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Old 27th August 2009, 11:37   #1  |  Link
Forteen88
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On2 brags about their encoder vs x264..

http://www.on2.com/index.php?599

Is there someone here who can do a real (not objective) comparison (with about equal encoding settings, and encoding-time mentioned)?
The On2's encoder-screenshot looks just filtered out :-P

EDIT: @CruNcher: Oops, I should've searched for similar threads :-P

Last edited by Forteen88; 27th August 2009 at 19:29.
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Old 27th August 2009, 11:43   #2  |  Link
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IMO One2 don't use the best available H264 encoder. Anyway VP8 seem a really powerfull codec. VP8 seem on par with x264 at max quality for OPSNR ...
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Old 27th August 2009, 11:46   #3  |  Link
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If its not open source who cares ?

using build r915 of the x264 encoder, set to HQ 2 pass
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If they can beat x264 in visual quality on ordinary test clips without postprocessing, I'll eat my hat.

Last edited by juGGaKNot; 27th August 2009 at 11:49.
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Old 27th August 2009, 11:56   #4  |  Link
G_M_C
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Quote:
Originally Posted by juGGaKNot View Post
[...]
using build r915 of the x264 encoder, set to HQ 2 pass
How many revisions back is that ? Not very realistic this comparison.

But most average joe's (like my parents) dont have any clue as to the state of development of x264. Prresenting the differences like On2 does, will probably impress those less knowledgeable. Too bad that people fall for such things so easily. They should at least google on 'x264' to see if there is a new version.

Last edited by G_M_C; 27th August 2009 at 13:53.
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Old 27th August 2009, 12:07   #5  |  Link
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@G_M_C: Yeah, although the test might be old (then the version of VP8 is old too), then it's a rather fair test to compare those codecs. But as it's not an objective test, I assume they probably cheat :-P
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Old 27th August 2009, 12:38   #6  |  Link
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Any encoder out there can be presented as bad as competitor's marketing wants to. It's much easier to screw encoding settings than to tune them for appropriate content.
Looking for fair comparison? Do it yourself. Wait...VP8 encoder is not freely available, is it?
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Old 27th August 2009, 13:28   #7  |  Link
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Any encoder out there can be presented as bad as competitor's marketing wants to. It's much easier to screw encoding settings than to tune them for appropriate content.
Looking for fair comparison? Do it yourself. Wait...VP8 encoder is not freely available, is it?
Yeah, 'Bababoom' comes to my mind, they bragged about their speed, but quality sucked :-P

Yeah, I don't know where to get the VP8-encoder.
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Old 27th August 2009, 13:36   #8  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Forteen88 View Post
Yeah, I don't know where to get the VP8-encoder.
"For more information about On2 VP8, please contact sales@on2.com"
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Old 27th August 2009, 13:40   #9  |  Link
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"For more information about On2 VP8, please contact sales@on2.com"
Yeah, but I want a trial-version for testing (not buying), especially since I got my lovely x264
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Old 27th August 2009, 13:42   #10  |  Link
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Originally Posted by Forteen88 View Post
Yeah, but I want a trial-version for testing (not buying), especially since I got my lovely x264
I assume they won't give it away for free (not even a trial version), because somebody could make a "real" test against state-of-the-art H.264 encoders.

At the same time people that already payed big money for VP8, will favor it anyway, because they must legitimate their investment

BTW: "On2 proprietary compression solutions bring unique commercial advantages."

I guess that statement found on the On2 web-site applies to the developer/vendor, not to the user/customer
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Last edited by LoRd_MuldeR; 27th August 2009 at 13:46.
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Old 27th August 2009, 13:45   #11  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LoRd_MuldeR View Post
"On2 proprietary compression solutions bring unique commercial advantages."

I guess that statement of On2 applies to the developers, not to the user/customer
Aha, Ok, seems like they don't have a version for consumers, just a SDK.
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Old 27th August 2009, 18:06   #12  |  Link
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This just in. Company tries to make itself look better than its competition. More on this breaking story at 9 o'clock.
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Old 27th August 2009, 18:11   #13  |  Link
Dark Shikari
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Originally Posted by Sagittaire View Post
IMO One2 don't use the best available H264 encoder. Anyway VP8 seem a really powerfull codec. VP8 seem on par with x264 at max quality for OPSNR ...
And Mainconcept can beat x264 too in PSNR; that's not news.

IMO, if it cannot even beat x264 significantly in terms of PSNR, VP8 is a massive disappointment; x264's psy optimizations surely put it far ahead of VP8, so if VP8 cannot even beat x264 without psy optimizations, we cannot expect it to be remotely useful in reality.

It's been 6 years since H.264 was released--they had all this time to write their own specification from scratch--and they still fail this badly? Even I was expecting better than this. What a joke.

Edit: It's worse than I thought; they left AQ on for the x264 test, which suggests that VP8 will probably lose by >1db PSNR in reality. Nice job being completely irrelevant, On2.

Last edited by Dark Shikari; 27th August 2009 at 18:37.
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Old 27th August 2009, 18:28   #14  |  Link
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brag in what way?
that vp8 is blurry?
that they have to use vp6 to show comparision between vp8 and x?

this looks like a complete anticommercial for them;

Code:
 mediainfo vp8x264_vga.flv 
General
Complete name                    : vp8x264_vga.flv
Format                           : Flash Video
File size                        : 15.8 MiB
Duration                         : 1mn 11s
Overall bit rate                 : 1 844 Kbps
Encoded date                     : Fri Sep 12 13:18:33 2008
Tagging application              : On2 Flix SDK for Dshow_2.4.2.2
canseektoend                     : No

Video
Format                           : VP6
Duration                         : 1mn 11s
Bit rate                         : 3 272 Kbps
Width                            : 640 pixels
Height                           : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 4:3
Frame rate                       : 29.970 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 0.355
Stream size                      : 28.0 MiB
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Old 27th August 2009, 18:45   #15  |  Link
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that whole thing their is their old almost 1 year ago Introduction page i see no new info the Video is also as old so im not sure why to discuss it again, in the H.264 section :P

see http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=141107
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Old 28th August 2009, 00:44   #16  |  Link
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Quote:
And Mainconcept can beat x264 too in PSNR; that's not news.
Mainconcept at max OPSNR quality never beat x264 at max OPSNR quality in all my test for many source. As far I know x264 is the best available H264 codec in the area for OPSNR result and I make test with many H264 encoder.


Quote:
IMO, if it cannot even beat x264 significantly in terms of PSNR, VP8 is a massive disappointment; x264's psy optimizations surely put it far ahead of VP8, so if VP8 cannot even beat x264 without psy optimizations, we cannot expect it to be remotely useful in reality.
VP8 seem to have advanced psy optimisation too ...


Quote:
It's been 6 years since H.264 was released--they had all this time to write their own specification from scratch--and they still fail this badly? Even I was expecting better than this. What a joke.
I don't think. One2 is really serious company. In the past all the annonced result was correct for VPx. Anyway it's always easy to choose good source for VP8 codec.


Quote:
Edit: It's worse than I thought; they left AQ on for the x264 test, which suggests that VP8 will probably lose by >1db PSNR in reality. Nice job being completely irrelevant, On2
It's true one2 don't use OPSNR tuned setting for x264. Anyway with max OPSNR quality x264 is just in par with the annonced result for VP8 from One2.
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Old 28th August 2009, 00:51   #17  |  Link
Dark Shikari
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sagittaire View Post
VP8 seem to have advanced psy optimisation too ...
Then why did VP7 look so bad if On2 is supposedly good at psy optimizations? It fell victim to the "blurring is good" RD fallacy worse than any other modern encoder I have ever tested, completely destroying detail across a wide variety of sources.
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Old 28th August 2009, 08:43   #18  |  Link
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What i seaid before; I think that whole page is NOT aimed at really comparing differences. It's only disigned as a marketing tool. It says more about their potential clients than it does about the encoding software itself.

From this i can deduce that their potetial customers are at least sort of gullible, since they fall for this kind of misleading marketing. Also you can deduce that they dont know how to use Google, else they would try to find out what this 'x264' they mention actually is. Not that that would help, i think they would not know how to compare encoding software for them selves for that matter.

And when you take all this into account; VP8 is good for people like that, let them; Imagine the flooding of n00b-questions if they they actually did start to use x264

Anyway, in short: The comarison on that page is not intended to be fair, it's just intended to mislead potential customers in to buying that crap.
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Old 30th August 2009, 06:19   #19  |  Link
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Then why did VP7 look so bad if On2 is supposedly good at psy optimizations? It fell victim to the "blurring is good" RD fallacy worse than any other modern encoder I have ever tested, completely destroying detail across a wide variety of sources.
That's really been a hallmark of On2 codecs going back to VP3, and was certainly a big part of VP6.

And that's probably not entirely wrong from a consumer expectation perspective; people notice added wrong stuff (blocking and ringing) than they notice right stuff missing (loss of detail). Blocking is particularly HVS attractive due to all those nice horizontal and vertical edges, which are about the most interesting thing to the human eye. Perhaps should have taken a lesson from Sony's ClearVID patterns and rotated our blocks 45 degrees, or from our misspent wargaming youths and used hexagons .

Even semi-pro compressionists can often get into the trap of doing QA by looking for artifacts, and assuming that if there's no blocking and ringing, the encode is going to be "good enough." But that's not a good assumption with a modern codec, or an advanced decoder with postprocessing. Comparing a VP6/VP7 AVI with different postprocessing settings in the DirectShow decoder can be very revealing.
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Old 30th August 2009, 06:24   #20  |  Link
Dark Shikari
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That's really been a hallmark of On2 codecs going back to VP3, and was certainly a big part of VP6.

And that's probably not entirely wrong from a consumer expectation perspective; people notice added wrong stuff (blocking and ringing) than they notice right stuff missing (loss of detail). Blocking is particularly HVS attractive due to all those nice horizontal and vertical edges, which are about the most interesting thing to the human eye. Perhaps should have taken a lesson from Sony's ClearVID patterns and rotated our blocks 45 degrees, or from our misspent wargaming youths and used hexagons .
This would explain why Microsoft's psy optimizations are such a failure: this entire paragraph is completely wrong.

Blurring is horrific HVS-wise; blocking and ringing are vastly preferable. Compressionists easily spot them, but what ordinary users will spot is the complete destruction of detail throughout the video. Artifacts are far more preferable than destruction of detail, especially as the former tends to mask the latter. Blocking is only noticeable in flat areas of the frame; in high-complexity areas it actually improves perceived quality in many cases, especially at low bitrates and in high motion, where the blocks appear for too short a time to be seen, but for long enough to create perceived sharpness.

The human eye loves sharpness and the appearance of detail. In particular, just like the human ear, it wants to see energy conserved. The heavy blurring of encoders like VP7 is the exact opposite of this, which is why it has such a terrible ratio of PSNR to actual visual quality. The same problem exists with wavelets; they destroy perceptual detail and sharpness.

(Should I really be helping our competitors this much? )

Last edited by Dark Shikari; 30th August 2009 at 06:30.
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