• SLR

  • SLR and bitrate

Hey, as promised, here are our findings.

We tested few ways:

  • comparing stills like some posted:
    • in cases where most of the frame is BG there was no major differences, maybe different artifacts
    • in scenes with more going on, you can notice a drop in quality
  • rendered videos where it switches the bitrate while its playing - we found it impossible to notice the switch (I will prepare few samples with watermark so you can all participate in this)

What is important to note here, we focused on what's noticeable when watching on headset, not zoomed in photoshop.

Now to the good stuff. There were cases where we found room for improvement (like harem - where you have a full frame of girls). So we are revising our transcoding practice as we speak, where instead of using very high quality with a limiter, we will try adapting the quality and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits). We plan to do only on original (max) resolution, other resolutions will stay the same.

As many have assumed correctly, this is more of a business decision then anything else. And being a streaming service first, this is and will stay our primary focus.

    Sandi_SLR What is important to note here, we focused on what's noticeable when watching on headset, not zoomed in photoshop.

    Which one? Pimax 8k?

    Sandi_SLR Now to the good stuff. There were cases where we found room for improvement (like harem - where you have a full frame of girls). So we are revising our transcoding practice as we speak, where instead of using very high quality with a limiter, we will try adapting the quality and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits). We plan to do only on original (max) resolution, other resolutions will stay the same.

    Finally, improvement! 👍️👍️👍️

          Sandi_SLR
          Would be appreciated if you tested on a headset with higher resolution as well. That's the future.

          I mean, we speak about high quality stuff here.

              Sandi_SLR So we are revising our transcoding practice as we speak, where instead of using very high quality with a limiter, we will try adapting the quality and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits). We plan to do only on original (max) resolution, other resolutions will stay the same.

              looks like the message might have finally got through to you people. its promising news but i'll reserve my judgement until i see the end result. knowing how stingy slr is on bitrate i would not be surprised if you ended up lowering the quality to a point where a 45 mbps limit is never even close to being reached in practice. its difficult to use a 1-size-fits-all vbr approach here.

                Sandi_SLR and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits)

                The upper limit of 45 is not fully clear to me: Is it referring to the average bitrate over the entire video? Or rather to the max. allowed bitrate during encoding?

                    Sandi_SLR I hope I'm reading this wrong and you don't mean that you'll only reduce the bitrate for the original files. That, would really suck big time imo, because I definitely do see a difference in scenes like the sharp/good vr allure scenes on pimax 8kx with heresphere (and those are solo scenes). You say you focus on streaming but at least give downloaders that escape hatch please.

                    Also, granted, the quest pro does have nice picture quality but that's mostly due to its lenses. The weakpoint is the low resolution though and since we'll get much higher resolution headsets with aspheric lenses in the near future (for instance Pimax crystal and even the quest 3 will likely be sharper). I think testing on something like a varjo areo might be much more represtative for this kind of test.

                        y'all are still ignoring and not being super transparent about the fact that you shoot your cameras at 200mbps for 8k, meanwhile that's a low bitrate for 4k video let alone 8k. 8k by any production standards should be closer or above 1gbps. They'll keep shoving this fact under the rug and ignoring it though. It's pointless to talk to SLR about export bitrate when they don't even have decent bitrate for the intake. it's horrible.

                          bobbytables y'all are still ignoring and not being super transparent about the fact that you shoot your cameras at 200mbps for 8k,

                          No, they already denied that in the other thread. We should stay fair...

                            Sandi_SLR we will try adapting the quality and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits). We plan to do only on original (max) resolution, other resolutions will stay the same.

                            Thank you for the rundown! Appreciate the transparency and the work you all had to dig into these past few weeks.

                            Question about the above quote, can you clarify? Which file will be 45 Mbps? The highest rendition / transcode of the video (ie what's currently 30Mbps), or the "Original" mezz master of the video (which is currently 120Mbps). I hope you mean the former, because 45Mbps is way too small for the "Original" file.

                            Thanks!