I have successfully exported an equirectangular AVI as a 2-second video, in 6432 x 3216 format. It looks great. The only problem is that even though it's encoded it's still 1gb for 2 seconds of video, and I can't find any way to 'inject' the 360 metadata tags into an AVI. I downloaded a program which claims to be able to do it, but it doesn't work for any of my output SE video files.

Everything I have found which converts this AVI to an MPG shrinks the file size to nothing.

I need either 1 of 2 things: I either need...

1) A way to output as MPG from SE, or...
2) A way to inject 360 VR metadata tags into an AVI file.

Any help would be greatly Appreciated!

what codecs did you use, lagarith lossless codec? Depending on your windows system and programs you have installed, you could have several encoders capable of encoding directly in mpeg 4, like xvid or similar.

I usually use x264vfw, fetched from here

Mosfet wrote:

what codecs did you use, lagarith lossless codec? Depending on your windows system and programs you have installed, you could have several encoders capable of encoding directly in mpeg 4, like xvid or similar.

I usually use x264vfw, fetched from here

Thank you for the response. I'm using the default ones from my windows 10 system, plus whatever k-lite installed, and then one called "UT video" that I just installed. None of them seem to be able to export as an MP4. I tried to install x264, and it's not showing up in SE. I downloaded the latest binary for windows 64x, so I'm not sure what happened.

I just downloaded Xvid, installed it, and it shows up as a viable codec in SE. But now every time I use it I get an "AVI compressed stream format setting failed" error message.



Here's another problem: when you encode an AVI using divx, or anything else, you're still exporting as an *.AVI format. Those are just compression schemes.

...So how in the hell do you get an AVI to be a 360 MP4 without shrinking it down to nothing???

I'm trying myself, it's the first time so \o/
if the problem is that this metadata spacial thing absolutely needs an mp4 container, I usually do that conversion with HandBrake (https://handbrake.fr/). My entire dvd collection is in a disk drive because this transcoder exist.

Edit: I used a very poor quality, in my defense I have a poor graphic card & i5 laptop

Mosfet wrote:

I'm trying myself, it's the first time so \o/
if the problem is that this metadata spacial thing absolutely needs an mp4 container, I usually do that conversion with HandBrake (https://handbrake.fr/). My entire dvd collection is in a disk drive because this transcoder exist.

Thank you again, but the reason why the output looks so poor is because that transcoder has a maximum output of 1920 x 1080, and an HD 360 panorama is more like 6432 x 3216. I need something that will just convert the file without changing the frame size, and so far absolutely nothing works for that except for ffmpeg, which I can't get to work on any computer. So... I guess at this point I give up.

I finally got ffmpeg to work!!

Youtube still managed to mangle the file size and resolution, unless a higher res version will be available later on today, but it worked!

You always may export video as a series of screenshots in SE, and combine them into whatever video container you wish with a third-party program. The fastest lossless format is uncompressed tga, the fastest compressed in jpeg.

SpaceEngineer wrote:

You always may export video as a series of screenshots in SE, and combine them into whatever video container you wish with a third-party program. The fastest lossless format is uncompressed tga, the fastest compressed in jpeg.

Thank you very much for your help!
This is how I wound up doing it:

1) Set the windowed screen resolution in SE to 3216 x 1608 for a resulting 4k 360 video.
2) Export AVI compressed with DivX.
3) Splice together the resulting clips in VirtualDub for direct stream AVI copying.
4) Take the resulting AVI and convert it to MP4 with ffmpeg.
5) Inject the 360 data into the resulting MP4 with the Spatial Media Metadata Injector tool.
6) Upload the tagged 360 MP4 to YouTube
7) Download the full-resolution 360 encoded VR video when it's done processing.

If anybody needs any help making one of these videos, just ask, and I will do my best. Using ffmpeg is VERY easy, but you will likely need help getting started with it. Just ask! I will most likely make a thread about how to do this soon.

Here is my first result. It's not fantastic, but it's a MILLION times better than what I thought I would be able to produce. I've learned a lot, and feel confident that I will be able to improve the quality of my resulting videos. I am extremely happy right now, and this first video looks GREAT on an oculus rift, at 4k resolution!

That took me months to figure out. Avidemux is good too, for splicing with fades.

Apollonius wrote:

SpaceEngineer wrote:

You always may export video as a series of screenshots in SE, and combine them into whatever video container you wish with a third-party program. The fastest lossless format is uncompressed tga, the fastest compressed in jpeg.

Thank you very much for your help!
This is how I wound up doing it:

1) Set the windowed screen resolution in SE to 3216 x 1608 for a resulting 4k 360 video.
2) Export AVI compressed with DivX.
3) Splice together the resulting clips in VirtualDub for direct stream AVI copying.
4) Take the resulting AVI and convert it to MP4 with ffmpeg.
5) Inject the 360 data into the resulting MP4 with the Spatial Media Metadata Injector tool.
6) Upload the tagged 360 MP4 to YouTube
7) Download the full-resolution 360 encoded VR video when it's done processing.

If anybody needs any help making one of these videos, just ask, and I will do my best. Using ffmpeg is VERY easy, but you will likely need help getting started with it. Just ask! I will most likely make a thread about how to do this soon.

Here is my first result. It's not fantastic, but it's a MILLION times better than what I thought I would be able to produce. I've learned a lot, and feel confident that I will be able to improve the quality of my resulting videos. I am extremely happy right now, and this first video looks GREAT on an oculus rift, at 4k resolution!

Great work!  Can this be done just with ffmpeg or must all the tools in your step by step list be used?

A-L-E-X wrote:

Great work!  Can this be done just with ffmpeg or must all the tools in your step by step list be used?

Thank you! I don't think that ffmpeg can inject metadata tags into mp4 files when it transcodes them, but I am probably wrong, ffmpeg is pretty amazing. I will have to look into that.

The problem is that SE can only export as an *.AVI, and as far as I can tell, the only types of video file that can be tagged with 360 metadata are MP4 and MOV. This means that you'll need to convert your resulting AVI video with ffmpeg, to ensure that your frame size and resolution are maintained. If you capture and encode your AVI using MPEG codecs to compact it (like DivX), then the process of converting your AVI to MP4 with ffmpeg will go much more smoothly and quickly. If you're simply converting one clip then you won't need VirtualDub at all, because you'll only need that if you want to append AVI segments together without reducing frame size. Also, if you have a way to convert a tagged MP4 to a true 360 VR video file without using youtube, then please let me know. I have to use a 3rd party utility just to find and download my own hi-res videos from youtube, and there's no telling how long they're going to allow that to keep happening.

Gnargenox:
That took me months to figure out. Avidemux is good too, for splicing with fades.

Thanks for that! I'll look into it. I'm having an issue with VirtualDub when I edit the beginnings of videos, and as a result the appended segments have a pause where they intersect. Maybe I can just fade them into each other, or put a black screen in between them...? Oh, and I have been into making equirectangular projections for years, so that helped. :p I'm still nowhere near done learning all I need to know about producing these videos...

Thanks for spelling out all the steps Apollonius,. I wonder what you'd recommend for bitrate and frame rate settings.

When I'm using Avidemux, and configuring the video output for DV (ffmeg) I can't get to the Rate Control menu. Using Mpeg4 AVC (x264), a common codec, I can adjust the Rate Controls.

I keep all frame rates at 60fps throughout every step, upload it as 60fps, yet Youtube churns out 30fps. I've seen plenty of other videos online that were still 60fps, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I like using a constant bitrate (single pass) with a target of 40,000kbit/s. I think it makes a huge difference with Banding on the near-solid black backgrounds of space. Unfortuneatly Youtube shredds the bitrate down a considerable perctange! Down to 4Mbps! But it's still worthwild to upload a higher quality video, for what Youtube spits out.

It seems I can do all the steps but just always loose so much quality when dealing with YouTube. So, yeah. It would be great to have a different (and free) way to tag AVIs (or MP4s at least) as true 360VR.

Here's a video I made in 360VR but with the 3D effect too!

Gnargenox wrote:

Thanks for spelling out all the steps Apollonius,. I wonder what you'd recommend for bitrate and frame rate settings.

When I'm using Avidemux, and configuring the video output for DV (ffmeg) I can't get to the Rate Control menu. Using Mpeg4 AVC (x264), a common codec, I can adjust the Rate Controls.

I keep all frame rates at 60fps throughout every step, upload it as 60fps, yet Youtube churns out 30fps. I've seen plenty of other videos online that were still 60fps, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I like using a constant bitrate (single pass) with a target of 40,000kbit/s. I think it makes a huge difference with Banding on the near-solid black backgrounds of space. Unfortuneatly Youtube shredds the bitrate down a considerable perctange! Down to 4Mbps! But it's still worthwild to upload a higher quality video, for what Youtube spits out.

It seems I can do all the steps but just always loose so much quality when dealing with YouTube. So, yeah. It would be great to have a different (and free) way to tag AVIs (or MP4s at least) as true 360VR.

Here's a video I made in 360VR but with the 3D effect too!

Awesome!! I have some 3d glasses somewhere... I need to dig them out!

And as far as framerate, I have tried 24 fps, the default for SE, and 30. You can't append one onto the other, so I try to keep them all the same framerate, and 30 fps looks better to me without adding much to file size. File size is no longer an issue for me! At one time 2 seconds of encoded avi was 1 gb... and that wasn't even raw AVI! I cut the frame size by 1/2, started using divx, and suddenly I can record for 30 minutes before I hit the 1gb mark. Converting them to direct stream MP4's makes them even smaller... that 3 minute 4k 360 video is only 100 mb! I might even be able to get away with boosting the encode somehow, without making the file much bigger.

As far as bitrate, the full-res video from youtube says it's 5788kbps. Again, I have to use a 3rd party streaming video downloader in order to find and grab those highest resolution files, even though I uploaded that video myself.

That all sounds good. Remember AVIs have a file size limit of 4gb lol but I see you won't have that problem anymore. I guess the ffmeg codec keeps bitrate high enough that you are in decent range for 1080 videos.

Recommended upload bitrates for Youtube:
Type        Standard Frame Rate (24, 30)    High Frame Rate (60)
2160p (4k)        35-45 Mbps        53-68 Mbps
1440p (2k)        16 Mbps            24 Mbps
1080p        8 Mbps            12 Mbps
720p        5 Mbps            7.5 Mbps