[FFmpeg-user] Choosing between experimental libavcodec aac or faac encoders

[Lou]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2012 12:15:14 +0200
Liran Zvibel <liranz at audish.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I use ffmpeg as part of automated and batch jobs processes converting video
> files to mp4 with H.264 and AAC.
> Quality and processing times are important to me, though I currently do not
> wish to use AAC+.
> 
> My random tests show that the libavcodec aac encoder that comes with ffmpeg
> is more time efficient, and has about the same quality.
> 
> Around the 0.7-0.8 releases of ffmpeg (up until 0.8.4, I think) I had
> several occasions that on my random tests ffmpeg with libavcodec would get
> stuck (which for my automated and batch jobs is even worse than a crash).
> 
> I chose to use libfaac back then, and did not get back to it until now I'm
> upgrading to ffmpeg 0.10.
> 
> I redid these random checks now, and was not able to have it get stuck on
> the files, and again it was consistently quicker than libfaac.
> 
> I noted that I still must pass "-strict experimental" to use that coded.
> 
> I would like to know which codec most of you are using, and whether you
> feel that the libavcodec one is stable enough to be usable in production
> environments.
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> Liran Zvibel

FFmpeg also supports another AAC encoder: libvo-aacenc.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencore-amr/files/vo-aacenc/

However I believe it can only use -b:a (-ab) and not -q:a (-aq), but I
may be wrong. It requires "--enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-version3" in
your configure.