Stics: advanced configuration & info

While the defaults are somewhat “sane” and pretty, there are some advanced parameters that can be set in the Stics.ini file.

Stics.ini

The configuration file has 3 sections, , [text] and [waveform].

For the moment there is no configuration GUI provided. Hopefully a GUI will be in place by the time it’s stable enough to use easily.

The [video] section

The video section has 4 settings so far:

• crf: this is the quality of the output video. 0 is basically lossless, 51 is worst. Default is 19. Play around until you find a good compromise
• report: this takes either a true/false argument. This will instruct ffmpeg to generate a report log file. You shouldn’t need this
• preset: this is the preset used by the x264 encoder. There shouldn’t be a reason to change this unless you know what you’re doing
• fmt: this is the pixel format used by the output video. Default is yuv420p. A good alternative (and better color reproduction) is yuv444p, but this isn’t supported by many video players (YouTube supports it) and it will impact the speed of the encoding process (15-20% in my tests).

The [text] section

The text section has 3 settings so far:

• font: this is the path of the font file used to write the text over the video. By default it uses the “impact.ttf” font found in the tools directory As of 0.9.4.0, this takes a system font name, like “Impact”, “Arial”, “Calibri” etc.
• size: self-explanatory, font-size. Default is 42.
• align: self explanatory, text-alignment. Can be left/right/center.

The [waveform] section

This section is only used when the video type is set to “Waveform Progress” and it configures the waveform generator. These are mostly color settings. As you can see in the default configuration file, it can accept literal color names (red, white, blue, black, transparent etc.), colors in hex #AARRGGBB format (AA is alpha channel, transparency) or plain #RRGGBB format.

• left: the color of the left (top) stereo channel
• right: the color of the right (bottom) stereo channel
• opacity: the opacity of the whole waveform. Takes values from 0.00 (completely transparent) to 1.00 (no transparency)
• bg: background of the whole waveform graphic
• fg: color of the time text on the waveform graphic
• height: the height of the waveform graphic. This is not fully implemented (the progress bar will look out of place at the moment)
• tk: the time-ticks color. default is slightly transparent white

Problems?

If at any time you mess up these settings and the program starts to behave weirdly, just delete the .ini file and Stics will recreate it.

Please keep in mind that at the moment, between releases the configuration files doesn’t update. If something doesn’t behave like it should, or new settings have been added, you can simply delete the Stics.ini file and it will be recreated with the defaults.