First I would like to congratulate you to your excellent and cost-effective product "The MediaCoder Premium" that I recently procured. For a technical (non video expert) user like me, this is a very nice product with many excellent possibilities. However, I am missing some basic functionality and have some remarks and questions that I hope you will comment.
1. Many video professionals use, as a rule of thumb, the video Quality Factor (Qf) when roughly estimating needed bitrate, or estimating the possible resolution from a given bitrate, from resolution and frame rate parameters(Qf=bps/Ypix*Xpix*fps). I have noted that you have the Qf parameter available by pressing F8 Media Information, the row showing Bits/(Pixel*Frame). The Qf parameter is usually between 0.05 - 0.3 for the x264 codec and approx. a factor of 3 for MPEG-2 DVD, dependent on coding quality level needed.
If you educate your customers to start using this formula, they will most certainly have a shorter path to good coding standards and hopefully reduce a lot of inferior video-coded material typically found on the Internet. I therefore kindly ask you to include this parameter in the Statistics Window/Task Stats, just below the "Video Bitrate" parameter, in real-time. An even better choice would be to have both "Input-Qf" and "Output-Qf" available simultaneously for input/output quality comparison. (See: "The Relationship Among Video Quality, Screen Resolution, and Bit Rate" by Cermak, Pinson, Wolf, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, Vol 57, No 2, June 2011).
2. I have noticed that only the VOD version has the "Normalize Volume" functionality and not the Premium version. This I did not expect. I personally think that this important and basic audio processing function should be included in the paid-up Premium version too. However, if you are too tight to offer such basic functionality in the Premium function, I personally would not procure the VOD version unless I had tried out this Normalization function first for performance. So my questions around this is:
a. Why not be Mr Nice Guy and include Normalization in any paid-up version?
b. Is the variable gain fader connected after the volume normalization, so one can set the level of the normalization function in relation to max permissible level?
c. Do you use a "plain simple" normalization algorithm with no filtering or smoothing? (You can get problems with simple normalization if you for example have a short transient, click or clap in the audio track, that is much stronger in amplitude than the rest of the audio track). Thus the normalization function would normalize to the high-level transient, and not to the useful audio signal, that in such case would have a too low volume. Please comment.
3. I am typically transcoding a large number of files, say 500 at a time. It would be very convenient (and normal) to have vertical numbering of the individual files in the left column of the GUI, or at least any type of indication in the GUI of how many files are loaded in the current processing. Currently, I can find no way of knowing how many files are included for processing.
4. Transcoding a large number of files from any source with unknown quality sometimes gives you errors like 13, 15 or 19, where such files are rejected in the coding process. However, such rejected files are sometimes typically playable in windows media player or the VLC media player thus making those players somewhat more robust to errors than MediaCoder. I think it would be imperative and very useful if the coding process could be made more resilient, thus being able to handle lower quality programme material and as far as possible automatically handle and correct glitches, bad joints, timestamp gaps etc.
5. Somewhere in your software I found a way to set a flag for outputting a csv-file of the transcoding process. (However, I can not find it now!?). For serious users, it would be nice to have more output data in the file, such as:
Input file and coding parameters (including "Qf") as well as output file and coding parameters (including "Qf") AND a totals row at the bottom including column summations, averages, standard deviations and CV's for such columns where appropriate.
6. The diagram presentations obtained over the Internet is somewhat ok, However it should show more useful parameters. But why not have diagrams internal to the software instead? There are a number of license free diagram/graphics packages with source code out there and this would increase the utility of your software tremendously, at least reflecting serious users.
7. In the paid-up Premium version, I sometimes get stupid and childish pop-ups that interfere with my work and I certainly do not need such crap. STOP THAT FOR THE FULL PAYING CUSTOMERS, else you will look like an idiot, and professionals will turn away to other solutions. You do not have that many users/customers out there, so be careful about how you treat your customers and remember to treat them all well
Remember, happy customers and a very good price/performance factor is your only weapon against hackers and crackers. Why not instead put a donation button somewhere on the GUI?8. In the paid-up Premium version, I am told that I must be connected to the Internet continuously in order to run the software. Have you ever given it a thought, to the users that can not, or do not want to be continuously on-line? If you must have such tight paranoid protection measures, why not try to make it smoother for the user? Your competitor TMPGenc has a similar but less paranoid protection scheme where you only get pinged very occasionally for license checks. Again be careful about how you treat your customers.
I hope you find at least some of my comments useful....
