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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."
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.
OGM is only a file container, so it doesnt matter.
And ogg theora is a VERY outdated version of the vp codec. VP6.x was tested, theora is based on vp4.something, a more than 2 years outdated codebase.
draw you own conclusions
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Theora is still in alpha stages and still has many problems with it. Currently it doesn't stand a chance with the codecs in the shoot-out, especially with the bitrates they were using in the tests.
That being said, remember that Theora is already pretty useful for low bitrate Internet streams.
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
Theora is based on VP3.2
Theora also has some changes that allow potentially much higher quality - although the reference encoder doesn't use them yet. Also the current reference encoder tries to encode noise very faithfully, and that causes noticeable quality issues (especially "beating" at low bitrates on noisy source data). Having said that, I normally find Theora to be noticeably better quality at the same bitrate than DivX.
I think you have to use a command line encoder that only accepts some weird raw picture format which by my (and most other persons', I presume) standards is just silly and in no way usable (*). Unless mencoder supports it, of course. But that still doesn't work with his usual toolchain.
(*): And don't come with that "oh, but it's alpha software. Things like that can wait!" because it won't get any use or testing at all if they keep it that way. So when 1.0 finally comes out they get bashed for its horrible quality and have to spend months tuning their encoder again, doing work they could have saved themselves had they had better testing from the start. That's how I guess it's going to be when 1.0 finally comes around.
PS: I still think it's a pretty cool project and with the java implementation for streaming, it would be very nice to see more wide-spread use of Theora, but I won't be holding my breath.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
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?
NeroDigital was declared the overall winner, not XviD. XviD had the best quality versus encoding speed. TFA specically says
Finally, XviD, one year after taking the crown, had to give it back. It would've won again, if it were not for ateme's AVC codecs. So, if you make DVD backups now that need to work on a standalone or slower machine, XviD is still a very good option, but I guess we'll see AVC capable decoder chips in 2005.
and
Looking at the encoding speed table, this was an easy pick: XviD clearly delivers the best quality per FPS and shows that high speed is not detrimental to quality at all. Also, ateme's Main Profile encoder delivered a good 31.40 fps, which is very respectable for an AVC codec, and thus it earned the 2nd place in this category.
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).