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Comparing Codecs for 2004
MunchMunch writes "Popular encoding/guide/news site doom9.org has just put up its codec shoot-out for 2004, comparing 3ivx 5.0, Divx Fusion 5.9 (prerelease 6.0), Nero Digital Main Profile and High Profile, RealVideo 10, On2 VP6, VideoSoft's VSS, Xvid 1.0, MS's WMV9 and, last, newcomer Jomingo's HDX4. The comparison covers the speed, accuracy, target-file-size-adherence and other aspects of the codecs -- but also lets you compare yourself via high- and low-bandwidth framegrabs of each codec with a nice zoomable image-swap script."
Nero Digital won on quality, but for both speed and quality, doom9.org concludes XviD is currently the best solution.
I realize it's not available yet, but it's coming...and frankly, it's pretty amazing. Scales from 3G handheld devices to HD content, already part of the forthcoming HD-DVD and Bluray Disc formats, not to mention being an ITU and MPEG standard, etc.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I'm an Amiga user, where is FLC you incensitive clod?
from my experiences with what i've played with, snow far surpasses all these codecs. its the only currently realistic wavelet choice, and it hasnt even been optimized for speed. you need a good processor though. mplayer has support for snow now!
Wow, I'm impressed, most of my Ogg and MP3 encodings only get 0 fps.
From a quite-newbie point of view: is there a reason why Ogg Theora isn't included? Given the quality and increasing popularity of Vorbis, I would have expected at least a mention. And it would have been interesting to know its state relative to the others.
..... Not only does ogg theora have great video quality but it has multiple subtitle support built in, which is great for up-coming unlicensed-yet anime and other foreign films.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
What about Ogg Theora? Is it not developed enough yet or did they forget about the open source codec? lasindi
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
that sucks. WMA gives me 15 when the pop ups show up.
1 55 3231&tid=95&tid=97&tid=172&tid=17
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31/
failed?
Beautiful. I thought you went too far when you mentioned anime porn, but apparently it is still going over heads...
MP3 files most definately have frames:
http://www.id3.org/mp3frame.html
http://www.dv.co.yu/mpgscript/mpeghdr.htm
Overall, the progress is just astounding. When I compare clips of say movies from 3 years ago to ones you can find now, the file sizes have remained the same but the quality of both video and audio have gone way up. I don't know much about video codecs but I do recall back then there still being MPEG 4 in the game, so maybe it's more about modern tweaks?
x264 is a free (GPL) implementation done by one of the French guys of the videolan team (who made the VLC player). ./configure options).
0 39
http://www.videolan.org/x264.html
MPlayer-pre6 now supports it. You just need to compile the x264 codec, and compile MPlayer with the x264 libraries linked (see
I tried it, it is very promising.
Apparently it also works with transcode and has a Win32 version too.
See alsothis thread about using mencoder and x264:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=83
About five months ago I got the theora encoder compiling in OS X.. Encoded a test 5 minute short. It was TINY and playback (through VLC or MPlayer I think) was great. It should have been included in any comparison.
Erm, this may only apply to old codgers with failing faculties like myself, but I think that a level of acceptability has been reached.
Just as mp3(and similar) is good enough to listen to and jpg, bmp and gif are good enough for the various static images needs, divx(xvid) and mpeg2 fill the processing requirements for moving images.
With the cost of storage falling there is less need to build a higher compression video codec. If you want to do some good, come up with faster and higher quality ways to transcode things to an existing open codec standard.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
...I'm not trusting this at all.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=4601d4772d 9800343fc7098250f3ab2f&threadid=87317
iwod: "Where is the SNOW in Xmas?"
akupenguin: "The rules say: don't ask what's "best". There isn't an objective answer.
But I vote for Snow: very nice at low bitrates, and it doesn't need so much tweaking to get a compromise between resolution and quantizer. No blockiness at all (wavelets+obmc take care of that), though it has it's own set of artifacts. While it's slow for normal use, that shouldn't be a problem at 320x240..."
Tommy Carrot: "Well, Snow is very impressive indeed..."
Teegedeck: "'The best' indeed is a dangerous term when it comes to comparing codecs. But since in the 'ridiculously low bitrates' area wavelet codecs really don't seem to have a competition, my vote goes for Snow, too..."
Mug Funky: "...wavelet means you can encode broad slabs of flatness alongside detail like subs pretty nicely. it's so experimental though..."
ChronoReverse: "Frozen precipitation in the form of white or translucent hexagonal ice crystals that fall in soft, white flakes."
Anonymous Coward: "why doesnt anyone on slashdot know bout snow?"
Bandwidth-saving link here.
What about the mpeg4 codec from ffmpeg?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...is that MS has a pretty stranglehold on it (although they've been moving to lessen its grip so as to not get completely rejected entirely by the industry). No open source player has source code for decoding it, and on the Mac, the only player that supports it (Windows Media Player for Mac OS X) lacks so many features such as drag-n-drop support, displayal of the file's name during playback, AVI, MPEG, and MP3 support, etc.
Video codec's will always be worked on and updated, as higher quality video is demanded, sizes get larger and larger and more unworkable. When you have a large HDTV, do you really want to watch a divx video with blocky motion artifacts? Ever hear of diminishing returns?
divx is watchable and a good size/quality compromise. You can get a 90 minute film onto a cd, for instance. If, in the future, you can encode a 90 minute hdtv into 700mb with no quality loss, the hardware needed to decode and render the film will probably not use cds. The codec will probably run into Gb.
And, yes, those stairs, rain and especially faces ARE blurred in real life.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Googling for "What is AVC?" bring up this. I'm confused as to if they're saying AVC will be stardard in HD-DVD? Is WM9 an AVC? If not, will both be options for HD-DVD content providers? I ask because in the shootout WM9 didn't look very good. Relatively it blurs more of the scene than xvid.
Where is FFMPEG? Its quality is at the level of XVid (excellent), but it's a lot faster (50 %) to encode.
A quote from the Theora faq:
So there! Theora is optimized VP3, which means there's a good chance it would turn out to be a faster codec. But as far as visual quality is concerned Theora is likely to be just as good or just as bad as VP3.On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
And, yes, those stairs, rain and especially faces ARE blurred in real life.
What, you have glaucoma? Are you near-sighted? Go buy some glasses.
The original picture WAS crisp, and there's no reason why the encoded version shouldn't be. We get most of our information from visual sources and so our demand for high-quality visuals will never go down. Normal people take time even distinguishing 64k AAC clips from the original sometimes. But with visuals it's easy to spot artifacts.
divx is watchable and a good size/quality compromise.
Yes, and maybe 64k MP3 is good enough for you. It's not for most people. Be happy, you have what you want. Let the developers develop for the rest of the human population who care.
You can get a 90 minute film onto a cd, for instance.
Yes and as development continues that same 90-minute film on the CD will look closer and closer to the original.
If, in the future, you can encode a 90 minute hdtv into 700mb with no quality loss
This is impossible to do losslessly - that's why we're developing lossy codecs. There will always be a tradeoff between quality and file-size, but it will continue to improve, barring people like you who claim everything is fine, fine. The point of technology is progress. If you're happy with your LPs and your black and white TV, fine, but don't go ruining it for the rest of us.
hardware needed to decode and render the film will probably not use cds.
Uh, what?
Ahhh, thats the wonderful thing about IT "standards" - there are so many to choose from!
I was hoping to get some insight as to how well dirac performs ...
MP3 files most definately have frames
Ever wondered why MP3 files aren't "gapless" and there are short gaps of silence between tracks that should otherwise run together? This is why. It's not a problem with your player; it's the way the MP3 spec works... it pads your sound file out to be a multiple of x samples.
Their sampling rate is pretty decent.
- Default:
129,002 bytes
- OptiPNG: 121,967 bytes
- PNGOUT:
113,759 bytes
It may not seem much, but it adds up. Sometimes you can reduce the bit depth (for gray scale), make a palette (for drawings and charts that don't need 64 bits of color depth), and reduce resolution. Some more tricks are at Baseline JPEG and JPEG2000 Artifacts Illustrated.Are you referring to case-modders? Or folks who work on their Civics by adding a couple of spoilers?
Please respond.
snow (part of libavcodec) is also in current mplayer release and is a wavelet based codec. Currently the code seems to me less mature than that of x264 but the quality of snow allready outperforms that of or x264 or any mpeg4 implementation I have tested.
Does anyone know where you can get a similar comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of codecs for audio, such as mp3 or ogg or whatever?
Thanks,
Ogg-Vorbis is the best audio-codec technically - but everybody calls it "ogg" and not "ogg-vorbis" because the file extension is .ogg
Effectively, xiph does everything possible to sabotage their own product: It doesn't have a good sounding name, it doesn't have a consistent name ("ogg" versus "ogg-vorbis"), they don't have any buttons/banners to put on products on xiph.org and there is lots of confusion about container format (ogg) and codec (vorbis), which is the "U"-part from FUD.
The only reason anybody uses ogg at all is because it is excellent technically and beats all other audio codecs by a longshot.
Unfortunately, the guys at xiph don't acknowledge that fact and insist of wanting to have videos with .ogg extension, too, which is doomed to fail because nobody wants to have audio and video to have the same file extension.
The users have created a pseudo standard file extension of .ogm for XVid/Vorbis streams which does quite well in the P2P-networks (= successful), but Ogg/Theora has the problem that it isn't as mature and even when they mature probably won't be *that* much better than the others. So even if the xiph guys manage to put out a competitive Theora codec, their own confusion and uncertainity (especially their stubborn and idiotic decision to have .ogg for both audio and video) will sabotage any hopes of success, the way I see it.
Which is really unfortunate.
Things would be much better if they would use .ogt or something for ogg/Theora, but the guys at xiph just refuse to :-(
I love my $60 Philips DVP 642 Divx/Xvid stand-alone DVD Player:= 2598455 0 204SWE
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20465
http://walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
When they make a $60 DVD player for other codecs than MPEG2/MPEG4 I'll be interested. Until then, why bother if something is a little bit better? A WMV9 DVD player would probably be another $50 and not worth it (not that they even exist right now).
pwnt!
Are all codecs from the shootout based on DCT? And if so, why is that? Are all wavelet based codecs too early in their development? I mean, wavelet is known for a pretty long time now, not as long as DCT :), but still. There's jpeg2000 and I'd have thought wavelet should be superior to DCT. :)) codec a few years ago.
It's not that I have absolutely no idea of codecs, I 've learned the basics by programming a very low bitrate (low quality
I am not saying that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability I am saying that there is less need to 'make software work within 640 kb', to use your analogy. A lot of codec development is , to use your analogy again, like making new fonts for Microsoft Word. Until there is a better 'original' than the dvd standard to encode from, the gains are getting smaller and smaller.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Normal people take time even distinguishing 64k AAC clips from the original sometimes. But with visuals it's easy to spot artifacts.
What original? The cd? So what original are you approximating with your fancy shmancy codec? Mpeg2?
trading quality for file size is getting less appealing as storage gets cheaper. You want to do something useful in codec development? Make a codec that enhances the framerate and resolution of the mpeg2 sources found on bits of plastic everywhere so it looks nicer on the next generation of displays. Shrinking dvds has been done. The divx codec is in commodity priced dvd players. Get over it.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Conclusion
Once again we've come to the last page of a codec comparison and are asking the dreaded question "which is best?". Actually, if you're a member of my forum you know better than to ask that questions but I'll try to answer it anyway. But be aware that you are not only entitled to see things differently, you might actually see things differently and can in all honesty disagree with my findings (with the proper respect though and some reason.. it's hard not to notice the detail difference between RV10 and the NeroDigital AVC codecs but you might value this differently). After all, you don't have my eyes and I don't have yours.
Let's start with 3ivX. The codec has once again been improved. Its rate control is accurate, it now offers an almost complete MPEG-4 ASP featureset, and it is quality wise up to the level with DivX, which seems to have been the goal.
I was once again not impressed with the progress DivX has made. It's nice to have additional features available, but quality wise I just don't see one year of development. Plus, if you spend as much time using settings that are called insane by the codec, I'd expect to see something. Though, this time there were no problems with Futurama, something which was a problem in the last test.
HDX4 left a mixed impression. There were no apparent issues in Futurama, and up until the night scene, I kinda liked it in SPR as well. Perhaps the effect of the grain reconstruction mechanism is a matter of taste and perhaps it'll become less disturbing as development progresses. But, for an upstart codec, it definitely rated much better in the first attempt than many other codec.
Ateme's NeroDigital AVC codecs really impressed me. The Main Profile encoder is already available to every Recode user, and thus a very good AVC implementation is already publicly available. Considering that AVC was only ratified in spring 2003 (and only became an ISO standard in December 2003), and that 1.5 years later we already have a fast encoder that delivers good quality, that's quite a step ahead from how long it took MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to make that step. The High Profile codec left a very slightly better impression, but I cannot shake the feeling that I just expected more. But, not all of the features of the High Profile have been integrated yet, and considering that the profile has just been ratified in November 04, I guess I cannot expect too much right now (though still, it's the best codec I've tested).
RV10, where should I begin? I know some people really like it, and it leaves a visually pleasing impression, but when you compare the results to the source, it leaves to be desired. And in my opinion, the progress since the last test has been less than stellar.
VP6 has not been under heavy development for months, but since the last comparison it has still been visible improved. It managed to beat almost all MPEG-4 ASP contenders, which is quite an achievement for a small company like On2. Now if that darned rate control would not give me oversized files and if the codec was faster.. Also, the considerable oversize obviously gave VP6 a bit more bitrate to work with, so I'd feel much more comfortable if the size had been on target in the two full lenght movies and if the results were still the same.
Videosoft's AVC encoder exhibited perfectly fixable problems that many codecs have head in their early age. But I think the codec has some definite potential that can eventually be exploited.
WMV9: With WMV9 being standardized as VC1, we'll probably not see more features in it, but having a standardized bitstream and featureset doesn't mean there cannot be any progress. It's just that I have not really seen it since the beta. But, detail wise some things have changed and I recall rating WMV9 in the "less details" area, which it no longer is (if you look beyond the problems that WMV9 had on my machine). But, if I were a broadcaster or potential user of HD DVD/ Blu-Ray, seeing the result of WMV9 and ateme's AVC codecs, I'd definit
Ah, you shouldn't use anime, but go to the source: Brazilian she-male videos.
...which was what I linked to.
With a codec like the video MPEG codecs (macroblocks), you can meet the spec and produce lousy output. Or you can meet the spec and produce good output. What this means is what you consider to be "MPEG 4" can get a lot better over time.
I don't recall this ever much with MPEG 1, but with DVD (MPEG 2) it is clear. The earliest DVDs had significant compression artifiacts. They were single layer, true, but later single layer releases showed fewer artifacts. This is the same with MPEG 4. Apple's early MPEG 4 encoders were positively awful, later ones are better.
But yes the early Apple codec results and the later Apple codec results both produce files which can be played back with the regular MPEG 4 codec.
Another thing to note is that a big thing that allows you to do better encoding is faster CPUs. This is because part of encoding is a trial-and-error process. You do it 5 ways and select the one that turns out best. With more CPU you can do it 9 ways and select the one that turns out best.
I agree the progress is astounding. Early MPEG 4 was nothing exciting, but now the results are so good, it makes me sad the HDTV standard was finalized with MPEG 2 instead of MPEG 4 or H.264. It's already obsolete before HDTV is even really adopted by most people.
I have a Liteon 2001 DVD player. When it first came out, Divx had all kinds of problems on it. It did well just a play a movie; fast-forwarding and rewinding were luxuries.
Luxuries saved for Xvid. Xvid has always played absolutely perfect on it. I can FFW and FRW like it was an ordinary MPEG2, I can seek to a time and the pause is very small. It reads DVDRW's like they were mastered DVD's. It plays Vorbis and can handle WMV, as well nested directory structures.
I did my own little comparison here, just recently. I tried using low bitrates with Divx 5.2.1, and low bitrates with both Nic's and Koepi's Xvid binaries. Xvid utterly won out, not to mention that the Divx encoder would hang when I selected options that it deemed "fucking insane".
I choose Xvid because it works for me, all the time, with whatever I throw, at or in, with it. It works with bare minimal effort on my part. I don't have to use the "right" encoding program, I don't have to choose the "right" resolution and quanitizer matrix, I don't have to have to keep high bitrates.
well it depends, sometimes the distribution and product are tied together, just look at the state of you average teen payola, mass produced media or Disney.
/. and downloading warez from p2p instead of listening to Klone radio from a seat in bar NTL.
.... I should really take a break from playing half-life ....
The reason that the current media mogals are worried is because for the past few decades they've controlled media from picking it off the streets to beaming teen idol 101 performing live at weekend entertainments night club straight onto fox 247.
Unfortunately for them the Internet is curring down on social activity, so their reading the news, chatting on
Now all it takes is for the government to get worries and pass some stupid copyright bills that prevent people from fairly using media and forcing Internet companies to hand over personal information about users while preventing them from telling anyone what's going on.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
So which ones on the list are free as in no patents (implys beer and code)... AND ... playback on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Any of them yet? I didn't add the ultra critical "plays on mom's 50$ DVD player" because I'm sure none of them will do that.
There is no point at all encoding anything unless the above are all true.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
No support for Sony Vegas. Any build of XviD 1.0 or newer will outright crash when you do an encoding run. It's unacceptable for shops that use Vegas.
I've read that tests have shown that more compression while keeping the higher resolution generally has better results.
Better compression will allow DVD's to carry more HDTV. If a smarter compression allows for a higher resolution to be kept, it's for the better. The higher the resoultion, the less a small artifact will be noticed.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not an Open-Source zealot, in fact I frequently prefer a lot of non-open-source software, but I can definately see why people prefer that method of development. And the creation of a "standard" is exactly why open-source should be used when it is applied to software. For an example, what happens in 200 years time when someone wants to read a Blu-ray/HD-DVD? They can't! WMVv9's specification, AFAIK, has not been publicly released, and so it will quickly be superseeded and forgotten. However, MPEG-2 has been publicly specified and therefore can be read in the future by simply reading and understanding the specification. We use standards so that we don't have to rely on a company, or a person to decode the data for us, without our knowledge of how it works. If something is going to be used to store data for future retrieval, we want to be able to refer back to how it was made. I've not made it clear what I mean, but hopefully people can understand. XviD appears to be not only the most logical choice from a point of view of being a freely available standard that no-one wants control of, just willing to contribute to, it is also of the highest quality and and speed, and goes well with Ogg Vorbis sound, which is also completely open-source. I will not buy any Blu-ray or HD-DVD's whilst they intend on pursuing this course of action. I don't have very good speakers or very good TV anyway, so DVD will do for me :)
Am I the only person here who thinks that recompressing an already MPEG2 compressed source is going to cause lots of problems for other compressors? At the very least, they now have to deal with block quantization artifacts, and all of the associated ringing etc.
Not to mention that because the sources were not compressed in a lossless fashion, there's less data to work with than they started out with.
So I guess if your goal is to test how well other codecs can recompress MPEG2 data, it's all well and dandy. What might be a better test is to see how all of the codecs work on DV encoded data, as that is rapidly becoming a common source of video information.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Jim Sachs is Gahd!
Most of these are used for ripping DVD's or encoding HD content.
WMV9 is a competitor to AVC. HD DVD and Blu-ray support MPEG-2, AVC, and WMV9, so content providers can choose any of the three.
Can any video experts comment how transcoding from MPEG-2 affects video quality?
This is a good test for comparing the quality of codecs for ripping DVDs, but do the results hold true when an uncompressed master is used as the source?
Xvid and all the other cross-platforms free softwares don't fear any software patent in Europe
What you are saying is that 640 kB should be enough for everyone
1.) Bill Gates never said this.
2.) Even if he had, in the year it was supposedly said, 640kb was enough for most everybody, so it was a true statement.
Wow, so when I play WMV files in Winamp, I'm just imagining things?
MPEG-2 is just as encumbered by patents as WMV is. MPEG-2 is corporate-owned.
I know there's an obsession with XVid and Ogg Vorbis because they're "OSS," but face it, they're not the best. The commercial codecs are quite simply better. Don't like it? Well, make better OSS codecs then.
Am I the only person here who thinks that recompressing an already MPEG2 compressed source is going to cause lots of problems for other compressors? At the very least, they now have to deal with block quantization artifacts, and all of the associated ringing etc.
If those other codecs can't handle the simple ripping of a DVD (which uses MPEG2), then it's good we have comparisons like this that will point it out to me before I waste a week ripping my DVD collection for backup.
Which is why CUE+MP3 rips are superior to separate MP3s for each track. You preserve the gapless nature, and at most only add that miniscule amount of silence to the very end, which makes it not an issue. And the cuesheet preserves the track layout nearly identically (so if you have a track that has a small 'hidden' part at the end, with the gap sized appropriately, this will also be preserved, with only a minor inaccuracy to the actual gaplengths)
I see CUE+APE and CUE+FLAC releases all the time, but never CUE+MP3, even though it's a simple matter to decode the MP3 and get a standard CUE+WAV image.
AHA! I knew Koizumi had a thing for futanari!
MPEG4 specification provided some tools for somewhat a "universal" codec.
The profiles are the "Simple profile" and the one DivX and similars use, is the "advanced simple profile". Don't go in the other profiles which talk about sprites yadda yadda because nobody has been able to do such thing (yet).
So yes, so far all advances are adjustments into "how much can we push the mpeg4 advanced simple profile" to do better compression, while still retaining compatibility with the decoder.
A revolution into coding would be to use other wavelets transformations, perhaps using some AI, or neural networks for the textures, etc etc. But don't expect such thing to appear in 5 or even 10 years.
...is that people take his comparisons as overall performance instead of overall performance with his chosen settings (I'll admit he's good...) and transcoding from an MPEG2 source. Sadly, most of these codecs he's using aren't for transcoding- they're for encoding never before compressed feeds. So, in all honesty, he should take care when he makes comments along the lines of none of the codecs are capable of DVD quality (Which he made in the current comparison...).
He really, really ought to qualify that remark- it should be one of "No single current codec can achieve DVD quality transcoding from any other codec source" If he did this, he'd be telling the truth as many of the distortions he describes would come from the imperceptable distortions that MPEG-2 introduces to the feed, even on a DVD. DVDs aren't lossless. Why should one expect the same quality out of two differing lossy codecs with differing schemes for reducing the amount of data preserved by the encoding proceess?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A pre-release of XviD 1.1 was the version tested, not 1.0. There are significant differences.
I like what it does though. It's output is awesome.
uhh look at apple's page.. H.264/AVC. Look at the doom9 article, they clearly state that NeroDigital and HD4X are AVC codecs.