Hi all. As I mentioned [post 292713]elsewhere[/post], I believe 10-bit and YUV444 h.264 playback support will, in the not-too-distant future, be widespread enough in media players, codecs, etc. to begin preparing primary encodes as such.
Thus, I am
officially encouraging that encoders produce a 10-bit YUV444 encode in addition to the set of encodes normally produced for a publication.
For those Windows users employing AVISynth to carry out their encoding, you will need to make three changes to your encoding environment to be able to do this:
- You'll need a 10-bit build x264; this is available in the usual places. You will probably want to use a different filename for it so as not to conflict with the 8-bit x264 that you'll be using for other types of encodes.
- Remove the 'ConvertToYV12' call towards the end of your encoding script; you can leave the 'ConvertToYV24' call intact.
- Add '--output-csp=i444' to your x264 command line(s) so that the output actually is YUV444.
I have configured the site to detect adding a mirror with '_10bit444' in the filename separately from other mirrors; this means
you will be able to add one of these encodes per movie without my intervention.
So, go to town, everyone!
---
EDIT: Since writing the above passage on AVISynth usage, I've noticed that DeDup, which virtually all of our AVISynth users are using, only support YV12 or YUY2 input/output. Both of these colorspaces have chroma subsampling, so just by doing the above you're not getting the best possible output.
Thus, I suggest you use a different deduplication plugin (such as [thread 12065]ExactDedup[/thread], which I specifically wrote for this purpose).
You might also experiment with removing the ConvertToYV24 call; since x264 contains a library (swscale) which can do colorspace conversions and AVISynth only support 8-bit/channel colour output, doing so (and thus using swscale's conversion) should theoretically be able to produce output covering the entire 10-bit/channel range for 10-bit encodes and thereby provide slightly better quality.