Filters
You can apply various special effects to spice up your stream. Effects include saturation, contrast, deinterlacing, logo overlays, and text overlays. This tutorial assumes you have knowledge on the external VLC technique.
Video Filters
Adjust
- contrast - [0.0 - 2.0] Changes the range between the darkest darks and the lightest lights. Setting contrast below 1.0 decreases contrast. Setting it above 1.0 increases contrast. Try not to go over 1.1 or else compression artifacts will be more evident.
- brightness - [0.0 - 2.0] Changes the overall lightness of the image. 1.0 is neutral brightness. Use this if your video is too dark or light.
- hue - [0 - 360] Shifts the color of the image. Personally, I don't think this is a useful effect. You can use it to make everyone look like green aliens.
- saturation - [0.0 - 3.0] Changes the intensity of the colors. Dropping it below 1.0 gives the image a retro effect. Dropping it all the way to 0.0 makes the image black-and-white. Setting it to 1.2 is suggested and can make sports videos more vibrant and exciting.
- gamma - [0.0 - 10.0] Brightness applies uniformly to the levels spectrum. On the other hand, gamma is applied as a curve to the levels spectrum. Pure black and pure white are unaffected. Only the midtones are affected. Dropping gamma below 1.0 darkens midtones. Boosting it above 1.0 lightens midtones.
Deinterlace
Sometimes your video may have horizontal comb marks.
This is called interlacing.
The producer of the video tried to save bitrate by interlacing.
Interlacing can be very ugly, so we should deinterlace to get rid of it.
- mode - discard, blend, mean, bob, or linear. Linear or mean should work for most sources.
Stream output
To apply one video filter at a time, set your stream output to something like this:
#transcode{vfilter=adjust{saturation=1.2, contrast=1.05}, vb=700, vcodec=h264, venc=x264{bpyramid=none, weightp=0}, acodec=mp3, channels=2, ab=96, threads=4}:std{access=http, mux=asf, dst=127.0.0.1:1234}
To apply two or more video filters at a time, you need to wrap the whole vfilter argument in braces. Separate your filters with a colon. There must be a space after the colon because the VLC developers didn't write their parser correctly.
#transcode{vfilter={adjust{saturation=1.2, contrast=1.05}: deinterlace{mode=mean}}, vb=700,vcodec=h264, venc=x264{bpyramid=none, weightp=0}, acodec=mp3, channels=2, ab=96, threads=4}:std{access=http, mux=asf, dst=127.0.0.1:1234}
Subpicture Filter
Unlike video filters, subpicture filters don't affect the original video. Rather, they overlay something on top of the video. Subpicture filters, such as marquee text and watermark are covered in detail in other tutorials. Here, I show you how to combind subpicture filters with video filters. Remember that sfilters and vfilters must be grouped into their separate blocks.
#transcode{soverlay, sfilter={marq{marquee="$N$_$T$_$D", position=5, size=14, opacity=255}: logo{file='C:\Users\Name\Desktop\logo.png', position=10,transparency=150}}, vfilter={adjust{saturation=1.2, contrast=1.05}: deinterlace{mode=mean}}, vb=700, vcodec=h264, venc=x264{bpyramid=none, weightp=0}, acodec=mp3, channels=2, ab=96, threads=4}:std{access=http, mux=asf, dst=127.0.0.1:1234}