Anyone using H.264

[ivan_alias]

There is a lot of news at the moment about H.264 and there a lot or codecs out there or coming out in various states of development, but is anyone actually using it regularly for backing up TV content of films etc?

Personally I really like videolan and when the h.264 support in that gets better it will be a pretty cool tool for quick backups of my PVR content. So are people actually using h.264 yet, or are all the codecs out there not reliable enough yet?

Ivan

[JohnV]

Imo the recent Ateme h264 beta encoder is the first h264 encoder that really gives good results. I'd be suprised if anyone already uses h264 for backing up yet, but I suppose this will change soon when Ateme h264 becomes public and mainstream in NeroDigital.

[unmei]

I actually did 2 full length movie encodings with FFDShow's x264 in constant quality mode some time ago. But i also encoded the movies in xvid and put both on the disk. The h264 version is rather intended as something of a "souvienir from h264 history" than a backup. But also x264 looks like it would rapidly approaching a point where you can consider it for backup. Maybe not so much for the top quality range, but for things you want to assign only very limited filesize to. A long movie on 1 CD for instance.

I have one more movie at hand i wanted to try h264 again, but as i'm now not part of Atheme's testers and the latest FFDShow has the constant quality broken i will probably have to wait for the next release (maybe it will even have the 2-pass mode:D )

[Tommy Carrot]

In my opinion the biggest problem with x264 is the very crude motion estimation. It still has jumping blocks and completely lacks the image stability, which prevent it from being usable. Adding a 2-pass RC wont change anything until they fix these issues.

[Sirber]

Will ateme H264 be avalible in VFW form?

[LostMP4]

Originally posted by Sirber
Will ateme H264 be avalible in VFW form?

I guess will only be available as part of Nero Digital

[Sirber]

Oh...

sucks. I wish I could add the codec to RealAnime :(

[bond]

make realanime support directshow filters

[snacky]

Originally posted by Tommy Carrot
In my opinion the biggest problem with x264 is the very crude motion estimation. It still has jumping blocks and completely lacks the image stability, which prevent it from being usable. Adding a 2-pass RC wont change anything until they fix these issues.

IMO this could be because the only comparison function used for motion estimation is SAD (sum of absolute differences). This method is fast, but not ideal for quality.

Also, I don't think ffdshow has been synching to the latest versions of x264. Currently you might want to use mencoder for that.

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by snacky
IMO this could be because the only comparison function used for motion estimation is SAD (sum of absolute differences). This method is fast, but not ideal for quality.
I don't thing SAD itself is the problem. Xvid uses it too in VHQ mode 0, and it has relatively accurate motion rendering, while x264 has many problems in this regard. The textures are not moving fluidly during the motions, but rather jumping around (i cannot explain it better).

[snacky]

I've found the problem goes away when using very low quants/high bitrates (say, quants in the mid or high teens), but this doesn't seem to be a very reasonable workaround.

[PeteD]

I've Just got a new Mobile Phone (Nokia 6230) so have been trying out some video conversions to try out on it. So far I've converted some sections of Finding Nemo and Xmen2 (from DivX)using Mpegable X4 live(mpegable.com)and the results at resoltion 128x96, video 198kbit/sec, audio 12kbit/sec, are absolutly fantastic. The quality is amazing. I did convert the whole film at these settings and it came out at 130mb... ish, which is no problem with a large MMC card installed, but, the phone seems to have some problems playing back large files. Video or audio sometimes freezes up. Clips of around 5-10mb play fine. This maybe down to the firmware version, as some people have susccesfully watched complete episodes of their favorite tv shows on earlier firmwares.

Anyway, so far so good, ideal for mobile devices and I guess it can only get better.

[PeteD]

Sorry. Misread the thread title. Obviously the post above refers to H263. But still damn good 8>)