[MEncoder-users] new doom9 codec comparission (submission)

[Guillaume POIRIER]

Hi,

On 12/15/05, Corey Hickey <bugfood-ml at fatooh.org> wrote:
> Doom9 Feedback Hotline wrote:

[..]

> > I don't know why that
> > is, but the Linux folks seem to avoid XviD, whereas the Windows crowd
> > gets the better open source codec.. XviD in all my tests didn't leave
> > lavc a chance. We'll see how it does this time, but it already got a
> > severe beating in the speed comparison.. XviD delivers 92 fps.. now
> > that's a number I like (but I have one ASP codec that gets up to 139
> > fps).
>
> It's not that I have anything against XviD. Lavc MPEG-4 has been stable
> for a longer time, and, back when I tested video encoding more often,
> was able to beat XviD in my own tests. That was a couple years ago, and
> XviD has been under heavy development since then while relatively little
> has happened to lavc MPEG-4 encoding.
>
> Preparing for this comparison has been the first time I've done any
> intensive video encoding tests in quite a while. I'm curious to try your
> XviD encoding parameters and compare the result to my best lavc MPEG-4
> encode.

The way I see it is that XviD being supported and tested by a large
crowd of windows user, it has been heavily tested, lots of guides,
tutorials , and front-ends have been written for it.
This means that it's a lot likely that a person who will get started
with encoding videos will use XviD (when not using DivX) because
he/she did not hear about anything else.

That doesn't mean that either XviD or lavc is a better implementation
of MPEG4 ASP, but that their history and advertisement has been very
different.

Take your codec comparison for example (once more, thanks a lot for
doing them, you're truely doing an amazing job there), it did not
feature lavc in the 2004 test session (when it was there in the 2003
test). This surely did not help to promote the very existence of lavc
IMHO.
I'm not criticising your job. I'm sure they are very good reasons for
not having lavc in 2004 test (like the lack of lavc users in your
forum).

Back about quality... Before switching to x264, I've used XviD
extensively (and before that, I was using lavc), partly based on the
fact that XviD won your codec competition.
Well, when I compare the quality I got with XviD and lavc, I'm still
undecided about which one if better.
On the one hand, XviD encode looks better and more eye candy, and
seems to do a pretty decent job at fairly low bitrates (not that I
pretty much never used custom quant matrices)
One the other hand, lavc encodes look closer to the original in most
cases, and features tons of option than allow fine quality tuning, but
in general, it seemed to need a bit more bitrate to look as good as
what you'd get with XviD.

To put it on a nutshell, lavc if for me a codec more suited for
"archival purposes" (whatever that may mean for lossless video
encoding), when XviD is more suited to make "CD rips to share over the
internet" ;-D.

Now, bear in mind that I'm only saying that based on my own
experience, and that I am not pretending to Hold The Truth nor
pretending that I'm talking on behalf of MEncoder users.

Cheers,
Guillaume
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