pouët.net

psionice: it's for the "oh shit it still looks crap" effect of h264.

well, i know for a fact that quicktime can decode CABAC streams, but apparently it can't encode them. whatever :)

anes: eh?! The stuff I've done so far looks pretty much lossless with a high bitrate. Xvid or whatever would look worse at the same bitrate.

...simply use x264 whatever platform your running... works just fine. don't bother with that apple crap ;)

@anes: Actually h.264 (at least with x264) is much more forgiving than Xvid. I've done a few encodes already and the ones I had to encode again or add zones to were the ones with Xvid.

anes are you saying that mpeg1 is actually better than mpeg4? A codec created with more 20 years of technological advances?

agree about x264, it just rocks (and the multithreaded encoding scales pretty well - always a nice bonus :).

xernobyl, no, anes meant mpeg4 and later corrected himself.

but that's still bogus because both codecs in question are part of mpeg4. xvid implements MPEG-4 ASP (the incredibly well-named "advanced simple profile", aka MPEG-4 part 2), whereas h.264 (as implemented by newer quicktime versions, nero, ateme, x264 and other encoders) is MPEG-4 AVC ("advanced video coding", aka MPEG-4 part 10. guess everything in video coding is advanced these days).

If it's advanced now, what will they call it in 20 years? Extremely Ultra Advanced? The people naming these things should take a look at the radio frequency bands, maybe they'd learn something? :)

I tried x264 before quicktime, but gave up on it - one video worked fine, the second refused to play in anything other than vlc. That could have been a problem elsewhere, but the x264 homepage seemed to be telling me it was half-finished and unsupported, so I dropped it. Guess it's a classic case of confident open source marketing ;) (Then again, I'd prefer that to the half-finished and unsupported crap with a great web site I came across through work before!) I'll give it another go.

Ryg: Deities is one of the ones I want to capture, I take it I need to boost the bitrate a bit for that one? For some reason, that demo runs really slow on this mac, actually a lot slower than my work pc which has a crap geforce 5 series card. And it's one of my favourite demos :(

x264 supports a lot of features most other codecs/players don't, so you need to be a bit careful if you want videos to play with quicktime etc. if you want compatible videos, set bframes to 1 (i.e. max 1 b-frame between two p-frames) and be sure not to use any of the fancier features introduced in the high profile or the fidelity/range extension (but all that's off by default anyway).

I think that in 10 years it won't be possible to compress much more.

who knows. personal experience shows you can often get a lot further than you'd expect to :)

H.264 is called "Advanced Video Coding" in MPEG-4 just because, well, it's more advanced than the former MPEG-4 Part 2 (Visual) coding scheme that DivX and XviD use. That name doesn't mean that it's the ultimate, definite codec to end all codec evolution. Though, in reality, it currently is. I'm not aware of any serious development on new standards for video compression, as everybode seems to be happy with H.264. There are some extensions being made (for example, they're reintroducing that scalability stuff from MPEG-2 that has never been used) and some R&D is done on wavelet-based schemes, but I don't think that this will become ready for serious use during the next few years. Instead we'll see proliferation of H.264 everywhere: Everything that has to do with HDTV uses it. Mobile phones and PMPs use it. It's going to be the one and only codec for internet video (expecially since Flash adopted it!). It's going to stay in widespread use for ten years at least, I'd say (based on what my heavy-duty crystal ball tells me :)

I've several times tried to code videos both in part2 and part14 (for both work and personal), and I am aware part14 is superior in compression. What made me wrote above is that for bitrates xvid doing just fine, x264 generates videos which lost their fine details. I'm talking about details to a single pixel. CG videos or CG elements over natural scenes (overlay texts, logos) just look bad with h264. Or it's just I haven't found the perfect x264 settings.

You might be ok with the smoothing effect since its free antialiasing anyway. But it's not appropriate for video analysis or showing some fine pixel work. I know you can get away with it, but the job is easier with part2. Also I'm not an xvid fan or something, Gretech stuff beats it :)

And also, you don't have to worry about the lack of excitement in future of video compression :) The research work, even if slightly, is shifting from compression of low level content to high level semantics. For example, there is no need to store each and every picture of a man's face (or each man's face seperately!) in a TV show. If after watching a clip of 200mb, your brain doesn't store that much bits, machines can be capable of compressing much further. I know, humans cannot exactly describe the original content to its deepest detail after watching it, h264 neither.

That's true, H.264 tends to use heavier deblocking (and therefore smoothing) than it should. However, there are two settings in the encoder that influence the filter strength (or, to be more precise, the threshold). Setting both to some small negative value (you'll most likely need some experimentation to get it right) might improve the perceived image quality.
By the way, AVC is part 10 of the MPEG-4 spec. Part 14 (in conjuction with part 12) specifies the .mp4 container format.

Right, I've just come back for correction :)

oneframe rules, obligatory stage6 60fps link: http://www.stage6.com/user/fdgdsgfapppooo/video/1686835/20070928-YUI

there is at least another video from that artist with 960x540@60fps, which looks pretty much "pixel-perfect"

Now that I look at it I must buy a 60Hz camera. It's worth the difference. And I can spot some blocks on that video. :D

...nothing like looking at black areas ;)

With a girl like that everything looks pixel-perfect :)

Lifeforce in .mp4 (200mb), looks quite well I think.

http://xplsv.tv/movie/2381/

However, Synesthetics prods, with the same data rate sometimes look quite blocky. But increasing the amount of data/sec will make the video non playable on not too old computers :/

http://xplsv.tv/movie/2377/
http://xplsv.tv/movie/2378/
http://xplsv.tv/movie/2379/
http://xplsv.tv/movie/2380/

I'm doing new Media Error one.

so uh, you guys wouldnt happen to know some tool that can normalize audio in an mp4 vid? or some fairly easy method?

if mkv is not your type, i think i would even prefer wmv than mp4 :p

Cinepak is the wave of the future!

mp5 is the future!