Poor H264 Quality

[Moley]

Hi,

Hopefully an easy one, though I couldn’t find anybody with this issue when I went looking.

When I play H264 files, the quality is pretty bad - blocky, with lots of artefacts etc.

Turning off hardware decoding seems to solve the quality issue, but then CPU usage jumps way up and frames start being dropped/skipped, so the playback is jumpy.

Playback is fine on other devices. I tried playing over a network and also from a USB stick.

The overall bitrate is 1936 Kbps.

Here’s the MediaInfo for the file:
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High 10@L4.1
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 9 frames
Muxing mode : Header stripping
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 25mn 42s
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 10 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Writing library : x264 core 124 r2197 69a0443
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=9 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x113 / me=tesa / subme=10 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=32 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=12 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=16 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=24 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=40 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=16.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=81 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00

Cheers,
Moley

[ActionA]

@Moley

Format profile : High 10@L4.1

Playback issues 60fps

Use mediainfo: Format profile : High 10@L4.0 The files that play incorrectly use 10-bit H.264 (aka Hi10P). That is not supported by the Pi (or any hardware codec). You’ll need a decent specced PC to play these files with software decode. Probably best to just avoid these encodings in the future.

[sam_nazarko]

@Moley

Format profile : High 10@L4.1

The file is 10-bit, so it cannot be decoded in hardware. The Vero 2 doesn’t support 10-bit H264. In fact, H264 10-bit is quite an odd format, and I am not aware of any hardware decoders for it.

The format never really took off and is mainly used for anime. I suggest that you either transcode the file or find another ‘source’.

[Moley]

Ah ok, fair enough then, I suppose I’ll transcode. I simply assumed if my ancient macbook could handle it, the Vero should be fine, but clearly that was a silly assumption!

Thanks for the speedy reply