[MEncoder-users] Help on x264 and theora SSIM test

[Federico Pistono]

Hi!
I'm doing my thesis on Open Source encoding algorithms, and I was
wondering if I could get some help from you.

I need to make a few video comparisons between theora and h264,
specifically for the web.

The videos are the followings:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/y...omparison.html
http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/

I know, they use youtube, which does not make the best h264 video at
all, and it's possibly biased since they come from people at xiph, but
it serves for the purpose of my thesis, which reflects online video in
specific. I will also include a comparison of locally compressed video
files, with the appropriate options, but I need both the crappy
youtube and the good version to make a more accurate study.

The comparisons I found by googling used the MSU Video Quality
Measurement Tool, but I don't have any access to a Windows machine,
and I'm having trouble compiling the java/c++ implementations from
Zhou Wang's website:

http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/research/ssim/

Also, the original source file is in matlab, but that only analyses
freeze frames and at the moment I can't use matlab (I'll be away form
the university for a while).

If you ware wondering this is my machine configuration:
Mac OS X Leopard
MEncoder 1.0rc2-4.0.1
MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.0.1
FFmpeg version 0.5
x264 0.67.x

I know, I should use the SVNs, but sometimes darwin ports are very convenient :P

I asked the people at doom9, and I was advised to use AviSynth's SSIM
filter by running avs2yuv with Wine. I would like to know if I can
make a comparison between the original MPEG2 file, the x264 and the
theora comparison without having to depend on windows or strange hacks
with wine.

I was able to get the SSIM for x264 while doing the encoding (using
the specific option), but not for theora.

So my question really is: what iter should I follow in order to make
this comparison in the best possible way using my machine? Should I
use x264 directly or mencoder? What options would be the best for a
web-oriented video comparison? And for theora? ffmpeg2theora?


Thanks,
Federico Pistono - Department of Computer Science - Verona, Italy

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