AVI2 Codecs and Video Formats

[JodyK]

I've had some really good luck in the past (LV2011) acquiring from a GigE camera and pushing my frames to AVI in order to save video/images of my sample. I just updated to LV2013 and the AVI2 toolchain seems quite a bit different and not as effective. 

It looks like AVI2 should be able to access the same codecs (Video for Windows [VfW], now called VCM) that I could with the original AVI toolchain, but I don't get the same list at all. I used to use Lagarith pretty heavily, but it's not available in AVI2.

Here:

AVI2 Get Codec Names

Microsoft Video 1
Intel IYUV codec
Cinepak Codec by Radius
FF Video Codec 1 (FFV1) (NI Vision)
Motion JPEG (NI Vision)
Y800 Uncompressed Grey Scale (NI Vision)
YUV 4:2:0 Planar (NI Vision)

AVI Get Filter Names

UtVideo YUV420 BT.709 (ULH0) DMO
UtVideo YUV420 BT.601 (ULY0) DMO
UtVideo YUV422 BT.709 (ULH2) DMO
UtVideo YUV422 BT.601 (ULY2) DMO
UtVideo RGBA (ULRA) DMO
UtVideo RGB (ULRG) DMO
DV Video Encoder
MJPEG Compressor
Cinepak Codec by Radius
Intel IYUV codec
Intel IYUV codec
Lagarith Lossless Codec
Microsoft RLE
Microsoft Video 1
UtVideo YUV420 BT.709 (ULH0) VCM
UtVideo YUV422 BT.709 (ULH2) VCM
UtVideo RGBA (ULRA) VCM
UtVideo RGB (ULRG) VCM
UtVideo YUV420 BT.601 (ULY0) VCM
UtVideo YUV422 BT.601 (ULY2) VCM

Anyone else running into this? 

Also, the camera I'm currently working with has 12-bit pixel depth and I can't find a codec that supports more than 8-bit. Anyone know of a good codec for that?

-Jody

[Prickly_Pear]

I think that it is possible that the confusion arises from the difference between a codec and a filter. These words are often used interchangeably, but they are actually quite different. Sometimes you will download something that says it is a codec when really it is a filter. AVI2 uses true codecs exclusively.

This NI Knowledgebase article talks a little bit about the difference between the AVI functions and AVI2: https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019M0ySAE&l=en-US

Also, here is a link to an external blog post in which someone talks about filters and codecs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/deanro/archive/2004/09/24/234155.aspx

Jeremy P.

[JodyK]

I read through your links, but I have to say that seems pretty nitpicky. Essentially, a codec is a subset of 'filters' of type = 'compression filter'. Yes, there are also audio splitter filters, etc but that kind of misses the point. For all intents and purposes, a 'video compression filter' IS a video codec.

There are a lot of different ways to interface with codecs and thus different types of codecs. The old AVI toolkit made use of VfW (Video for Windows) codecs - similar to VirtualDUB. And indeed, all the VfW codecs I've installed show up in the old AVI toolkit.

The new toolkit claims to make use of VCM codecs, which as far as I can tell is just Microsoft's new name for VfW. So far I haven't found any VCM/VfW codecs that work with AVI2. The UTVideo codec that showed up in my old AVI list is actually a VfW/VCM codec (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ut_video_codec_suite.htm) but doesn't show up in the AVI2 tool.

Can you provide an example of a codec I can install that will work? I'd love something that supports monochrome with a bit depth greater than 8, but honestly anything that can do low latency real-time encoding on an i7 would be nice. The AVI2 uncompressed streams seem to crap out at 2GB which means post-processing compression isn't a good option.

What do you mean by 'true codecs'? I've spent quite a bit of time in the video codec community and follow VP9/H265 development as a hobby, but I've never heard anyone use the term 'true codec' to refer to something...

-Jody

[JodyK]

Honestly, I wish LabVIEW went away from VfW/VCM - Microsoft stopped supporting it a long time ago (1996) as an abstraction layer for codecs. Here's some history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows

Release Date	Version	Notes
November 1992	Video for Windows 1.0	First public release. Including Microsoft RLE and Video1 codecs.
	Video for Windows 1.1	Added Cinepak codec
	Video for Windows 1.1a
	Video for Windows 1.1b
	Video for Windows 1.1c
	Video for Windows 1.1d	Included Indeo 3.2 (Allegedly included source code from Apple's QuickTime for Windows)
March 1995	Video for Windows 1.1e	Last version for Windows 3.1x
August 1995	Video for Windows 95	Bundled with Windows 95
July 1996	Video for Windows NT	32-bit version bundled with Windows NT 4.0
July 1996	ActiveMovie 1.0	The successor to Video for Windows. Added support for MPEG-1 and QuickTime file formats
March 1997	DirectShow 1.0	The successor to Active Movie.

The last update to VfW/VCM was in 1996. It's still around for backwards compatibility/legacy applications, but Microsoft developed DirectShow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectShow) for Windows XP. In Win7/8 they're starting to deprecate DirectShow and move to Media Foundation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Foundation).

LabVIEW's reliance on VfW is part of why it's so hard to find modern codecs to use.

-Jody

[Tinnotek]

Hi Jody, 

It's good to find out someone ran into the same problem as I do.

Check out my reply in this community post.

The workaroud I did is using the older version of NI VDM. The LabVIEW 2011 SP1 version seems to be the last version that using AVI Codec instead of AVI2 Codec.

According to the article here, it seems that AVI2 is getting the codec tag from the registry of Microsoft VCM. The older version of IMAQ AVI Codec actually get the codec tag from Microsoft VFW.

Although VCM and VFW are identical, we don't know what did NI R&D did under the hood.

It's really unflexable to utilize current NI VDM to do the recording/encoding application.

Do you have any good workaround for us to encode video with different codec in LabVIEW?

BR

Ting