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Topic: H.264 vs. XviD (Read 20718 times) previous topic - next topic
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H.264 vs. XviD

...which would collate compression ratios and relative speeds for a variety of music on a variety of systems.

I'm not even sure if that produces repeatable or entirely meaningful results.

I held an MPEG-4 encoding "race" on another forum starting in November of 2007 and compiled the results into a long list in descending order of encoding FPS achieved on different systems. The test used the same source file and the same encoding software with the same settings and the same version of the XviD codec on all systems, and the results varied wildly, even between almost identical PCs. I have a feeling that the same may apply here. It would be interesting to see though.

Cheers, Slipstreem.   

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #1
Quote
I'm not even sure if that produces repeatable or entirely meaningful results.

I held an MPEG-4 encoding "race" on another forum starting in November of 2007 and compiled the results into a long list in descending order of encoding FPS achieved on different systems. The test used the same source file and the same encoding software with the same settings and the same version of the XviD codec on all systems, and the results varied wildly, even between almost identical PCs. I have a feeling that the same may apply here. It would be interesting to see though. smile.gif

Cheers, Slipstreem.


Not to get off topic, but I think XVid looks attrocious. I prefer H.264 right now as it easily blows it out of the water and hopefully someday Theora maybe once Thusnelda is finished and scales to HD also it will look 100x better then that.  . There are too many motion compensation artifacts with it (I don't know what they are called in the video world) I am not that savy when it comes to video. 
budding I.T professional

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #2
Not to get off topic, but I think XVid looks attrocious. I prefer H.264 right now as it easily blows it out of the water...

Saying that XviD looks attrocious is like saying that LAME sounds attrocious. At what bitrate? Using what encoding strategy? Most front-ends abuse XviD by defaulting to typically 600Kbps (270MB/hour) in CBR for converting DVD quality source material. That's similar to forcefully restricting LAME to, say, CBR96 and expecting to achieve perceptual transparency from CD quality source material. It ain't gonna happen.

CQ-mode (more commonly known as VBR in the audio world) is the only way to go if you want almost any lossy video encoder to work well in terms of PQ vs efficiency. Using CQ-mode at 90% quality used to produce results close to perceptual transparency visually (for me anyway) on my 60" projection screen at a normal viewing distance at an average of around 1GB per movie, but with a bitrate capable of peaking at around 2.5Mbps as and when necessary.

H.264 definitely has the edge over XviD, but setting an unrealistically low and fixed bitrate, or an unrealistically small target for the final file size never gets the most out of any lossy encoder, be it audio or video.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

PS Thanks for moving this, Greynol.

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #3
Slipstreem
Your vision about video technology is very erroneous.
Do you watch DVD resolution at your 60" projection screen extremely HD?
If you want to understand what's going on around video compression you should be doom9's member.
2-3 years ago there were some Xvid Guru (very respectable people on doom9) but even they admitted that H.264 is superior in all situations.
Today x264 has very strong psychovisual optimizations. The best of all H.264 encoders. 
It preserves even miscellaneous film grain. 

You are talking about 1GB per movie. With x264 you will enable to achieve the same or even better quality at 600-700 Mb.
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/?dir=./x264clips here are some examples of x264's professional HD rips 720/1080p at only 2-4 Mbit/s. It's state of art and very very hardly distinguishable from Blu Ray original.


It's not correct to say for example that Xvid is on par with x264 at 3 Mbit/s for DVD because at these high bitrates even MPEG 2 will do excellent work.

And do you know why creator and most important developers of Xvid  has ended their work at Xvid?
H.264.
That happened in 2004 and since then there was only one quality improvement: VAQ from x264's code.

Right now there is Xvid 1.2 - multhithreading support and 1.3 alpha which is deadly dead.

Mainly
MPEG4 ASP is around 1.5x efficient than MPEG-2
H.264 is around 1.5x efficient than MPEG4 ASP

It means if you have lossless DVD resolution or high qulaity Blu Ray source all three folowing rips will have the same quality for DVD resized resolution:
MPEG 2: 3-4 Mbit/s (DVD bitrates)
ASP:  2.1-2.8 Mbit/s
H.264: 1.5-2 Mbit/s

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #4
Quote
Saying that XviD looks attrocious is like saying that LAME sounds attrocious. At what bitrate? Using what encoding strategy? Most front-ends abuse XviD by defaulting to typically 600Kbps (270MB/hour) in CBR for converting DVD quality source material. That's similar to forcefully restricting LAME to, say, CBR96 and expecting to achieve perceptual transparency from CD quality source material. It ain't gonna happen.


Which is precisely why I despise it.    I don't pretend to know anything about video encoding since the command-line of H.264 encoder is a little bit to complicated to use, but I am sure psychovisually it looks 10x better it's designed for HD.

Quote
Your vision about video technology is very erroneous.
Do you watch DVD resolution at your 60" projection screen extremely HD?
If you want to understand what's going on around video compression you should be doom9's member.
2-3 years ago there were some Xvid Guru (very respectable people on doom9) but even they admitted that H.264 is superior in all situations.
Today x264 has very strong psychovisual optimizations. The best of all H.264 encoders.
It preserves even miscellaneous film grain.


That was the general conclusion that I came to. Most of the material that I have is encoded with H.264. I woukldn't watch anything else.

Quote
You are talking about 1GB per movie. With x264 you will enable to achieve the same or even better quality at 600-700 Mb.
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/?dir=./x264clips here are some examples of x264's professional HD rips 720/1080p at only 2-4 Mbit/s. It's state of art and very very hardly distinguishable from Blu Ray original.


Agreed. 
budding I.T professional

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #5
Do both of you happen to despise MP3 too?

I'm not arguing with either of you regarding XviD being the Dodo of video encoders, but I stick with it, warts and all, for the same reason as sticking with LAME MP3. Compatibility. Given enough bitrate, either can still produce adequate results for most people I know personally despite there being better alternatives available, if you have the hardware to support them.

Bear in mind that I live in the UK where only a tiny minority of the population (the rich and/or very enthusiastic) have access to Full-HD encoded material outside of the PC fraternity in the form of Blu-ray, so HD encoding doesn't matter to the average man in the street as he often doesn't have the opportunity to either burn or watch Full-HD material anyway. Conversely, a high percentage of the population here have a standalone DVD player that's DivX/XviD compatible, and a small enough TV for the small drop in picture quality not to be readily apparent at a normal viewing distance if XviD isn't abused by being bitrate-starved.

I don't class the pretend HD offered by Sky as being HD due to the painful mangling it receives before hitting a person's eyeballs. I'd rather watch well encoded SD content than any of the "broadcast-quality" HD content we currently have available here. Even John Logi Baird is probably spinning in his grave at the utter poop Sky push into people's homes from a technical standpoint. It's just completely unwatchable by my standards, although I am perfectly aware that that's their fault and not that of HD as a standard.

And no. I'd never even dream of attempting to encode HD content with XviD, even if it is/were capable of it. I don't even know if it can because there are limits to how far I'd push any lossy encoder, and XviD is clearly not aimed at encoding HD content in the first place.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

PS Thanks for the links. I've seen a few x264 encodings before but will download them now as they've come recommended from a trusted source.

PPS Please note that a moderator chose the name for this thread when splitting it off. It was never intended to be a debate between H.264 and XviD.

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #6
Saying that XviD looks attrocious is like saying that LAME sounds attrocious.

It's not quite good comparison.
1. MP3 has more compatibility than Xvid. MP3 is playable on everything, while Xvid is still popular but not every player has MPEG-4 ASP support.
2. Bitrates for audio and video are too different. It isn't the same keep MP3 -V 5 60 Mb as to keep one movie at 1 gb.

It isn't correct to compare  MP3 vs AAC  as Xvid vs H.264.  I would say as MPEG-2 and H.264 by compatibility.

Some enough sure prognostics say that Blu ray will completely replace DVD by 2011 year. 
While there is no sure about AAC.
And price cuts for Blu ray are amazy. There are some BR players around 100-150$.

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #7
1. MP3 has more compatibility than Xvid. MP3 is playable on everything, while Xvid is still popular but not every player has MPEG-4 ASP support.
Maybe that depends which country you're in. Almost all standalone DVD players currently on sale in the UK (certainly the budget brands) have native support for DivX, hence XviD. Prices start at around £20.

Quote
2. Bitrates for audio and video are too different. It isn't the same keep MP3 -V 5 60 Mb as to keep one movie at 1 gb.
Bitrates are bound to be very different due to the vastly different amounts of data having to be retained, but using VBR for lossy video encoding can give exactly the same benefits as using VBR for lossy audio encoding. A motionless, black screen equals zero bitrate, for example. The same basic rules apply with regard to maintaining a constant level of quality be it audio or video, surely.

Also, I've been thinking about your claim of MPEG-2 being satisfactory (sorry if I've misinterpreted you) at a bitrate of between 3 and 4Mbps, and I'm unable to agree with that. Unless there's some other technical reason for the terrestrial digital broadcasts in the UK (Freeview) looking dire at almost all times, I don't think that's really a sufficient bitrate for MPEG-2. They use MPEG-2 at typically between 2.5 and 3.5Mbps and the blocking and quantisation noise is absolutely awful a lot of the time.

I've noticed this on some budget commercial PAL DVDs too, and upon further investigation, found that they were using similarly low bitrates. All of the commercial DVDs that I find acceptable seem to use a bitrate closer to 5 or 6Mbps. My playback system and eyes really start to struggle if it falls much lower than this, yet I find XviD hovering around 1Mbps and peaking at 2.5Mbps in CQ-mode to be perfectly acceptable at almost all times. This suggests to me that Xvid in CQ-mode is closer to three times as efficient as MPEG-2 in CBR.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this as I'm not sure how else to interpret it really. Could my intolerance to MPEG-2 at anything less than 5Mbps be down to me watching PAL and you watching NTSC? Maybe PAL needs to throw more bandwidth at the increased resolution (720x576 vs 720x480 pixels) and this isn't entirely offset by the reduced framerate of PAL versus NTSC (25 vs 30FPS)? 

Quote
It isn't correct to compare  MP3 vs AAC  as Xvid vs H.264.  I would say as MPEG-2 and H.264 by compatibility.
Once again, I think this depends whereabouts you are on the planet. I can walk into any high street electrical store in the UK and buy a standalone DVD player that supports MP3 and DivX/XviD natively. They carry the logos for MP3 and DivX clearly displayed on the front panels of the players, so no prior research is necessary. They make no mention of either AAC or H.264, so the average man/woman in the street is likely to not even consider those two standards. He/she may have never even heard of them.

Quote
Some enough sure prognostics say that Blu ray will completely replace DVD by 2011 year. While there is no sure about AAC.
Some of us stick-in-the-mud Brits are still using VHS, although DVD is obviously massively popular and in almost every home. The majority will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the age of Blu-ray though if the general consumer attitude over here doesn't suddenly change overnight. We only have digital terrestrial TV broadcast nationally (and very badly) in the UK because the government have forced it upon us. Concensus of opinion amongst those with reasonable eyesight and decent TVs seems to be that the analogue system we already had was vastly superior.

Quote
And price cuts for Blu ray are amazy. There are some BR players around 100-150$.
The prices are definitely coming down via one or two on-line retailers here too, but a typical high street price for a standalone Blu-ray player with a recognisable brand name is still £300+ ($430US+) in the UK. With 2 million unemployed and many of us having to hold down two jobs just to keep a roof over our heads, most of us simply don't have that kind of money laying around to spend on luxury items under the present economic climate.

£20 or £300 and no food for 3 months? Hmm... let me think.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #8
1. MP3 has more compatibility than Xvid. MP3 is playable on everything, while Xvid is still popular but not every player has MPEG-4 ASP support.
Maybe that depends which country you're in. Almost all standalone DVD players currently on sale in the UK (certainly the budget brands) have native support for DivX, hence XviD. Prices start at around £20.
This is what keeps me using Xvid, rather than using MP4, although I love the multi-stream aspect of it.
I'm on a horse.

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #9
Also, I've been thinking about your claim of MPEG-2 being satisfactory (sorry if I've misinterpreted you) at a bitrate of between 3 and 4Mbps, and I'm unable to agree with that....

Please, investigate by yourself. http://forum.doom9.org/
I can only see that you don't know anything about high quality MPEG-2 encoders.

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #10
No need to be so harsh, Igor. I was making what I thought to be a fair assumption that major commercial DVD producers and national digital TV broadcast networks would be using high quality MPEG-2 encoders. From what you're saying, many of them obviously aren't.

I'll trouble you no further. 

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

 

H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #11
i don't see why xvid would not work well with HD, other than that iam all x264 person.
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H.264 vs. XviD

Reply #12
Xvid works fine on HD despite it isn't designed for it. However the difference between H.264 and ASP is more pronounced on HD than SD because of more restricted intra/inter search in the last case.