have to make the distinction. Here, the video is encoded in MPEG4 Simple Profile, while the audio is encoded in (LC)AAC and everything is stored in a MP4 file.
You can perfectly put the mpeg4-encoded video stream in an AVI, for AAC it is also possible but it's quite a hack and absolutly not recommended if you want to use it in a general editing software like Premiere.

And i'm lucky, i won't have to code a little gui for you guys, there is already one that does the job : http://yamb.unite-video.com/download.html
Use the extract fonction ;)

yiiiik !!! well thanx for your time but it seems a bit too tricky for me at this point...and thinking of spending that much convertion time in every single .mp4 file i would shot before even beginning the editing job seem a bit too much time consuming

i will wait for an update of MP4CAM2AVI or i will pass on the HD1

Steven that's great - so we don't need to worry about dos and all that!

I've downloaded it and added a HD1 MP4 clip.

I press mux but it spits out another MP4 file.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

WOW that's super great steven, i spoke too fast in my previous post

actualy the application you showed us do the trick quite easily and fastly

once you "demuxed" the mp4 file with this yamb application, then just put it through MP4CAM2AVI and it would convert it to .avi

(and i tried to import that .avi file into windows movie maker and it worked just fine :) :)

A BIG THANK YOU TO you steve !! you pushed my decision to buy the HD1 a bit more into the YES direction :)

i still have to know if there is a loss in quality though (at first sight i would say NO)

PS: one small drawback i'm just noticing is that the video file obtained after an edition in Windows movie maker is a bit distorsed, but i know it's due to the HD format----> windows movie maker changed the HD definition video into a 640 x 480 movie so i need to work that out...

after some playing around with the yamb application conversion, i notice 2 litlle drawback :

-it seems that the mp4 files can only be imported into the window one by one

if you try to add 2 or more files into the "audio video" section, it will only demux the first one...can be quite long if you have dozens of mp4 files

but maybe there is a way to change that (there is a divide option but it doesn't do the trick when you wannna do 3 separate conversions of 3 different mp4 at the same time)

-the second thing is that it seems that once the .avi file is edited through Windows movie maker it loses a large part of its High Definition feel...i don't know if it's due to the yamb application or due to the Sanyo HD1 not much compatible with windows movie maker but that's pity.

i didn't really notice such a lose in quality with other non HD files...

I'm thinking that good quality hd1 video can make great downsized SD. I was messing around with Vegas today and put together some of the best hd1 clips I have into a 720 x 480 resolution movie. I included one horrible hd1 clip for good measure ;) It is 37MB in size. Please right click and download. Let me know what you think about the quality. Previewing the MP4 files in Vegas on a P4 2.5 was very choppy, but it rendered very quickly. I am impressed in how clear DV can look.

http://www.gamersden.com/hd1test/clips.mpg

Hey guys, you realise you have your own sub-forum now.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=115

Thanks Chris.

GOOD video Joseph, the music is cool

i'm quite impressed by the quality and somehow it sounds strange when you read the very bad review from the forum akihabara quoted in another thread...BUT that's true that the HD1 gives best results in conditions when camera does not move, which is the case for most of your video.

i have to imagine what it would be like without a tripod because you seem to have used that much...

on the akihabara review they say that the Image stabilizer is useless ! because it has no effect, what do u think of that ?

i'm still hesitating between buying a C6 and buying that one...but your video put the HD1 back in the game whereas i was about to give it up !

thanx

Quite a few shots in the video don't use a tripod and don't look bad, but of course you will get the best shots with a tripod. I agree the Image stabilizer does not seem to do much.

You notice that the first footage done here was poor too, but there is a way to shoot clean video with it, that Joseph subsequently used.

Thanks

Wayne.

Lets hope that the next version of this camera has h264 19Mb/s or at least Mpeg4 19Mb/s.

On motion compensation:
Have a look at this comparison between H264 quality and mpeg2, even though it is not a DB measured difference stat I would like to see, but you see with the human viewers, complex motion clips had less difference with human viewers, even on h264, this either proves that humans notice less during motion, and/or that real bandwidth still matters. The good news is that water is clearly perceived as better on h264.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/paper...estResults.pdf

"the second thing is that it seems that once the .avi file is edited through Windows movie maker it loses a large part of its High Definition feel...i don't know if it's due to the yamb application or due to the Sanyo HD1 not much compatible with windows movie maker but that's pity."

I'm just guessing here, but isn't that because Windows Movie Maker is a really poor quality programme?

^^^^maybe...but i have to admit that the high quality programs which are FREE are very rare nowadays