Forum - View topicNEWS: NicoNico's English Site Lists 6 Summer Anime Titles
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TeenChibi
Posts: 60 |
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Confirmed! NicoNico is THE best streaming site. For me at least. I watched Uta no Price on it and the quality was superb, with no ads!!! Will watch all of those titles on this amazing streaming site. Thank you NicoNico!
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Ontopofthemoon
Posts: 2 |
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This site's attempted simulcast is pretty bad. The video quality is only 360p but the filesize is close to that of Crunchyrolls 720p, and on top of that there doesn't seem to be a full screen option.
Never watching anything there again until they get their act together. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Why does filesize matter if it's streaming? Doesn't bigger filesize imply higher bitrate = less compression artifacts? |
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Ontopofthemoon
Posts: 2 |
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True, but a higher bitrate really doesn't mean much to 360p. It's overkill, no 2 ways about it. A 70mb 720p file would look better than a 500mb 360p file. |
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TheAncientOne
 Posts: 1875 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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Unless the video in question was filled with non-stop motion. 
A low bit rate high-res video can look fine if there is little movement. Turn up the action dial, however, and it can quickly turn into a mosaic fest. If the bitrate is already comparable to what other sites are using for higher resolution, however, I see little reason not to bump it up. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Just for the record, the bitrate should be 1500 Kb/s (that includes audio and video). |
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TheAncientOne
Posts: 1875 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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On a measurement I did in the past of a CR 720p stream, the average data rate was 1.555Mbps. If the resolution is only 360p, a data rate that high is something of a waste. Even at 480p, it would offer excellent quality. The second problem with it, is that is basically rules out anyone with a 1.5Kbps or slower connection from viewing it, unless they dynamically scale the bitrate, and 1.5 Mbps is the maximum. Unless their backend coding is considerably more sophisticated than their website design (unlikely, but no impossible), I doubt that is the case. As a bit of trivia, a 720p stream from TAN came in at an average data rate of 2.2570 Mbps. They apparently use VBR with a high maximum, as even with tested 5 Mbps connection, long scenes with a lot of movement (i.e., Infinite Straos open), or quick scene changes (i.e., Canaan opening) can cause the video to freeze briefly while the audio continues. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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There's also an eco stream version at... 400 Kb/s, I think. In any case feedback about bitrates and resolutions is something they are actively seeking. They're still in beta and deciding these issues right now, so tell them what you want and they can probably do it (assuming it's financially feasible). |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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One thing they really need to do, is learn how to IVTC to 23.976 fps and not use stuttering/blended 29.970 fps for simulcasted streams. Another is not hurting overall quality and wasting bitrate by using 1-pass CBR encoding with extremely strict VBV settings. Taking a few more minutes to do 2-pass VBR encodes with a higher VBV limit on their speedy encode boxes, would help improve quality and bit-rate distribution a lot. The next step would be higher resolution for subscribers, since the nicovideo.jp platform already supports 1280x720, 1440x810, and even 1920x1080 videos.
Though as long as make all simulcasts free and available at the same time for subscribers and non-subscribers, 1.5Mbps 640x360p works. It's only if/when they erect a pay-wall on simulcasts that it may become an issue from a value standpoint compared to other streaming sites (Crunchyroll/Hulu/Youtube). |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Actually the jittery playback seems to be flash playback related and not IVTC related... At last, I can tell you the Canopus HQ 480p I provided them was perfectly IVTCed. Since the original tape was uniform cadence, I simply undid the pulldown manually: SeparateFields() SelectEvery(10,2,1,4,5,6,7,8,9) Weave() in any case, I do fully intend to meet with their lab techs as soon as I can to give some helpful pointers. I suspect that the VBV requirements might be part of whatever built in profile they are using in their encoder suite. Note: All videos are being delivered to nico with hardsubs at pure 23.976 fps and 720x480 (WIDE), Canopus HQ... Any quality loss is incurred during their final streaming encoding step. |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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It was the same stuttering 29.97 fps (verified with MediaInfo) played back locally on my computer, so I'm 100% certain it has nothing to do with Flash. NicoNico most definitely messed it up during re-encoding, considering you gave them a clean source.
When you talk them them, see if they are able to use 854x480 (2-pass VBR, 23.796 fps, bitrate=1500 kbps, vbv_maxrate=3000 kbps, using a slower x264 preset probably wouldn't hurt either considering they were encoding with 12-threads) from the 720x480 Canopus source. They are encoding using x264, so they should have lots of flexibility to maximize stream quality. You're assumption is likely correct that they are using some sort of general-purpose nicovideo x264 preset for video uploads, but they really need to put a bit more effort into maximizing quality for simulcasts. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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I just got off the phone with them, and actually it seems haste was a factor... Some inside baseball here, but we got the final tape for Uta no Prince a whopping 24 hours before airing, and I didn't get them the subbed video until about 12 hours to go. I just got off the phone with them, actually, and it turns out the they had to fallback on some crappier settings and redo things after discovering playback issues with their original encodes. That would explain the "default" encoding settings that were mucking things up. We'll see how the quality is for Twin Angel 1, which should be up soon. (Hopefully once they get them tweaked properly they'll go back and redo the encode for episode 1). |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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They fixed a couple of the Uta Prince 01 issues with the Twin Angel 01 stream. __________ The good: Smooth IVTC'ed 23.976 fps Relaxed VBV settings a bit __________ The good/bad: They increased the video bitrate resulting in a +11% increase in stream size (244MB vs 270MB). They stripped their x264 headers 
__________ The bad: Still using 1-pass CBR instead of 2-pass VBR Their VBV settings are still a bit restrictive (Example where quantizers peaked at 43, though if the source was full of blocks in that section, you wouldn't want to waste bitrate there anyway) Still downscaling their 480p source videos to 360p for no particular reason, other than 640x360 being the standard wide-screen size on nicovideo. They made the video very blurry with what appears to be heavy noise reduction and deblocking along the lines of blur().blur().blur().blur(), which probably isn't needed nor helps compression that much. x264 should be good enough to retain more detail/sharpness with psy_rd (if there was any to begin with in the source) than there was in that episode. Now this doesn't mean they should make things worse by going in the opposite direction and over-sharpen everything with halo artifacts. __________ samuelp, if you can continue to relay your knowledge to nudge them in the direction of quality, that would be great. Encode quality is paramount for a streaming service, and nicovideo,jp has always been somewhat poor in that regard to begin with. I see it as a good thing that their least popular simulcasts are airing first, to give them time to fix issues. The next four are what more people will likely be watching and care about. Last edited by cyberbeing on Thu Jul 07, 2011 6:20 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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The Blood-C stream seems like the most sane encode of the three simulcasts so far.
Smooth IVTC'ed 23.976 fps Bitrate reduced to something more reasonable for 360p (208MB) Quantizers averaging 15-17 throughout (min @ ~12 | peak @ ~25) Not ultra-blurry like Twin Angel. This is now around the quality you'd expect for free simulcasts. Hopefully they can keep it up for future episodes, if the nice compressibility of Blood-C 01 wasn't a fluke. Offering 480p/720p 2-pass encodes is still something they should consider when they leave beta and have paying subscribers, especially if they plan to have such a large overlap with Crunchyroll as they do now. |
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cyberbeing
Posts: 135 |
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They've taken one small step forward, but two large steps backwards with the Itsuka Tenma (Dark Rabbit has Seven Lives) stream.
The stream was 23.976 fps, but it was IVTC'd horribly, resulting in a stuttering mess with large frame jumps whenever there is movement (not a Flash problem). Either ItsuTen was actually a 29.976 fps show, or extremely sloppy frame-rate decimation was used. Oversharpened. There is now noticeable aliasing and halo artifacts on all the edges. There also noticeable ringing/blocking artifacts around all the edges, a likely side-effect of the high-bitrate needed to maintain the oversharpened edges. They are finally using 2-pass VBR encoding, but 1000 kbps seems a bit borderline for this episode (see-above). If they must use one standard bitrate to fit all simulcasts, I say bump it up to a target bitrate of 1200 kbps + audio and call it a day. Related to the above, there are a couple issues I've been noticing related to watching videos on niconico. The first is niconico is limiting the rate videos are buffered to 1200Kbps (flat-lines @ 150KB/s in my bandwidth monitor) exactly for ItsuTen. This has resulted in videos occasionally stalling for a second or two, since the video bitrate is occasionally is higher than the extremely restrictive rate they are limiting download speed to. Raising the download speed limit to 2000Kbps (250KB/s) seems like it would be a good idea to avoid stalling. For reference, I'm on a FTTH connection out of California and have a 15ms ping to the Limelight CDN they are using to serve video. The other stalling related issue seems to be a flaw in their auth-token system. At random times throughout watching, your auth-token expires and the stream stops downloading until you seek (or playback reaches) the point it stopped buffering. At which point normally a new auth-token should be issued and buffering continue, but I've seen a few times already that this doesn't always happen. You'll reach the point it stopped buffering, and NicoNico will refuse to download any more (even after seeking around attempting to jump-start it). The only way to get it to continue is to reload the page and wait 10+ minutes for the video buffering to catch up to where you were watching before (since the NicoNico flash player doesn't allow you to seek anywhere which has not been buffered sequentially, from the beginning of the stream. I can reliably reproduce the problem with the Blood-C stream. Start playback, immediately seek the the end of the buffer, and when it reaches the Blood-C OP it will hang a couple time during playback since it's not allowed to buffer fast enough. I also have to wonder if all the streams so far are 640x352 with 4 pixel padding (black bars) on top & bottom on purpose. samuelp, does your anamorphic source have a display aspect ratio of 1.81:1 and not 1.78:1 (16:9)? I'm leaning towards this being a mistake during decoding of the source, unless the source itself is padded. samuelp, I apologize for the continued need to relay these things to NicoNico through you. Unfortunately, NicoNico has no way to file bug reports or contact them outside of Facebook, even though this is supposedly a beta... If you'd prefer that I PM you instead, I'll start doing so. |
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