[MPlayer-DOCS] [PATCH] Choosing the video codec

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hi,
On Mon, Dec 26, 2005 at 03:30:22PM +0100, Guillaume Poirier wrote:
>   Therefore, you can't be wrong choosing MPEG-4 AVC codecs like
>   <systemitem class="library">x264</systemitem> instead of MPEG-4 codecs
>   such as <systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem> or
>   <systemitem class="library">XviD</systemitem>

That is a very bold statement. Beyond the reasons you mentioned, the CPU
usage can be a very good reason to use older codecs (CPU usage on
decoding, it doesn't matter as much for encoding).
I would expect that I'm not the only one who still occasionally uses an
old P-II class PC.

>   Please refer to the technical specs of your player for more informations.

(if you can find any *evil grin*)
But really, unless things changed a lot these "technical specs" are
useless in most cases. Like the "usage manual" for my notebook, it
didn't get much farther than saying "you should not take it with you
when you take a bath". Seriously, it said something like that!!

>   You may also consider choosing a codec that can do multi-threaded
>   processing.
>   <systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem> does allow that,
>   but at the price of picture quality for some low speed gains.
>   <systemitem class="library">XviD</systemitem> has some experimental
>   patches available to boost encoding speed by about 50-60% in typical
>   cases with low picture degradation.
>   <systemitem class="library">x264</systemitem> also allows multi-threaded
>   encoding, which currently speeds-up encoding by 30-35% while lowering
>   PSNR by about 0.05dB.

Are you sure these values aren't overly optimistic?

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger