[MEncoder-users] converting and subtitle questions

[RC]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:06:30 -0300
"Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto" <please.no.spam.here at gmail.com> wrote:

> And this is good, because in my experience, H.264 absolutely kicks the
> butt of MPEG-4 part 2. I was told that the difference was not very
> big, but they were wrong. The difference is huge.

At very low bitrates, H.264 does a very good job masking artifacts, and
preserving more detail.  Once you get up even just to medium bitrates
though, where ASP codecs don't have terribly obvious heavy artifacts,
the two are much more closely matched.

In my testing, x264 (encoding DVD with the recomended x264 options) has
a nasty habit of strongly smoothing and removing lots of detail in
certain parts of the picture, while at the same time leaving other parts
of the same frame very noisy.  What's worse, x264 makes odd choices of
the noise to preserve, which looks completely unlike the original
(where the noise does a good job helping to mask blockiness), and very
different from the noise Xvid encodes (which I don't happen to like, but
is at least non-irritating).  This heavy, seemingly non-random, noise
actually makes the picture look worse instead of better.

In addition, many parts of the picture appear to have had their contrast
lowered, and this makes the video look washed out in areas.  This
effect is all the worse when contrasted with neighboring extremely noisy
blocks. All strange effects, that make the lower-bitrate x264 encodes
actually look better than somewhat higher bitrate versions.  Though,
then the medium bitrate FMP4 encodes look generally better than either.

Even if you don't have very good eyes, you should be able to see this
effect very clearly just by turning up the contrast and saturation.