980479 - Improve quality of eideticker movies

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Testing Graveyard :: Eideticker, defect)

Description

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

The quality of the videos we're generating with pointgrey cameras is quite bad. After doing some research, ffmpeg's default encoder is quite bad. Apparently with more recent versions, you can do better, but I don't think it is available by default in Ubuntu 12.04, which is what we're currently using as our "default platform".

I have been experimenting a bit with vpxenc, and have gotten much improved results, especially if you do a two-pass analysis. I initially thought it was much slower than ffmpeg, but this appears not to be the case after some testing. I think we should switch to using it.

http://wiki.webmproject.org/howtos/convert-png-frames-to-webm-video

Comment 1

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

Attachment: Optionally use vpxenc to encode movies

This patch improves the quality of the generated videos quite a bit. Unfortunately I found out that the version of png2yuv does not currently work correctly on Ubuntu 12.04. Later versions of this tool (e.g. in 13.10) do work, however.

Since I would like to see better movies sooner than later, I'd propose the following:

1. Apply this patch. Default behaviour is maintained for now, this remains a "secret" feature.
2. Update the machine in London with a custom-built copy of png2yuv. Modify the copy of eideticker-ci to pass --use-vpxenc when calling update-dashboard.py
2. When Ubuntu 14.04 is released in a month, make that the default eideticker platform and remove the --use-vpxenc flag and the ffmpeg path.

Comment 2

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

This might be interesting to :whsu as well.

Comment 3

[William Hsu [:whsu]]

Good job! Thanks William's sharing.
Have a nice weekend! :)

Comment 4

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

Comment on attachment 8387846 [details] [diff] [review]
Optionally use vpxenc to encode  movies

Review of attachment 8387846 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

This looks good to me. I'd prefer to drop the 'use' prefix, but r=me regardless, especially if this is going to be removed and made the default once we make 14.04 a requirement.

::: src/eideticker/eideticker/options.py
@@ +84,4 @@
>          self.add_option("--no-capture", action="store_true",
>                          dest="no_capture",
>                          help="Skip video capture (mainly for debugging)")
> +        self.add_option("--use-vpxenc", action="store_true",

Could we make the command line argument simply --vpxenc?

Comment 5

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

Pushed with suggested change: https://github.com/mozilla/eideticker/commit/85e9bb0fe9f6bb72ea680227956ef615baf08d19