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ExtremeTech Wages War of the Codecs
prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech tested Windows Media, DivX, QuickTime/Sorenson and QuickTime/MPEG4 codecs. They encoded clips from Matrix Reloaded, Monsters, Inc., X2 and Spider-Man. QuickTime/Sorenson won the encoding speed contest, for the quality tests read the entire review, as each movie sample was encoded with 500KB and 1MB bitrates. Video samples provided on the site as well, so see for yourself."
I took a look at there sample images and found very little difference (other than MPEG4 obviously) in their quality.
It is very difficult for ME to decide between them. I have never actually seen any QT movies up for download as far as real movies go. Most movies are encoded with divx and seem to work just fine.
Do people really care about minor differences in quality when the file sizes are down to 710mb? I know I don't. Blurred motion is just something I deal with when I download something.
Encoding time is important only if you do this regularly. For those of us just watching a movie it doesn't matter. Whatever gives me the smallest file size with a decent picture is what I want to go w/.
Looks like WMP9 won overall... Sure QT may be fast, but it looks like poop most of the time...
Thanks to the hard work of the Mplayer team, I can play any video format I want. If you havent tried it, you should.
Get mplayer
found here
OK, the article blurb claims that QT/Sorenson had the fastest encoding times, but also had the third-worst quality (only QT/MPEG-4 was worse). DivX seems to have the best quality, which, in my opinion, should be the end goal.
Think about it, how many times are you going to encode a movie? How many times are you going to watch it? Typically, you are going to encode once and probably watch it multiple times. Therefore, I would happily accept a little longer processing time in the beginning if that means I will end up with a better quality production.
Posting still images isn't the best way to point out video artifacts due to compression. Post five seconds of compressed material (all of this qualifies under fair use) and let the users see the artifacts themselves. The human eye is much more likely to spot the artifacts in a movie because of our perception of motion.
Sorenson Pro (which has 2-pass and VBR encoding) isn't available in the $30 QTPro package. Use Sorenson Squeeze or MediaCleaner.
Also, QuickTime's MPEG-4 encoder is not the best MPEG-4 encoder out there. But there are better ones available, and of course MPEG-4 being a standard, the output of those other tools will be playable in QT Player.
So to make the comparison valid, both in terms of encoding speed an quality, some other tool should've been used.
What a wishy-washy article. To sum up and save you the 2 minutes of your life to read that article, all 4 techs are good, and they are all good for something, bad at others. I wonder if the author could have sat on the fence any MORE when comparing the codecs.
I for one, will continue to obey my DivX Masters, they have always been good to me. It seems that the author had a hard-on for QuickTime and M$, both of which annoy the ever living crap out of me... QuickTime, with it's little icon in the toolbar that just won't go away, and Microsoft because I just can't trust them to not tell MPAA which movies I have on my HDD.
$0.02 Flamebaiting, Trolling response concluded.
(and my Karma just got back to Neutral, dang it)
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
Test of some scenes from copyrighted movies? What're the results for? What format is best downloaded off of Kazaa?
And the samples are all live action.. Test encoding some hand drawn animation (ie; an old bugs bunny), a computer generated animation, a anime style animation, a dialogue type scene, a live action scene with a lot of action, black and white vs color, etc, etc.
The types of images on screen greatly affect the performance of different algorithms.
Plus, each codec has about a million tweaks and optimizations for different types of footage.
I doubt highly that there's one clear "winner". It's really not that simple.
Which is why I hate sites like ExtremeTech that always have to boil it down to "this product is the best, the rest suck!".
Like the ATI vs nVidia flamewars. ATI may benchmark faster, yet nVidia has effects in games ATI lacks. There is no clear "this one is the best". Or Intel vs AMD or Linux vs Windows, etc, etc..
Nothing in the realm of computer science is that simple.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Unfortunately, due to the fact that the source was itself the result of mpeg encoding, it could unfairly impact the ability of the various codecs to handle the content. On the flip side, much of the content people are encoding is actually decoded content, i.e. from a digital camcorder, etc.
What would be interesting is taking the original raw film footage (that hasn't been digitally compressed with a lossy method) and encoding, then comparing the results.
As sad as it sounds, I'm not surprised that XviD was left out. After all, alot of these reviewers pay attentions to what is being *marketted*. But I am surprised that On2 failed to get their VP4 Personal Codec noticed by this reviewer. I guess On2's marketting group dropped the ball when it came to make ExtremeTech aware of it's offerings.
Aren't there any 'Stock-footage' type DVD's out there that include a license to redistribute they could have used? Or couldn't they at least have tried to get permission for the clips they used?
While they might not have want to try to argue fair use through education or reviewing, they could have found at least one clip they could distribute. Hell, rent a high end digital camera and make one. Tape traffic on a highway, both daytime and nighttime, and you've got a motion video test, or a fountain, or anything.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
...is which codec is best for encoding pr0n???
I'm sorry, but some hand-waving, subjective "Hey, this thing kinda looks better than that thing" is not a test. Calling it a "War of the Codecs" is even more ridiculous.
How does the velocity engine make *better* encodings using the same codecs as x86? Presuming that the codecs are implemented the same, wouldn't it just maybe do it faster?
I like having all my movies and music and shows just a mouse click away. No fondling media, no DVD drives whooshing and movies stuttering halfway throgh because some tiny piece of schmutz got on the precious disc. In order to do this, I don't care at all what 500kbs or 1mbps files look like - The Twins effect alone occupies about 2GB on one of my drives, and I still haven't been able to produce a rip of Natural City that satisfies me even when the last one I tried was nearly 4GB (lots of film grain in that one and I don't care to lose it).
Yes... many of us care about quality. In fact, this is the very reason I rip DVDs - so the programs I enjoy play (more smoothly) from my hard drive.
Um DVD burners cost $140 cdn, high speed internet and bittorrent have made movie swapping easier and easier. Once the diffrence becomes irrelevant progress stops, for example it's going to be a long long time before something unseats 128kbps mp3 as the standard.
.doc. Doc. is the standard but it sucks, at the moment I think people might consider going back to mpeg 2 which I think is not a valid tradeoff but who knows.
The question is parralel to whether something cool like rtf or swx format will be the long term universal standard or
The other reason this is important is the new HDDVD battle comming up, some people are trying to upgrade dvd decoding standard (I.E. What's in commercial dvd players) to Mpeg 4 and leave dvd sizes where they are other are trying to keep mpeg 2 but raise dvd size to 22 gigs to compensate. I think both solutions should be implemented but that's just a personal preference not a business decision.
The reality of life is that WMV9 is one of the most, if not the most, used codecs around. Therefore it would have been poor testing and irresponsible reporting to have excluded it from the test.
What you suggest would be like a round up of office suites that tested Open Office, WordPerfect, Star Office and KDE Office but, didn't include Microsoft Office. You can't do that and expect to taken seriously.
On the other hand, their result was that WMV9 was the overall winner. My testing is based on what is most important to me. Quality. From a quality perspective I felt that DivX was the clear winner. Of the examples they gave, DivX was clearer and retained more detail than WMV9 in all but a very few cases.
Don't you know, EVERYTHING is better on a Mac. Heck, put an Apple logo on your glass, your drink will taste better :).
In all seriousness it comes form the fact that many Mac users toss around apple marketing terms (like Velocity Engine) without understanding what they mean (it's a floating point vector math unit, like 3dnow or SSE2). They just assume it makes things better since that's what the hype claims.
What I find interesting is the lack of information on how much processing power is needed to decode the content. For instance, I have some QT-Sorrenson-3 video that looks incredible, but requires too much heft to decode on my lowly iBook/500MHz. The MPEG-4 version of the file does not look as good, but the video DOES at least play.
I think it is VERY important to understand the target platform where the content is to be decoded. If it's set-top box, PDA, or mobile phone, then I'd imagine MPEG-4 would be more appropriate (it's also great at streaming). QT-Sorrenson-3 is more targeted towards the desktop.
Easy: they are not implemented the same. Apple will spend much more time and money tweaking G4/5 + Velocity Engine encoding than x86 encoding. That and as some one else said the test did not use the $200+ pro version. -chris
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
No kidding. Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.
A little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men. -Willy Wonka
If you always encode to 650MB or 1300MB/Movie, then yes.
But if you want to use disk space efficiently, you get too big file sizes for easily encoded movies and too bad quality for hard encoded movies.
IMO, nothing beats quality based encoding, ie. you specify a quality setting and the movie will have whatever size is needed for that quality.
As soon as the CD dies as the major storage for movies (being replaced either by hard-disk or DVD), we will hopefully see more focus on quality-based encoding and less on bitrate-based, because it's pointless.
The bigger question is how taking a compressed format (MPEG2) compressing it further (Indeo) and using that as a source is a good test. Each different type of video compression create artifacts that are unique to that algorithm. When you re-encode with a different codec you can have distortion that is amplified by the *beating* of the algorithms. Different codec's will react in different ways to source that has a specific kind of distortion.
To make a comparison of codec's based on an MPEG2 compressed source is justifiable from the standpoint that we are likely to be ripping DVD's. However, I very much doubt that we will rip down to an interstitial Indeo format before doing the final compression. The fact that they didn't separate the compression time test's from the compression quality tests is suspect. They say they didn't want to contaminate the test with disk access, but disk access times would have been the same for all of the codecs and would have modeled real user usage.
I would not be surprised that SV3 and MPEG-4 have a bad interaction with Indeo compression, or at least Indeo compressed MPEG2. They should have used the original MPEG2 source at a minimum, and ideally uncompressed source.
XviD is not "just as good as DVD but at 700 megs". Be reasonable. XviD, DivX and QT/MPEG4 are actually close relatives, they all "speak" MPEG4 "dialects".
I played with a lot of different codecs, including MPEG4-like mutants such as DivX, XviD, ffmpeg, etc. If i limit myself just at comparing DivX and Xvid, then:
- XviD is slightly faster than DivX, all else being equal
- XviD has slightly better quality than DivX, all else being equal, but it's an extremely close call (and sometimes the opposite is true)
So, in the Extremetech benchmark, if you replace DivX with XviD, it would fare slightly better overall. But definitely nothing as ridiculous as "owning the competition".
Facts please, not emotional knee-jerk reactions. Thank you.
I know this was strictly about quality - but i think its very shortsighted to miss some of the key features WHY people like Quicktime... and its not always about the quality of watching ripped DVDs.
For example - I don't see anywhere where it points out that Quicktime and Divx are by far the most DRM-less codecs out there. WMP9 can stick you up the ass if you're not careful. Plus, there are plenty of times that WMP9 will refuse to operate properly with multi=monitor setups (my friend's brand new ThinkPad, for example, refuses to play over the external VGA port....)
i also don't see any mention of the ability to cut/copy/paste with the built-in default players as a comparison tool. How many times have you wanted just a sliver of a movie to playback - ro to have the ability to quickly convert it to DV to put onto a workflow with some other editing? Even the average goofball making iMovies wants to do that all the time - but is 100% prevented from doing that with WMP9
While the quality of QT is obviously lacking - i'll use it EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK because its far more powerful for everyday use, and much more free of DRM issues.
this would explain, of course - Hollywood's facination with it - its got great quality while sacrificing little things... like fair use.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.
OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look at the comparisons for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.
Mod parent up.
He's right about introducing more artifacts with each encode. If you wanted to get the best compression and did not care about quality, you would run your source material through multiple codecs. As each artifact the prior codec produced will get worse and worse as the codec tries to implement its method of saving space.
It's a bad idea to test the quality of a codec when they put each one at a disadvantage because they use ALREADY COMPRESSED SOURCE MATERIAL, not to mention they decided to run it through another codec (Indeo) before they finally decided to the "test quality" of the codecs in question. Using the Indeo codec only compounded the problem, even if it was at a high bitrate, its still being compressed again.
I wish these authors would understand that you don't do quality comparisons of video codecs with already compressed source material, its just WRONG.
This "comparison" was a waste of time because of their test methods.
Windows Server 2003 has streaming (for Windows Media) built in. It is 'no tears' according to Info World.
Really- it's easy. In Server 2003, go to 'Manage Your Server' then do the little 'add functionality' thing, and say 'Yeah...I want streaming'.
Wait a few minutes, and you've got a streaming server that even an idiot Windows admin can manage. Simple, easy, and free.
No reason to lie.
The problem begins with those pesky carbon based lifeforms called humans. Their perception of quality is not as simple as a measurement of error between original and encoded->decoded picture, but a much more complex one, which can't be reliably measured by any numerical algorithms fit to run on PCs.
Complicate the problem further with the users feeding the codec source material of the most varying quality and form, no controlled viewing enviroment or even device.
A mostly bright movie viewed in a dark room on a bright screen, and you might get away with throwing away lots of the darker details without anyone noticing, saving bits to use on things the viewers might notice.
Having a very dark source, which the viewer then views on a crappy and dark screen with gamme ramped up to 2.0 or 3.0 or something just to see the movie, and you'll see nothign but some blinking blocks using the same settings as in the previous scenario.
The source has lots of noise in it? We'll chuck it all away. No point in storing noise. What? The users complain? But it's just noise... Oh? Film grain, not noise? Could've fooled me, and the computer.
Until computers evolve a bit, excellent results at the click of a button will only exist in the utopian dreams of the casual user. Until then, the casual user will just have to make do with spending more bits on the video to get good results, instead of spending more time learning options and finding the best ones for the particular source/quality target/viewer to get good results.
You haven't been around much, have you?
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