Holy moly, cant believe i havent stumbled on this piece of software/plugin before.

I seriously recommend downloading voukoder 5 along with its vegas pro plugin, it works just like any other render preset.

The thing is, due to vegas pro nvenc rendering stopping every other second (because the buffer limit is in vegas somehow extremely small) the speed of voukoder 5 is ridiculously fast compared to vegas pro native gpu rendering...

15 minutes of h265 footage took a whopping 3 minutes to re encode!

Also the best thing.. its free.

So yeah, if anyone else is getting frustrated with native gpu rendering stopping every second and then rendering 50 frames and doing the same thing again, i suggest trying this one out!

Voukeder Render is way sharper compared to Magix AAC template. Why Magix render template is horrible? I mean its okey just that the artifacts introduced make it look like a compressed video.

+1 Especially in shadow areas or areas with same colours I get a lot of visible artifacts with Magix AVC. I do a lot of down scaling from 4k to FHD and that gives great results with Voukoder.

@alifftudm95 @Deata@Deata

what settings are you guys using? With my 1050 I'm not seeing any real speed differences with any configuration of voukoder but the quality difference between Magix AVC and Vouk are marked and not in favor of V. Edges are softer and overall the video looks like there's some vaseline on the lens. The people in the video I tested with aren't *that* old :-)

@fifonik

"Have you checked how the rendered file behaves when so4 enabled/disabled in VP internal preferences?"

Yes. There are marked differences between the two decoders. To get the most accurate assessment, my suggestion is to always use the decoder that was used for the original source material. E.g. older mts or m2ts files use compound.dll for decoding. For measuring audio delay of the rendered file, then use compound.dll. If the original file was decoded with the newer decoder, then use that one.

"If I understand correctly, this is another "issue" of the so4 decoder. It does not recognize the audio stream offset correctly."

IMHO, that's most likely the problem. However, it may be that the offset is not being "written" properly which seems possible but unlikely since FFmpeg is the writing library for both Voukoder and HOS.

I wish I knew a program that can be used to edit/modify audio offset in existing files (m2ts & mp4) without re-muxing.

I'd use it for testing old compoundplug vs so4compoundplug to understand where the issue lies.

@alifftudm95 @Deata@Deata

what settings are you guys using? With my 1050 I'm not seeing any real speed differences with any configuration of voukoder but the quality difference between Magix AVC and Vouk are marked and not in favor of V. Edges are softer and overall the video looks like there's some vaseline on the lens. The people in the video I tested with aren't *that* old :-)

the 2min 1080p60fps sync check above encoded at 73.42fps with voukoder and 60.66fps with Magix AVC. Using NVENC High quality preset . The speed difference is a little more than 20%

Cutting 1080 60P .h265 footage from Samsung camera like butter. Getting 114 frames with custom high bite rate template.

A new connector enabling Voukoder with VP 18 is out: https://www.voukoder.org/

Voukoder 6 is also released now: https://www.voukoder.org/forum/thread/670-voukoder-6/?postID=4273#post4273

Note than in x264 (CPU) mode it can be quite slow if you enable some of the presets.

I wonder what I'm doing wrong. I've never seen any benefit with Voukoder over the Magix NVENC encoders as far as speed goes.

"I've never seen any benefit with Voukoder"

Are you kidding? The render output formats from Voukoder are by far a better output quality (and visually) than all other available options. As for speed, that's another thing, But for a cleaner, more pristine output quality with a smaller file size, that is key!

@Steve_Rhoden Seriously not kidding. I think my use cases must be different from every other fan of Voukoder or I just need to spend a bunch of time tweaking the defaults.

Most of my work is destined for youtube and even at 1080p they're going to compress it in ways that will undo the 120mpbs quality that I see from voukoder.

Well michael-harrison, my work as with many others are geared towards the Television and Broadcast industry, so our output has to be of the highest quality right out the gate to be delivered to varied media houses!...So yeah, our case is different from a youtube delivery.....So base your comments around using Voukoder for youtube output!

There is no fan of Voukoder here, its just another encoding option that some of us prefer to use for its varied benefits !

@Steve_Rhoden "prefer to use for its varied benefits" that's pretty much the definition of "fan" :-)

Note, I deliberately didn't say "fanboy" because that's not at all what I meant.

"So base your comments around using Voukoder for youtube output"

I think I just did. Comparatively speaking, almost nobody else in this thread has specified their use case, mostly it's just "Voukoder is great!" and questions about render settings go unanswered.

But really hyperbole aside, in my testing in the last hour I find I'm able to get comparable quality out of the magix encoder just by matching bit rates with voukoder.

By default it's using very high constant rates so yeah, the visual quality is going to be better out of the gate.

The latter is a bit faster which might make it worth using in the longer term. Say, averaged over months of rendering.

I'd be more interested in comparisons similar what John Dennis and others have done for other formats.

I see at least three different points where Voukoder helps for my intends:

1. It gives access to deeper encoding parameters (e.g. IBP frames ratio) including some useful filter options.

2. It outputs better quality for low bitrate AVC encoding (I once tested this with high frequency details and grainy footage) and at the same time it offers this "lazy" RF option which ensures constant quality.

3. It gives access to further meta data (for instance before Vegas Pro 18 I used it to output AVC with full level meta data which was not possible with Vegas Pro before).

Also it offers the nice option to use MKV wrapping instead of MP4, a broad choice of audio codecs and VP8/VP9 encoding.

So to me Voukoder is a useful addition to the given render set.

@michael-harrison Well, x264 encoder was discussed in the forum many times with all its benefits (quality-wise, not speed wise). My example.

Voukoder provide easy access to the x264 encoder from VP (other options -- use x264 through temp lossless file or frame server). So I do not really see any points to discuss x264 benefits here. Just Vouk's UI, options, bugs etc.

P.S. I personally not using Voukoder for final renders as it still has audio offset issues while rendering from VP with my media files. I will start to use it as soon as the issue got fixed.

@Marco. thank you, those are the kinds of details I can make use of.

@fifonik yes, those are exactly the kinds of comparisons that work for me. Hard data.

I'm starting to get more into vfx and compositing work so having high quality intermediates are becoming important.

fifonik, the audio offset issue has been corrected in the new Voukoder version 6, along with a new connector for Vegas Pro 18. Give it test and see if it holds up!

Thanks for the information, but I am monitoring the project and have not seen anything related to the audio shift issue in the voukoder and VP connector changelogs nor mentioned in forum. Could you provide any details please?

UPDATE: Another bug that was not fixed when I tested last time: 5.1 audio support was broken.

UPDATE2: I checked Voukoder 6 + Vegas Connector 1.0.0 and it still cannot render 5.1 audio (Vegas Connector 0.5.1 can)

I posted about it on the 25th of May, scroll up to the top. Also many people think h.264 is h.264 no matter who makes it, but they're using different patents and licences of h.264. x.264 is the best version of it

Sure I read this.

so4 does not work with my media so I'm having it turned off. As a result, the audio offset issue is not fixed completely for me (and this was discussed in Vouk's forum). However, it is much better then before.

I can vaguely recall he wanted an elegant automated solution where voukoder could detect s04 on or off but needed Magix to change something to be able to send a signal. So if they didn't do that, he should just add a switch for so4 off sync .

I see where he's coming from though, with Vegas people will always have to turn so4 on or off depending on what they're editing, so without an automated approach sync will always be a problem, unless in case of a switch the user remembered to activate it , but then deactivate it next time so4 was on again. For a commercial product that would be too much to ask, but for a hobbyist project, it should be there