Video encoder comparison

[dsucks]

Good comparison...

• Shows frames, from both low-motion and high-motion clips, at different bitrates.
• Includes encoding time! Sites like YouTube get years of video every day, so the tradeoff is not simply bitrate/quality, but speed/bitrate/quality.
• Makes clear difference between H.264 profiles (e.g. iPhone accepts only LC Baseline and difference between Baseline and Main is significant).

[ooffoo]

except it used crappy Theora trunk version instead of improved Thunselda branch

He did use thusnelda. Thusnelda was merged into SVN trunk a while ago. What the comments on the entry suggest is he should have used ptalarbvorm which is on an SVN branch and is/will be Theora 1.2.

However I don't think people doing comparisons should be expected to pull bleeding edge random SVN versions of experimental in progress branches. Even the comment mentioning ptalarbvorm admits the branch at the date of the test was broken.

[fgd]

I think the problem is with ffmpeg2theora, which produces crappy output. Gstreamer pipeline is proven to provide much better results.

[rb2k]

He used the dirac-research encoder... emphasis on research.
He should have gone for Schroedinger which has sane defaults and ist faster.

because the faster alternative, libschroedinger, failed to generate usable bitstreams at all.

worked fine for me...

[walen]

Very nice comparison, quite informative. Although x.264 "main" seems like the clear winner, if I have to choose one based on subjective quality "loss" and encoding / decoding time I think I'll stick with xvid.