AMVApp x64-Edition?

[Bauzi]

Hey there,

Will there ever be a version of the AMVApp that was made especially for x64 - operating systems?
At least I know that there are x64 versions of XviD, Lagarith, LAME mp3 and HuffYUV that work great with VirtualDubMod x86. I know that there might not be x64 for every part of the amvapp (like a lot of the Avisynth filters), but there surely are some parts that gave me a great encoding boost.

[Qyot27]

My guess is that it hinges on AviSynth making the transition to supporting 64-bit without special modifications or separate releases, and perhaps an internal bridge that allows it to pull from both 32- and 64-bit plugins (whether this is even possible, I don't know). I doubt this will happen before 2.7, if '2.7' even gets developed after 2.6 is finished - for all I know, there may be a restaged effort for 3.0 before a future 2.7 comes to fruition (although I doubt said 3.0 would have any similarity to the one that died a couple years ago).

Because like you said, most of the other pieces already have 64-bit versions or have the capability to be compiled that way (as some of them don't readily have distributed copies of 64-bit builds - x264 is simple to build in the first place, and 64-bit mode is automatically detected if the OS and compile architecture is 64-bit).

[Zarxrax]

Yep, it mostly hinges around Avisynth, which is stuck in x86, where it will likely remain for many years to come.
64bit x264 requires 64-bit input, and input can only be avisynth files or raw .yuv files. Raw .yuv files are difficult to make, and since Avisynth doesn't output as 64bit, then you cant use Avisynth input, thus, you can't really use 64bit x264.
Also, I don't know if 64bit lagarith encodes work in any editing software. I haven't tried it.
In general, I think we are stuck in 32bit for a long time to come.

[Qyot27]

I seem to remember some application (I don't know if it was avs2yuv or not; I could almost swear there was a GUI, though) that could load 32-bit AviSynth and then pipe to 64-bit x264. It'd still be particularly bottlenecked on the loading stage, but you could at least squeeze out a performance gain from the encoder. AVFS can mix 32-bit AviSynth and 64-bit processing apps also, and it's already included in the lastest AMVapp roster.

The other option would be to use the special 64-bit AviSynth build by squid_80 but not use any filters; do all filtering beforehand and output to a lossless AVI file, then load that with 64-bit AviSynth and a simple AVISource (making sure of course that you have a 64-bit version of ffdshow or whichever codec you're using doing the decoding). That's generally what I do on 32-bit as it is. And as far as I know, 64-bit AviSynth should work with 64-bit x264 just fine, especially for something that simple. The only downside is that it's not at version parity with the 32-bit main branch (the 64-bit build is only at 2.56, I think). I don't know, but that might cause some problems on Vista/Win7. You also have to install it manually.

Maybe I've just gotten too used to the command-line, but it's fairly easy to configure mencoder to always output raw YV12 (or I420, I can never keep straight which exact one x264 requires, as I420 and YV12 are the same except for swapped channels) and then call it with a simple mencoder input.avs -o output.i420 (or output.yv12, as the case may be). For uncompressed I420 in AVI, you can actually just use ffdshow's VFW interface for that. Outputting to raw is necessary for those on Linux that don't want to pipe from Wine, but not for Windows users - x264 can use AVI files themselves, just so long as they're uncompressed I420 or YV12.

[Bauzi]

Yep, it mostly hinges around Avisynth, which is stuck in x86, where it will likely remain for many years to come.
64bit x264 requires 64-bit input, and input can only be avisynth files or raw .yuv files. Raw .yuv files are difficult to make, and since Avisynth doesn't output as 64bit, then you cant use Avisynth input, thus, you can't really use 64bit x264.

OH! I just loaded the 64bit .exe into the zarxGUI folder without knowing that

Also, I don't know if 64bit lagarith encodes work in any editing software. I haven't tried it.

They do. At least they work with VDM-,Premiere Pro and After Effects x86. I think VDM was also able to use the full 64bit power for encoding. That was soooo smooth!

In general, I think we are stuck in 32bit for a long time to come.

Do not want.

[Qyot27]

They do. At least they work with VDM-,Premiere Pro and After Effects x86. I think VDM was also able to use the full 64bit power for encoding. That was soooo smooth!

On Windows at least, 32 and 64 bit processes can't be mixed from the same application (at least upstream 32->64, dunno about downstream 64->32), so I highly doubt VDubMod was able to interface with Lagarith x64 - simply for the fact there is no x64 version of VDubMod (that I know of, anyway), and AFAIK on how these things work x86 VDubMod can only access x86-based codecs, so the boost would likely be either multithreading capabilities or the program taking the full 3 or so GBs of RAM that x86 is allowed to use. The main branch of VirtualDub itself does have an AMD64 build, though.

The files created by x64 versions, however, should properly work in x86 apps because files should be bit-agnostic. The problems, if any, would actually be located in the container. MP4 allows 64-bit times, but this is not anywhere near even a rare feature yet, in terms of actually finding some in the wild or needing that capability (and chances are, end users would never need it anyway - that kind of high precision timecode is for absurdly long recordings, like from a security camera; although having very precise timecodes like that wouldn't do any harm).

[Bauzi]

Oh yeah that's true: I forgot that I enabled multi threading for Lagarith. Maybe there could be a section on how you make special tweaks for your x64 and multicore settings. AFAIK the multi threading option wasn't default.

[Zarxrax]

I'm pretty sure all the settings are mentioned in the guide.
As for tweaking for x64, there's really nothing to do.
And honestly, the gains from using x64 stuff aren't that great. It's not like some magic fairy dust that makes everything better.

[Qyot27]

I couldn't do any truly-fair comparisons due to OS restrictions, but it very much depends on the program. x264 can see pretty big performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit. Of course, the problematic part of that comparison was that the 32-bit version was running on 32-bit XP, and the 64-bit was a Linux build running under 64-bit Ubuntu 8.10 - also funny enough, using the 32-bit Windows build under Wine on that install was faster than it was under Windows itself, but only by a couple fps.

Not to mention that 64-bit allows the use of more than 4 GBs of RAM, which some apps (like x264, if you're attempting to encode 1080p content using the highest possible settings, or certain really filter-heavy AviSynth scripts) can definitely use because under x86 they'd hit that barrier.

Basically, if an x86 setup runs the app flawlessly, without calling more and more RAM and the speed curve has already dropped out, then 64-bit won't provide an added benefit.