Playback

While I am no expert on playback solutions, since my files seem to be playing fine, I thought I’d write a little amateurish tutorial here. I have been playing both xvid and low bitrate x264 files for over a year now on my six-year-old 867 MHZ PIII with 256 MB of RAM. Often people come to us complaining they are not able to play a particular file and the solution is usually simple unless they have a problem with their computer. You should be able to play x264 files fine if you have at least 1 ghz of CPU speed and 512 MB of total RAM. As for xvid, it is possible to get higher quality playback than what default ffdshow setting would allow even with a computer as slow as mine. However, before we go to that discussion, I must tell you what codecs and player(s) you should have installed in your system to play any fansub properly.

Minimum system requirements to be able to play ANY fansub: 1.3 ghz CPU, 512 MB RAM, PIV if Pentium or Celeron D, Win 2000, Mac OS 9.2

Minimum system requirements to be able to play most fansubs: 867 mhz CPU, 256 MB, RAM, PIII if Pentium or Celeron II, Win XP, Mac OS X

(Make sure you have at least 500 mb of space left on C drive, when system drive runs out of space, I’ve noticed things get VERY slow.)

WINDOWS/PC:

Codecs:
NOTE: Although Beta versions do have advantages, we’re only going to list stable releases here.

ffdshow
(the audio and video decoder MPC, Winamp, and various other directshow player uses)

Haali Media Splitter
(a DirectShow splitter for .MKV, .MP4 and .AVI)

Players:

Media Player Classic (this plays everything, MUST HAVE, THE directshow player)

The Core Media Player (again, something that virtually plays everything… interface is highly graphic, not recommended for slow computers)

****************

Winamp will play files with AC3 audio track and is able to play the default audio track in a multiple track file on its own. However, I don’t think it has an inbuilt audio switcher. It also does not play any other common format than AVI and does not support x264. To play AC3 audio, you need to install the Winamp AC3 plugin. Please note the Winamp uses a lot of memory to play video files in general and may lag with xvid too on slow computers. It is better to use Winamp 2 if you are experiencing problems. Old versions of Winamp can be found here.

For the love of God, please do not use Windows Media Player to play our files. It will not play them properly as WMP will play both the audio tracks simulataneously just like GraphEdit, BS/Zoom and a couple of other players would do. This problem, however, only happens for AVI files. While Haali Media Player does solve the issue for directshow players which are unable to play tracks separately, looks like WMP users aren’t lucky.

If you have the CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) installed, provided you’ve configured it properly, it should be enough (i.e you won’t need ANYTHING else). It is more than just a codec pack; it is everything — codecs, filters, mpc and ONLY for Windows OS. Many people tend to whine about how they can’t get files to play although they ‘have hundreds of codecs installed’ on their computer. Too many codecs is a worse problem than no codec. Before installing CCCP or just ffdshow, uninstall all codecs you’ve got there for your fansub files (keep backups just in case you screw up something in the process). Read here for configuration help.

Macs and Linux (also Windows):

mPlayer - The Movie Player

Although I personally use mPlayer to play my files as it’s absolutely convenient for normal use and required less memory than any of the players above, I have never had to configure it so I do not know much about it. It’s a fine player and you may read about it here. For support on playback on Linux and MAC OS X, please post on our forums. Of-course, for anything and everything, google is your friend.

VideoLan Media Player

They are both standalone players and you do not need to install anything else beside the player to play files.

Other Files:

GraphEdit (Recommended, tests your file, has a very basic player)
Zoom Player
BS Player
DS Player
BeLight (You may use this to convert from AC3 –> wav/mp3/ogg, etc.)
xvid 1.1.3 by celtic druid
Lame MP3 Encoder 3.98
Ogg Vorbis aoTuV (latest Ogg Vorbis encoder)
QuickSFV v2.34 (for generating and checking .sfv and other file verification properties)
WinMerge 2.6.8 (stable) (to compare differences between visual displays)
DirectX 9.0c June 2007
MS VC++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86) (If you do not have Visual C++ 2005 installed)
MS .NET Framework Redistributable Package 3.0

For other softwares not available in the list above, especially softwares used in fansubbing, visit this page.

More files will be added as time goes.

PLAYBACK:

When you have installed ffdshow on your computer, the default configurations are usually enough for quality playback. However, if the show is old and at 12 bpp xvid, and there are multichannel (>2.0 stereo) audio tracks, some manual configuration may be necessary.

Audio:

When you open a file in a directshow player, two ffdshow icons appear on your system tray (windows). One is the ffdshow audio decoder configuration icon and the other is the one for ffdshow video decoder configuration. Obviously, to configure audio settings, you need to pull the audio dialogbox up. If you’re playing DTS/AC3/AAC audio formats with surround audio on stereo speakers, do this:

In the audio decoder window, go to the VOLUME option and tick it. Since this is a real-time utility, if you’re using ffdshow/internal filter for audio playback, you will see the audio levels changing on the bars for each available channel. At max, there is six channels. If you’re familiar with decibels, tick ‘Decibels Scale’. Adjust ‘Master volume’ and each channel’s maximum decibel settings till you are satisfied with the loudness/softness. If audio still sounds noisy or something isn’t sounding right, go the MIXER option at the bottom of the list and tick it as well. ‘Output speakers configuration’ should be set to 2/0 stereo. Tick ‘voice control’ and ‘expand stereo’ if they already aren’t selected. Play with the levels of Voice, Surround and LFE till you’re satisfied. Normally, increasing Voice and decreasing LFE does the trick.

If you’re planning to use the external release of AC3filter, you will not be able to monitor changes in audio with every setting as this filter is an offline utility and you will need to close and reopen the file for the settings to affect playback. With AC3filter, you need to play with increasing Master Gain, DRC, Voice, Surround and LFE. Avoid messing around with the other options unless you know what you’re doing.

Some MPC configuration is necessary too. Go to ‘Options’ and then to ‘Audio Switcher’ under ‘Internal Filters’. Enable built-in audio switching and custom channel mapping. Select speaker configuration for 6 input channels and make sure all the ticks are made in the first two channels. Then press OK.

Video:

The directshow video decoder is so smart that it allows you to get high quality playback in rgb32 from a normal YV12 xvid/divx file. This is an algorithm and the results it produces are amazing, especially noticeable with CRT monitors and the latest LCD monitors. However, this setting is notably CPU intensive. So use with care. It is a good idea to turn it off while playing h.264/h.263 files and use the default settings for them. This option is mainly there for overcoming the colorspace-quality issue that YV12 causes and usually makes much difference for older shows. Hence this is highly recommended for watching our fansubs. This is a guide to get the highest quality playback in MPC using ‘VM9 (renderless)’ mode. In Options —> Playback —> Output settings, do as the picture below shows:

Close MPC and open the ffdshow video decorder configuration dialogbox. Go to ‘Output’ and change default settings to:

We have just told you how to made ffdshow convert YV12 to high quality rgb. Open the file again and see the difference it has producted. If things lag, use ‘VM7 (renderless)’ or ‘Overlay Mixer’ mode. Try using RGB16 instead of 24 and 32.

Updates will be made when necessary. Keep checking back from time to time!

If you would like to add to the information above or found any content of the article to be inaccurate/ambiguous, please leave a comment or make a thread in the ‘blip’s tech garage’ board in our forums. It will be appreciated.

***IF ANY OF THE LINKS DO NOT WORK PLEASE REPORT TO US IMMEDIATELY***