Video Codec Comparison

FonkiE writes "Doom9 wrote a good article: After more than 3 weeks of work and no free time during that period it has been done: The latest codec comparison is online. 7 codecs have been put through one of the hardest tests in the history of codec testing. The results: find out on your own ;) I had planned to change the presentation somewhat but certain events (forum problems and such) prevented me from completing this for the release. I plan to eventually supply an updated version of the comparison."

Comments

nice article, but..

[Squarewav]

there is lots of things left out like bitrate/quality comparisons, some codecs, like realvideo do a much better job at low bitrates (200k/s) then say xvid at the same bitrate.

Bink?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing good things about Bink. Anyone have any experience with it, one way or the other? Seems to be used in a lot of games.

quite the wrong way to go about it

[Trepidity]

A signals-processing attempt to measure audio quality isn't useful in general, and especially when dealing with lossy codecs. The various measured distortion values aren't really interesting -- the only relevant result is audio quality. As such, the only interesting tests are blind listening tests.

3ivx and encoding

[shepmaster]

Well, if you have read the article, you can see that 3ivx (not 3ivX as the article states :) ) does not fare well. However, 3ivx does have one thing that the others do not have whatsoever... it was built from scratch for QuickTime compatability. The reason that this is a good thing is the versatility you can achieve with a QuickTime movie. I have personally ripped and encoded an anime movie, and was able to put both English and Japanese, as well as English subtitles, all controlled by a flash menu. The few OGMs I have seen have similar capabilites, but nothing quite as nice as QuickTime.

The video quality is actually pretty damn good, IMO. I suggest trying it out for yourself. Check my webpage for more relevant information.

Sigh, Quicktime and MP4-video?

[2nd Post!]

I wish they tested that too, the encoder isn't free, but it is cheap. Then the question is, is the price worth it?

Which formats are the most durable?

[astrashe]

If you wanted to make video files that will have the best chance of being viewable in 10 or 20 years, what are the best file formats and codecs?

Are any file formats and codecs likely to be visible?

MPEG1, still the best

[Anonymous Coward]

All these years and MPEG1 is still the only truly universal video format.

1. MPEG1 is not encumbered by patent problems as MPEG2 and 4 are. http://www.mpegla.com Thus it is effectively free-as-in-beer by default.

2. MPEG1 is playable everywhere from the old Solaris and SGI boxen to the newest PCs.

3. No finding out after the fact that the .mov or .avi you downloaded requires a codec you don't have.

4. It is not a tool to let Microsoft, Sorenson, or Real dominate all online video and divide the web into gated communities.

yay, the good guys won (or something)

[real_smiff]

I'm really happy to see XviD come out on top (well, i think it did anyway :p). The devs really deserve it, with all the work they've put in, and the problems they've had with commercial companies ripping their code off, users whining, the brain numbing difficulty of what they're trying to do, not getting paid for it, and so on and so forth.

I've been semi-following XivD for about a year, occasionally compressing one of my DVDs to see how it's doing. (which always seems to be: Great, but better the next week (i.e. a severe double-edged sword!).

One thing you know about Xvid is that those problems (the ones Doom9 found) will get addressed. Cheers XviD team.

Helix license forbis comparison?

[Internet Ninja]

IANAL but looking at the Helix binary EULA there seems to be a clause disallowing this sort of thing.

https://reguseronly.helixcommunity.org/2002/clic kw rap/eula-clickwrap
Entry 2(a)(vii)
You may not make available to any third party the results of any evaluation or testing of the Software by You under this License. Any such forbidden use shall immediately terminate Your license to the Software.

Just a thought

Sound and vision...

[hughk]

It is interesting that some encoders tend to do bad things with the sound. What does this have to do with the video playback quality, well if the player has to seek between the video stream and the sound stream, then video (requiring the higher bandwdth) suffers. Playing from a fast HD masks some of this out, but usually not from CD.

For whatever reason, some programs mess up the spacing of the video and sound streams, for example, Variable Bit-Rate Audio often gives problems. The thing is that it isn't the video codec itself, just the delays getting sound and vision to run concurrently.

Re:after working with lots of them

[Herr_Nightingale]

since MPEG2 requires such a high bitrate for decent looking video to emerge, I can give you five times better quality (for same size video file) using DivX ;-) because Divx ;-) is many times more efficient. Also note that MPEG2 is quite limited, doesn't work nicely with high resolutions, etc.
The trick to good encoding is in knowing how to use NanDub (or VirtualDub, or VegasVideo, or whatever you use..) and knowing ALL of the various little settings that can be tweaked. The default settings INVARIABLY SUCK, with the quantizer matrix being set for fast, crappy quality video output. The max. quantizers (if using SBC or DivX5) should NEVER exceed 9, for example; however, the default is usually 31! You shouldn't use the default settings and still expect near-DVD quality.

I'm writing a proper, updated tutorial on SBC and Divx 5 Pro right now, which I will submit to various newsgroups when it's done. In the meantime, check out Doom9.org for a rough idea of how to rip properly. They ignore some pertinent details (ie, filters - esp. contrast filter) but you should get a very good idea of the work involved to produce a decent rip.

Re:Ogg theora?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Unfortunately, it appears that Ogg Theora development is "mostly dead". The main developer has been stuck doing contract work (on the integer decoder for Vorbis, as far as I can tell) and can't get to it "for the foreseeable future". The mailing lists are almost completely dead, and, most tellingly, Xiph hasn't updated the theora.org page since January.

I doubt very much they'll have the 1.0 release next month as they have been saying since last June that they'd do...Alpha 1 was looking really promising, but Alpha 2 got pushed back twice (originally scheduled for early December 2002...then late December...then they stopped talking about it anywhere.) Last I'd heard was they were planning to skip Alpha 2 and go straight to Beta in March. Obviously that didn't happen. I do know Monty managed to get some (non-Theora-specific?) work done that will benefit Ogg Theora, but that was back in February, and nobody's talking about it since then.

There are hints that there are other people puttering with the code a little (and VP3 decoding support [the "video codec" part of Ogg Theora - I gather there are still a few "tweaks" to be worked out to turn VP3 into "Ogg Theora"] is slowly being worked on for ffmpeg, Xine, and MPlayer.) but I don't know if Xiph has enough attention on it to get anything out. (Support for VP3/Theora video codec going into Xine is mentioned - very briefly - in the latest "Ogg Traffic" newsletter which at least indicates SOMEBODY remembers that Theora exists. I think if they at least got out some documentation on the format (particularly the .ogg part - they say .ogm is 'horribly hacked' but until there's a "proper" standard available for people to work to, that's all we have for "video-in-ogg") it would help. (If encoding support for Theora in ffmpeg/mplayer isn't far behind, then adoption and work on it outside of Xiph will probably pick up pretty quickly.)

Kinda sad to see the project languish silently as it has for most of the year - some days I can't tell if Xiph will be abandoning Ogg Theora or ever getting back to it or what...

As a side note, back on the topic of "codec comparison", my playing with the one and only release of Ogg Theora way back when it was released (8 months ago!) gave me the impression that it can be a very nice format, especially for more compressed bitrate. Where most codecs seem to get "blockier" as they compress, VP3/Theora seems to get "blurrier" instead, which to my eye generally "looks nicer", despite the fact that it has lost as much actual information from the video as the "blockier" codecs (e.g. mpeg4). IF Xiph ever gets around to some file format documentation and VP3/Theora encoding support appears relatively soon, I can easily imagine Ogg Theora becoming a popular format for internet video and archiving home video.