Encoding software

[Helmet]

Can someone recommend some encoding software which allow to choose specs like Codec Format, Level Profile (for video codec format), Number of Frames, Bitrate, etc?

More specifically, I would need something which allow me to change the specs for those mkv files I want to play on my blu-ray player, like the video codec Profile Level or to change the default audio or subtitle streams (for instance, if one mkv comes with the default audio stream in english, to change it to japanese).

I already have and use MediaCoder, but I would like to have some alternatives, as MediaCoder is sometimes a bit too complex (and also, while freeware, their pestering about donations is annoying like hell).

[Tri_Edge]

If you want simplicity just use Handbrake.

[Mcgreag]

MeGUI would be the usual recommended software but it might be too complex for you.

[Helmet]

HandBrake is a good option. Any other suggestions?

I have one problem though during encoding: when I try to convert ogm files to mkv, it never keeps the subtitles, regardless of what tool I use, HandBrake or MediaCoder. Does anyone have any idea why?

[Krudda]

Well, it looks like you want this for re-coding, more than encoding.
I would suggest XMedia-Recode
This program has all the options you are looking for and can convert to Almost 50 formats (that's including audio formats)
The batch encode crashes on me constantly, but other than that, superb converter.
I seriously suggest giving it a test run, its faster and more reliable than Handbrake and certainly easier than megui.
Also, what do you mean by "keep" the subtitles?
Burn them into the video or keep the soft option in the file or what?
If you want the subtitles for on a dvd or bluray, you will need to convert them to an appropriate format for dvd/bluray
I do not suggest using xmedia recode's inbuilt hardcode/soft sub feature, as it is imperfect. (though it will work)

[Helmet]

Well, it looks like you want this for re-coding, more than encoding.

   Well, I thought I was pretty clear that what I wanted was to simply change some features in order to make them more accessible for different kind of media hardware. For instance, changing the format level for video codecs from 5.1 to 4.1 or changing which is the default stream, things like that.

Also, what do you mean by "keep" the subtitles?
Burn them into the video or keep the soft option in the file or what?
If you want the subtitles for on a dvd or bluray, you will need to convert them to an appropriate format for dvd/bluray

     I'll give you an example. For instance, I wanted to re-encode Fushigi Yuugi from ogm (which is outdated) to mkv. In the process, I also tried to change the audio, so that the japanese stream should be the default one. So the re-encoding went fine, changing the default audio also went smoothly, but the subtitles are well... gone. On my PC, not on some media hardware, like a blu-ray player or something else. In Handbrake, you can select the subtitle track you want, set which to be the default one, but when the re-encoding ends, there is no subtitle in the new mkv file. This happens only when re-encoding ogms.

[Bob2004]

If all you want to do is convert an ogm file to mkv, or change the order of streams so that Japanese audio is first, there generally isn't any need to re-encode the whole video, assuming the video itself is h.264 to begin with. That takes hours, will have a quality impact, and is often unnecessary. You might need to re-encode it if you want to change the h.264 profile, and you definitely will if you want to change things like the bitrate etc. But other than that, you can just demux all the streams contained in the ogm file, then mux them into an mkv file instead.

I've never needed to demux ogm files before so I don't know which tool is best for the job, but a very quick google suggests this, which looks like it should work fine. It should just create a separate video file, audio file(s), and subtitle file(s).

For muxing these streams back into an mkv file, use MKVToolNix, specifically the MKVMerge GUI (mmg.exe). You can select the video, audio, and subtitle streams to be used (the files you extracted from the ogm), change their order, set their names, language, etc. It's all fairly self explanatory.

Doing this doesn't actually modify the video, audio, or subtitles themselves. So if you want the video to be at a lower bitrate, then yes, you will have to re-encode it to achieve that. Similarly, changing the audio format (eg. from ogg to aac/ac3/flac/whatever) will require re-encoding the audio. But just changing the container, and changing the order of streams, and their metadata (name, language flag, etc) doesn't require changing the actual streams themselves, so re-encoding them is just a waste of time.

[Helmet]

If all you want to do is convert an ogm file to mkv, or change the order of streams so that Japanese audio is first, there generally isn't any need to re-encode the whole video, assuming the video itself is h.264 to begin with. That takes hours, will have a quality impact, and is often unnecessary. You might need to re-encode it if you want to change the h.264 profile, and you definitely will if you want to change things like the bitrate etc. But other than that, you can just demux all the streams contained in the ogm file, then mux them into an mkv file instead.

    Well, converting ogm to mkv is just the immediate task. Maybe I was not clear enough, but, in the long-term, these are the tasks which would require the use of a converting tool (for which I opened this inquiry), depending on files in question:

1. Converting old containers like ogm into newer ones, like mkv.
2. Converting h.264 profiles from Level 5.1/5.0 to 4.1 (primary)
3. Changing the default audio stream and subtitle (where it is the case) so that japanese audio + english subtitles would be default.
4. Changing the audio codecs to AAC/AC3 (where it is the case).

    Those are all I can think of right now. Things like bitrate, framerate, sampling rate, resolution will stay as they are in the original files.

     As you probably noticed, it is basically a compatibilization of video files with blu-ray standards. As you might now, some of the fansubbing groups have rushed to use the most advanced h.264 Profiles like 5.0 or 5.1. From having watched both on my PC, I fail to see what benefits do 5.0 or 5.1 provide particularly for resolutions of 1280x720 or less in order to sacrifice for it the compatibility with an entire class of media hardware. The same can be said about the High 10 profile, which had been lauded as "providing better image" or "less size" or whatever, but it does neither, quite the opposite, it makes the picture look like crap. The first time I saw a video file encoded in High 10, my reaction was "what the hell is this shit", because the color of the image looked from place to place like a painting over which someone spilled some drops of water.

Anyway, to each their own, but, as far as I'm concerned, I would rather get rid of all these needless "bells and whistles" with which some groups adorn their releases for no gain which I can see, as I much rather prefer to watch the videos from a blu-ray player than a PC and it does not really cost me anything to re-encode them. The amount of time required would have been indeed a concern in the past, but, with the power of the most recent CPUs, is not one anymore. For instance, my CPU is a Intel i5200K Sandybridge at 3.3 Ghz which takes less than 8 minutes to encode a 300 MB files. Basically, if I leave it on a task over night, it can do an entires series of 60-70 episodes until the morning. Which is a satisfying speed, especially having in mind that not all the series would need re-encoding, but just a part of them.

    For this task, I had one tool, MediaCoder. While it has all the features one could desire, it has one major drawback: you are constantly pestered with requests for donations. As such, I decided to test the waters which are the best tools used for encoding/re-encoding and, from all the suggestions, pick the one which suits my needs the best.
     Handbrake is an acceptable option. It has less features than I would like, but it's usable.
     X-Media Recode seems to be a very good choice as well. So, everything is fine for all aspects, except one: I can't figure out what happens with the subtitles tracks when converting from ogm to mkv. Both handbrake and X-Media Recode have the option to select which subtitle track you want to include in the output file, but no text appears (and, yes, I know where you select the subtitle track - in the WMP which I use, it's in the navigate/subtitle language, but the text simply dissapears during the conversion).
    It's not necessarly something crucial, as ogm files which I need to convert are very few - is an antique container which was abandoned a long time and, for the few files still left encoded in ogm, I can dispense with them. But I would like to know what is the problem, if possible.

[Krudda]

The same can be said about the High 10 profile, which had been lauded as "providing better image" or "less size" or whatever, but it does neither, quite the opposite, it makes the picture look like crap. The first time I saw a video file encoded in High 10, my reaction was "what the hell is this shit", because the color of the image looked from place to place like a painting over which someone spilled some drops of water.

Th hi10 profile (10bit) is superior because of many reasons, if you actually research it. The reason it looks like crap is because you haven't updated your decoders to play it. It compresses superior to 8bit and displays colors better than 8bit does.

Now enough ranting. If you want all that, then xmedia-recode does the lot, even 10bit decoding. Give it a try.

[Helmet]

Th hi10 profile (10bit) is superior because of many reasons, if you actually research it.

I dislike the implications that I did not.  I know the theoretical drill. Hearing someone telling me a gazillion times how awesome Hi10 is does not matter too much when my eyes tell me otherwise from what I see on screen.

The reason it looks like crap is because you haven't updated your decoders to play it.

     Beg your pardon, I keep my decoders quite updated. I'm using the K-Lite Codec Pack from this spring and many of the releases I was criticizing were from last year.
    Is there something I miss?

Now enough ranting.

     That's a bit off-topic, but, with all due respect, there seems to be a massive discontent outside of the encoding scene in regard to this. Allow me to offer some quotes I found :

It's not the same story. They're not transitioning to a new standard, they're transitioning to non-standard encodes. The same story would be back in the xvid/divx days when you had to update your codecs every week because the encoders didn't know what the heck they were doing and kept trying new things all the time. When groups started using h.264 a lot of things finally stabilized.

Most of the people who were bitching durning the transition to h.264 were wanting compatibility with old hardware and divx DVD players, but there was already a lot of hardware and software that could play back h.264 correctly. From what I've read so far, there are no hardware decoding/standalone/PMP options for using h.264 with Hi10. The only option is raw CPU power, which is fine for a modern, general use computer, but these days more and more people are using set-top boxes like the Boxee Box, ATV2, Popcorn Hour, GoogleTV/Android devices, phones, tablets, netbooks, ATOM powered HTPCs, etc.

Change in itself isn't bad, but a non-standard change that has no support is bad.

'Small compatibility sacrifice' is the understatement of the year, considering it completely breaks hardware acceleration and even software decoding in most cases. We have faster connections and more storage than we've ever had at any point and they're whinging about filesize.

I have to say that I don't mind the concept of 10-bit - better quality with smaller filesize (and reduced banding) is definitely a good achievement. However, forcing it on people when there is still so little support is aggravating.

If your hobby is to get top of the line high power stuff for your pc, this is cool. But this concept is hitting a small percentage of the market.
Think of devices not capable of playing this format:
iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Android Tablets, Google TV, Roku, Squeezebox, Apple TV, Netbooks, Lower end laptops, etc...

I dont see it breaking out of hobby status until "typical hardware" can deal with it

---edit---
Dont get me wrong - I like the whole concept it is based on

I get the impression that many of them are just trying to one-up each other and show themselves off, and once one of them dropped the hammer with 10-bit, the whole line of them followed suit like dominoes. It's clear that they marched forward on this with absolutely no understanding of the technical side of this decision, evidenced by such brilliant recommendations like, "Well, CCCP is putting out a beta next week to support 10-bit, so that should solve everyone's problems." lol

On the Doki website I tried to impress that there are a whole slew of people out there that actually play media on HTPCs (low-end purpose-built boxes like the Zotac IONs, etc. that depend on HW acceleration) that are going to be totally left out by this switchover. The typical response was, "You must have old hardware. It works fine on my laptop." lol x 2

(BTW I am able to play 10-bit 720p on my 2 x 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron, but 10-bit 1080p absolutely chokes the system. Meanwhile 8-bit 1080p plays flawlessly w/o HW decoding. So this 10-bit is going to add significant processing requirements in addition to losing HW acceleration.)

The only real reason I see people in the anime communities jumping all over it is because it will allow for a slight drop in file size, good when youre sharing a dozen 720p shows every week, and how well it addresses color banding which is more noticeable in animation than anything else. After first reading about it I started noticing the banding in every animation I watch now. It sucks but it doesnt bother me (and Im sure most other people) enough to outweigh the issues encoding everything into a new format brings. Ontop of that, the only reason you really get banding is because the bitrate is so much lower than the source just so the file size is reasonable to distribute online. If these people really cared more about quality over getting things for free they would just buy the media from the source, ie Blu-ray.

This is personally why I dont care in the end that it isnt supported and Im happy waiting until hardware decoding comes around to do it. It would be nice to have it in XBMC, even if it is just software decoding, for the compatibility. But such groups as these obviously dont care about compatibility and never have. This has always been an issue with them and this is just another example of it, as long as it runs fine on their machines to hell with everyone else, its not their problem. I have run into this time and time again with "their" content as Ive been watching fansubs since the 90s, even with that new-fangled codec called DivX.

The benefits of smaller file sizes are nice... but the cost of losing video acceleration isn't worth it IMO. Hard drives are cheap and easy to come by. The changes to video quality, while apparent in some cases, are only really "meh". It'd be a good idea if it didn't force EVERYBODY onto CPU-based (software) decoding. Meanwhile the entire industry is trying to move away from that idea with APUs, SoC, etc...

I tried to carry the banner on the Doki forums but people just didn't get it. As long as it played okay on their 720p laptops, they didn't understand the problem.

So, albeit I already knew the theory with Hi10, I did one more search on google for "why is Hi10 better". The first result which emerged was a thread dedicated to Hi10 and its support. You can see above the opinions. A lot of people don't seem to be head over heels about it.

If you want all that, then xmedia-recode does the lot, even 10bit decoding. Give it a try.

    I did. It works well, except for the issue I already mentioned, which is to preserve the subtitles when converting from ogm to mkv.

[kitamesume]

Th hi10 profile (10bit) is superior because of many reasons, if you actually research it.

I dislike the implications that I did not.  I know the theoretical drill. Hearing someone telling me a gazillion times how awesome Hi10 is does not matter too much when my eyes tell me otherwise from what I see on screen.

Hi10P's true advantage is the heavy reduction in color banding, i have never seen any sort of banding with Hi10P for a while now.
also preserving more grains in grainy videos, or simply put, Hi10P excels in anything color related.

edit: why is that exactly? well what they did is they expanded the 8bit color space to 10bit color space, which means they can store more details of color on the same file size. but since the first encoding usually looks horrible, encoders try to increase the bitrate to drastically improve video quality without pushing the filesize too high, if they did the same to an 8bit encode it'll easily reach twice the Hi10P's filesize.

if you can't see any difference tho, its usually two reasons, one is you're watching on a 20" inch screen from more than 3meters away or you're heck blind.

[Helmet]

Th hi10 profile (10bit) is superior because of many reasons, if you actually research it.

I dislike the implications that I did not.  I know the theoretical drill. Hearing someone telling me a gazillion times how awesome Hi10 is does not matter too much when my eyes tell me otherwise from what I see on screen.

Hi10P's true advantage is the heavy reduction in color banding, i have never seen any sort of banding with Hi10P for a while now.
also preserving more grains in grainy videos, or simply put, Hi10P excels in anything color related.

edit: why is that exactly? well what they did is they expanded the 8bit color space to 10bit color space, which means they can store more details of color on the same file size. but since the first encoding usually looks horrible, encoders try to increase the bitrate to drastically improve video quality without pushing the filesize too high, if they did the same to an 8bit encode it'll easily reach twice the Hi10P's filesize.

if you can't see any difference tho, its usually two reasons, one is you're watching on a 20" inch screen from more than 3meters away or you're heck blind.

     Dude, why some of you get so defensive when some technical feature is criticized? For your knowledge, I'm watching on a 37 inch screen from about 4 meters or a 22 inch monitor from half a meter. And I have good eyesight. And I stand by what I said, that Hi10 is massively overrated.
    Yes, in theory, the advantages are reduction in color banding and size. In practice, all this is not worth the price it has to be paid in terms of compatibility issues. This is the general consensus outside of some groups of encoders and a specific camp of followers. I posted you 7 opinions above, I could have easily find 100 if I tried hard enough. Shouting that "if you can't see the difference, you're heck blind", does not change this fact - and is also a bit patronizing.

     I'm not buying all the hype about Hi10. There is zero interest in it outside of some circles of the anime encoding community. If it was all that hot, it would not be the case. When I searched for opinions on the issue, the terms used to describe the attitude of those circles  was "pigheaded". I censored it at first because I did not want to offend anyone, but look here, I dare say something negative about Hi10 and one comes back at me implying "you can say that only because you have not done your research", another tells me "if you can't see the improvement, you are heck blind". Well, ok. Blind or not, I have done the research suggested by Krudda and the conclusion is that only a specific cathegory of people are into Hi10. Outside of that niche segment, Hi10 is treated coldly, for reasons quoted above.

[Bob2004]

*sigh* This argument again. Let me just make it clear, since (as usual) a bunch of people seem to be totally misunderstanding the benefits of 10-bit H.264. It absolutely does not mean that you see greater colour depth (and therefore displays colours better) than videos encoded in 8-bit (Krudda, I'm looking at you).

The benefit of 10-bit is more for the encoder than for the end user. Normally, when encoders re-encode video from a transport stream to the final h.264 video that gets released, significant banding is often introduced. It is possible to minimise this, but it takes a lot more time and effort, and can be difficult to achieve without adversely affecting quality in other ways. Encoding to 10-bit provides greater precision during the re-encoding process, which means there is a significantly higher margin of error, and in turn it is very easy to almost completely eliminate the problem of banding being introduced. Thus, the main benefit is that it makes it easier for encoders to produce high quality video.

It does also provide a modest reduction in filesize, which means encoders can add more bitrate, and thus potentially produce higher quality video.

The fact that the video uses 10-bit colour depth has absolutely no visible effect for the end user. Why? Because decoders decode it to 8-bit colour anyway. And even if they didn't, 99% of monitors only provide 8 bits of colour (or often 6 bits dithered to 8 bits), so 10-bit colour wouldn't be visible anyway. There is no inherent quality increase simply from encoding in 10-bit, as such. I make no comment on whether or not it offers a big enough benefit to be worth the compatibility issues or not; that's been argued to death elsewhere already, and it's too late to change most encoders' minds by now anyway, so there's no point.

Right, clear? Good. This has been discussed to death many, many times over. There's already a massive long thread about it elsewhere, I suggest people go there if they want to know more about this issue. That said, back to the topic.


Helmet: I'm assuming you've tested level 5.0 and 5.1 videos on your media player, and they didn't work, yes? If not, give it a go; some hardware players will still play them (except for 10-bit, ofc), even if they aren't officially compatible (though they may still fail with some of the more over the top videos). For videos which are already in a compatible format, or where you only need to re-encode the audio, demuxing and remuxing manually will eliminate quality loss, and probably save time. See my suggestion below for handling lots of files at once.

Anyway, regarding the subtitle issue - I don't know what the problem could be, since as far as I'm aware the ogm container only supports srt subtitles, which are pretty much universally supported.

One workaround would be to demux the file, use X-Media just to re-encode the video stream, and then remux everything back together manually; a bit awkward, but it should work. It becomes a lot more awkward if you need to do it for an entire series, but it wouldn't take too long to write a quick batch file to automate the process (use forfiles to run the demuxer on every file ending in ogm, use forfiles again to run x264 on each file ending in .avi (most encoder GUIs should tell you the command line they use for whatever settings you picked, somewhere), then finally use forfiles a third time to mux each file back into an mkv. I can probably help write one if you need it.

That's what I'd do, anyway, mainly because troubleshooting the subtitle problem would probably be more effort, and I don't like most of the GUI encoding tools available, so I don't know a better alternative (At the end of the day, they do the exact same thing anyway; they just let you pick command line options from a menu instead of typing them). You might prefer to just try a different tool instead; I'm afraid I don't know which ones meet your requirements while being any good. Maybe give MEGUI a try, if it can handle ogm.

Other than that, I'm afraid I can't really help you, sorry. I'm not familiar enough with most of the GUI tools to offer much support with them.

EDIT: Bloody hell, wall of text much? Sorry about that, I got a bit carried away there :p

[Helmet]

Helmet: I'm assuming you've tested level 5.0 and 5.1 videos on your media player, and they didn't work, yes?

Correct. They didn't.

Digressing a bit, I major pain in the ass regarding this issue is the fact that the tech specs aren't specifying which Format Levels are supported by many media hardware. Usually, you are provided the type of containers supported, the video codecs and that's all, with no word about the type of profiles or levels.

Which hardware players do you know of which support Level 5.0 and Level 5.1? I tried once to find out more about this but, even in dedicated tech forums, people there (which theoretically should be familiar inside out with media hardware) seemed to have no clue. They reacted as if I had asked them whether media hardware possess Heisenberg compensators (Star Trek pun - for the non-initiated  )  Do you know where could one could find out more about the Profiles/Levels supported by different media hardware?

[Krudda]

I have a habit of not explaining things fully. Thanks bob2004. I never meant it looks better color wise, but rather as you said, less banding is introduced, therefore looks better...
Y'know what, before I make myself look like an ass again, I'm just gonna stop.

[Bob2004]

Sorry; I honestly can't remember which player it was I heard about, or where I heard about it, so I can't help you there

However (and hopefully someone more knowledgeable here will correct me if I'm wrong), I'm fairly certain that the only thing in high-end anime encodes (not 10-bit, of course) which most hardware players can't handle (and which is the only reason they have to be flagged as level 5.0 instead of 4.1) is the number of reference frames they use; level 4.1 is limited to 4 for 1080p content (9 for 720p), whereas level 5 can go up to 13. Groups like Coalgirls tend to use ~8, which stops the majority of hardware players which only support level 4.1 from being able to play the video. It doesn't actually have a massive impact on quality (IMO), but that's the way it is.

However, I think that there are a few players that can handle more reference frames than the level 4.1 spec requires, even if they don't support the other features of level 5.0 (I think that was probably the case with the player I heard about). Try asking in forums like Doom9, where people know a lot more about this stuff, or try contacting the manufacturers to find that out; you might get further than when just asking about which levels they support, since I imagine 99% of hardware players all just support High Profile up to level 4.1, and that's it. The level 5.0 spec requires players to be able to handle bitrates up to 168.75Mb/s, which is way beyond what anyone would ever use normally, which is why none support it.

But yeah, I'm sure there are a few hardware players that can handle the extra reference frames, and which aren't bothered by the Level 5.0 flag - those are likely the only ones capable of handling most anime releases without re-encoding them to meet the 4.1 specs, unfortunately.

EDIT: I just had a quick glance at random through some of the releases I have on my PC at the moment, and it actually looks like only about half the groups I looked at exceed the level 4.1 spec anyway, so it's not all bad. And I should also mention that the number of reference frames a player can handle depends on the resolution of the video; lower resolutions allow for more reference frames, hence why the specification sets out different numbers for 720p and 1080p content.

[kitamesume]

simply put, Hi10P is not a step-back or is it a horrible choice of encode, it's pros out-weights its cons tremendously.
even if it does require more muscle to decode its only natural that way, a few years ago when people still used pentium4 it felt as if you could play anything on it, now a day's program would make that pentium4 crawl, its the same concept.

people clinging to their old ancient rigs need not to be stingy and shell off a buck to get a new rig for the purpose of more processing capability and sometimes even less power consumption while at it.
people who bought the low power rigs did a bad choice, if they did their research correctly they could've bought something better with not much compensation, for example the celeron E3300 was an overclockable dual core that uses barely higher wattage but retains it's processing muscle, now's newly released G530 is even more efficient while increasing performance and undervolting it further makes it the ideal choice.




on topic: i havent re-encoded anything for years now and the last encoder i used was handbrake, what i grab doesn't need to be re-encoded anyway.

[Krudda]

There is also the option to just pay for the original DVD/Bluray 

[Helmet]

However, I think that there are a few players that can handle more reference frames than the level 4.1 spec requires, even if they don't support the other features of level 5.0 (I think that was probably the case with the player I heard about). Try asking in forums like Doom9, where people know a lot more about this stuff, or try contacting the manufacturers to find that out; you might get further than when just asking about which levels they support, since I imagine 99% of hardware players all just support High Profile up to level 4.1, and that's it. The level 5.0 spec requires players to be able to handle bitrates up to 168.75Mb/s, which is way beyond what anyone would ever use normally, which is why none support it.

But yeah, I'm sure there are a few hardware players that can handle the extra reference frames, and which aren't bothered by the Level 5.0 flag - those are likely the only ones capable of handling most anime releases without re-encoding them to meet the 4.1 specs, unfortunately.

     Well, what annoys me the most in this is the scarcity of information on compatibility related issues. I know that media hardware are not compatible with all video formats and codecs. I expected that. What gets on my nerves is the impossibility to find the exact specs. For instance, one friend of mine has a 32 inch LG TV with media player incorporated which supports 5.0 and 5.1 (the model does not interest me though, because it does not support ASS subtitles, which are the ones used mostly in anime). But there seems to be no chance in hell to find out what each media hardware (be it blu-ray player, media player or TV) can do before buying it and testing it yourself.

I just had a quick glance at random through some of the releases I have on my PC at the moment, and it actually looks like only about half the groups I looked at exceed the level 4.1 spec anyway, so it's not all bad.

     Well, no, it's not THAT bad. That's why I said that re-encoding them myself is a realistic option if I find a proper tool, having in mind that the number of incompatible releases is only a part of the total (I caught on to the limitations more than a year ago, hence I avoided Hi10, 5.0 or 5.1 since then, but there is still a good number left) and the speed of my CPU.

simply put, Hi10P is not a step-back or is it a horrible choice of encode, it's pros out-weights its cons tremendously.

     Dude, give it up, now you are just being obtuse. In light of Bob's technical explanation, what pros are you talking about - for the end user at least?

even if it does require more muscle to decode its only natural that way, a few years ago when people still used pentium4 it felt as if you could play anything on it, now a day's program would make that pentium4 crawl, its the same concept.
people clinging to their old ancient rigs need not to be stingy and shell off a buck to get a new rig for the purpose of more processing capability and sometimes even less power consumption while at it.
people who bought the low power rigs did a bad choice, if they did their research correctly they could've bought something better with not much compensation, for example the celeron E3300 was an overclockable dual core that uses barely higher wattage but retains it's processing muscle, now's newly released G530 is even more efficient while increasing performance and undervolting it further makes it the ideal choice.

    Lol at this. What do you think "lack of compatibility with media hardware" means? There is no "old ancient rig" to cling to, because there is no new modern rig to run Hi10P, nor will it be in the near future. What do you think that "media hardware" refers to?
     What does Pentium 4 have anything to do with all this? The problem and the complaints stem from the fact that Hi10 cannot work of any kind of media hardware - except sheer CPU power from desktop/laptops. If you know of any, I'm all ears. Rant all you want, you are never going to convince me that using a format which makes video files impossible to be played on any video dedicated hardware is a sensible choice, regardless of what benefits, real or imaginary, it provides - it's either utterly stupid or utterly selfish.

    It seems the people I quoted earlier were right in calling some of the Hi10P fans as "pigheaded". Just think of the absurdity of the situation: it makes video files impossible to play... on video dedicated hardware.
     This is just not normal - a video file, be it anime or something else, is not Battlefield 3 or Skyrim. What some anime groups have done is the equivalent of Activison, EA and Bioware suddenly implementing in their games a kind of new software which would not be supported by any of the videocards on the market, nor the consoles, but only by the MacIntosh PCs. Can you imagine the outrage if that were to happen?
     It would not matter if that software were the most revolutionary thing since the discovery of fire. People who don't use MacIntosh for gaming (or at all) would be pissed - and rightly so.
     Again, I know the deal and I know, like Bob, that we are not going to change the minds of the encoders on this. But don't feed me Hi10P propaganda, will you (and poor one to boot)?

    As for your comment that "people should stop clinging to their old rig", for your record, I have an Intel I5-2500K at 3.3 GHz, with ATI 6950, 8 GB RAM and 2 TB of space. That's more than enough power to run any video I throw at it. But has it crossed your mind that many people would prefer for entire classes of hardware not to be completely excluded from the equation - and for no benefit they can relate to? Or that many people would prefer that their choice of hardware to watch animes on not to be shoved down their throats? (Classic situation: someone wants to watch a video on big screen TV, but their desktop is in their office, the TV in the living room; many other scenarios can be imagined).

There is also the option to just pay for the original DVD/Bluray 

      Well, for what interests me, there is no original DVD/Blu-Ray... unless I learn japanese.
     

[kitamesume]

@helmet, did you just miss my whole point? im saying that bitching about Hi10P wont help you at all, since encoders wont be going back to the older encodes because they see more pros by going with it, and people who cant play Hi10P shouldn't cling to their ugly rigs anyway. thats what i've been saying.

end user's gain for going Hi10P would be the less likely they'd get a horrible encode than the latter because the encoders would less likely stumble upon an "oops my bad, horrible choice of settings so you download the swap again without complaining mmkay?", which from experience tends to get swapped, or compared to other encoder's works almost regularly.
a lesser gain would be a more compact file size, not always the case hence a lesser gain. do note that a compact file size doesn't only mean less storage space would be needed, but also less time for it to finish downloading on a slower line.

its the same with the old times, newer softwares needs more hardware power, if this wasn't the case then people wouldn't be needing anything better than a pentium4, and its the same with encodes. how is it same with encodes? AVI/DIVX to Matroska, when Matroska first got implemented nothing could play it other than a PC.

as for hardware players, they're old technology and they got caught in an evolution. what do you think would happen if H265 gets implemented as a standard? it would be worse off than Hi10P and those old hardware players would become total junks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding

Schedule

The timescale for completing the HEVC standard is as follows:

    February 2012: Committee Draft (complete draft of standard)
    July 2012: Draft International Standard
    January 2013: Final Draft International Standard (ready to be ratified as a Standard)

but do wait for ARM powered hardware players, seems like one of the ARMs can handle 1080p Hi10P, shouldnt be long before they got manufactured.