Hi, I need a video upscaling solution to enhance some old family videos. As much as I’d love to use a FOSS program, I can’t find anything that comes close to Topaz Video AI.
I purchased the license and I’ve been battling with the application for a week trying to get it running on Linux. I’ve tried Wine, Bottles, Lutris, ProtonGE and tinkering with prefixes.
I’ve read on the Topaz community forums that people have got it working previously on Linux, but I’ve been unable to replicate their setup.
On the forums they said it takes a performance hit on Linux, but I’m willing to deal with that to avoid Windows. In the end I may have to purchase a copy of Windows for the first time in over decade to run this app, but I’m not going to give up without a good effort.
Does anyone have any experience with this application or know of a similar application working on Linux? I’m also willing to run older versions of the client just to use it, anything but a Windows install please!
Thank you!
You could use
ffmpeg
or python to split the video into a sequence of images and an audio file, then AI upscale the images using Upscayl, and finally combine the upscaled images and audio back into a video, usingffmpeg
.I’ve seen issues in the past where the audio would be out-of-sync when recombining the frames because ffmpeg wouldn’t output the right number of frames, so someone wrote a python script to split the video into frames and apparently it works correctly.
Also see: https://superuser.com/questions/1758192/how-can-i-split-a-video-into-frames-and-then-reassemble-it-with-the-audio-too
This probably won’t work well because you will want stability between images. An upscaler that isn’t video-aware will result in lots of distracting flickering.
Off topic but that one answer on superuser looks a lot like it was AI generated.
Wow, I didn’t think of that. Thank you!
Wouldn’t you lose a lot of quality during decode/encode?
Not really, because you can output to png so decoding is lossless, and since your AI upscaled images are of a much higher quality, the resultant video would be a higher quality video as well.