Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

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blamore
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Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by blamore » 26 May 2019, 23:35

This is the monitor https://www.newegg.com/black-acer-vg271 ... 011278-S0E
It is connected to a laptop. I also tried it with a desktop, the results are the same.

This is probably not an issue exclusive to anime, but it is extremely apparent when viewing anime. If there is a static scene (say, a character standing in a field) and the camera is sliding to the right, it will look like the character is vibrating across the screen. I know that anime isn't supposed to look very smooth, but there is something particularly unsmooth, because it looks like it should on the laptop's own screen.

I would appreciate any insight.

if I use pot players "motion blur" feature, stuttering is fixed because it does frame interpolation. But there are artifacts then.

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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by RealNC » 27 May 2019, 03:51

Use 120Hz and see if that helps.

In general though, this is quite normal with displays that have a very low pixel response time. High pixel response can sometimes have enough blur as to hide the issue. The better the display gets, the more apparent low frame rates become.
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blamore
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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by blamore » 27 May 2019, 10:50

RealNC wrote:Use 120Hz and see if that helps.

In general though, this is quite normal with displays that have a very low pixel response time. High pixel response can sometimes have enough blur as to hide the issue. The better the display gets, the more apparent low frame rates become.
I tried 60Hz as well as 120Hz, no difference at all. I was thinking of the same thing, it might be because the frames transition too quickly so the image appears to be jumping across the screen rather than being smoothed out by display induced motion blur. Any way I can do this with a software. Maybe if a media player had an option to insert the average of the two frames for a very short duration in between the frames or something?

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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 27 May 2019, 11:31

Yes, low-framerate stutter is significantly more visible on fast-response LCDs than slow-response LCDs.

Even if the video framepacing is perfect (frames are being displayed for exact amounts of time / exact amount of refresh cycles) -- many modern laptop LCDs & gaming monitors have quite noticeably faster-responding pixels than a common 10-year old LCD television set, so playing anime on those laptops can look more stuttery than on those televisions.

Also, you sit closer to a computer and laptop, than a television. That will amplify the visibility of stutter too.

Try http://www.svp-team.com to smooth your anime. See if it produces satisfactory results for you.

Your Acer has a strobe backlight called Visual Response Boost (VRB).
When playing anime, please try turning off VRB. Otherwise you get stroboscopic artifacts like this:
Image
So do not use VRB when playing "framerate mismatch Hertz" material. VRB is best for "Framerate Equals Hertz".
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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by RealNC » 27 May 2019, 11:46

SVP is great for actual frame rate increases, but if you don't like the "soap opera" effect, you can use MPV on its own. (It happens to be the player I use.) You need to use the "--video-sync=display-resample --interpolation" options and select a refresh rate that will force MPV to interpolate frames to reach the nearest FPS that fits exactly.

Since this is only a problem with 24FPS (or 23.976FPS) anime, you need to switch your monitor to 60Hz. This will make MPV convert the video from 24FPS to 30FPS (because 30 is the nearest frame rate that "fits" on 60Hz,) which solves the problem. Unlike SVP, the interpolation MPV performs is temporal, meaning it simply blurs it a bit by combining frames. It does not have the "soap opera" effect of SVP and exhibits none of SVP's motion artifacts, especially at the edges of the image (those can be severe, especially with this kind of content.)

30FPS (or 29.97FPS) anime does not have this problem. Unfortunately, the majority of anime is 24FPS.

Note though that there's some broken anime releases out there that are 30FPS encodings of 24FPS anime. Those are tricky. You need to enable the ffmpeg "decimate" filter in MPV using the "--vf-add=decimate" option. This drops the repeating frame and brings the video back to the original 24FPS. MPV will then correctly interpolate that to 30FPS. You can tell if you need to do this by pausing MPV during a camera pan, and then press the "." key on the keyboard (plays one frame every time you hit it.) A bogus 30FPS video will have the effect of 1 repeated frame after every 4 normal ones.
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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 27 May 2019, 12:04

RealNC wrote:SVP is great for actual frame rate increases, but if you don't like the "soap opera" effect, you can use MPV on its own. (It happens to be the player I use.) You need to use the "--video-sync=display-resample --interpolation" options and select a refresh rate that will force MPV to interpolate frames to reach the nearest FPS that fits exactly.
Theoretically, video players with built-in interpolation is vastly superior.

The more information the interpolator has (e.g. MPEG4 motion vectors), the less black box the interpolator is, less-guessworky it becomes. It is a hot research topic now, with frame rate amplification technology.

Image

Oculus Rift (virtual reality) came up with a really good algorithm called Asynchronous Space Warp 2.0 for virtual reality that can perceptually-laglessly convert 45fps to 90fps without visible interpolation artifacts. It is quite impressive in that I often don't notice it activated (45fps looks exactly like perfect 90fps most of the time!). It can do it so well and laglessly because it's extrapolating (rather than interpolating), based on a lot of data -- including head tracking data -- and the depth buffer (Z-buffer) -- it even successfully avoids most parallax artifacts that afflicts old-fashioned interpolators.

For us, the word "interpolate" is a bit loaded, so we have a new terminology called "frame rate amplification technology" that catches al the whole universe of framerate-increase technology that avoids full-renders -- whether be interpolation, extrapolation, warping, or other method of framerate-increase technology.

Any good frame rate amplification (interpolation, extrapolation, warping, etc) works with more data than less, so an interpolator built into a player can theoretically be superior to an interpolator not part of a player. The player has access to the original motion vector data in the video files, which can be used to help assist interpolation. And some codecs (e.g. H.265) keeps a parallax memory which can be used to remove parallax artifacts (edge artifacts of moving foreground objects) -- good artificial-intelligence interpolators were shown off at CES 2019 which reduces artifacts further.

Often it's best to "interpolate" to director's intent (e.g. virtual reality software co-operating with the frame rate amplification) rather than against director's intent (e.g. interpolating movies that directors don't want in HFR) but, each to their own.

We are looking for ways to get more frame rates with less GPU, with fewer artifacts, and we are expecting GPUs to begin increasingly including more frame rate amplification technologies in the coming years.
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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by blamore » 27 May 2019, 12:26

RealNC wrote:SVP is great for actual frame rate increases, but if you don't like the "soap opera" effect, you can use MPV on its own. (It happens to be the player I use.) You need to use the "--video-sync=display-resample --interpolation" options and select a refresh rate that will force MPV to interpolate frames to reach the nearest FPS that fits exactly.

Since this is only a problem with 24FPS (or 23.976FPS) anime, you need to switch your monitor to 60Hz. This will make MPV convert the video from 24FPS to 30FPS (because 30 is the nearest frame rate that "fits" on 60Hz,) which solves the problem. Unlike SVP, the interpolation MPV performs is temporal, meaning it simply blurs it a bit by combining frames. It does not have the "soap opera" effect of SVP and exhibits none of SVP's motion artifacts, especially at the edges of the image (those can be severe, especially with this kind of content.)

30FPS (or 29.97FPS) anime does not have this problem. Unfortunately, the majority of anime is 24FPS.

Note though that there's some broken anime releases out there that are 30FPS encodings of 24FPS anime. Those are tricky. You need to enable the ffmpeg "decimate" filter in MPV using the "--vf-add=decimate" option. This drops the repeating frame and brings the video back to the original 24FPS. MPV will then correctly interpolate that to 30FPS. You can tell if you need to do this by pausing MPV during a camera pan, and then press the "." key on the keyboard (plays one frame every time you hit it.) A bogus 30FPS video will have the effect of 1 repeated frame after every 4 normal ones.
I do not like SVP. Some of the interpolated frames look like there is water on my screen. Does it work perfectly for some people?

Image

I do like the high frame rate, if not for the artifacts
Chief Blur Buster wrote: So do not use VRB when playing "framerate mismatch Hertz" material. VRB is best for "Framerate Equals Hertz".
VRB was already disabled.

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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by RealNC » 27 May 2019, 12:30

Yes, that's the main problem with SVP. Too many artifacts like that. Another big artifact are the edges of the image. Like the left and right edge during a fast horizontal camera pan.

Using MPV to watch videos instead, and using the options I mentioned above, is a better option here.
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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by blamore » 27 May 2019, 12:33

RealNC wrote:Yes, that's the main problem with SVP. Too many artifacts like that. Another big artifact are the edges of the image. Like the left and right edge during a fast horizontal camera pan.

Using MPV to watch videos instead, and using the options I mentioned above, is a better option here.
I will try doing that, however:

>30FPS (or 29.97FPS) anime does not have this problem. Unfortunately, the majority of anime is 24FPS.

My display is 144, which is a perfect multiple of 24, not 30. So i dont see what that should matter. In fact, this 24fps anime does look better on 60Hz displays (with longer response time)

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Re: Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

Post by RealNC » 27 May 2019, 12:35

blamore wrote:I will try doing that, however:

>30FPS (or 29.97FPS) anime does not have this problem. Unfortunately, the majority of anime is 24FPS.

My display is 144, which is a perfect multiple of 24, not 30. So i dont see what that should matter. In fact, this 24fps anime does look better on 60Hz displays (with longer response time)
On the desktop, you should use 120Hz, not 144Hz. 144 is for games. 120 is a multiple of 24, 30 and 60, so it's the recommended desktop refresh rate since you can watch all of those three video frame rates perfectly.

Edit:
Well, other than this case with anime which looks "jumpy" due to the nature of the content. So 60Hz in this case so that MPV can interpolate it to 30FPS.

By the way, if you're looking for an easy to use front-end for MPV, you can try one of these two:

Baka MPlayer - http://bakamplayer.u8sand.net
SMPlayer - https://www.smplayer.info

If you use smplayer, make sure to select "mpv" as engine during the installation, not mplayer.
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