H.264 decoders comparison preparation (errors resistance test)

[DmitriyV2]

Our lab have plans to organize error resistance comparison of H.264 decoders (looks like decoders are ready for such tests now).

Now MPEG-2 is commonly used for unreliable envirement - satellite broadcasting, scratched DVD.

Last week we publish "small" MPEG-2 decoders comparison (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=111761) (you can use it for scratched DVD for example). But we think that soon such comparison for H.264 become topical and interesting.

So any ideas on such comparison are welcome.

[check]

Looks like an interesting idea. Which decoders are you aiming to test? I would guess ffdshow, vlc and possibly mplayer (although I'm not sure if it would be any different from ffdshow) plus other commercial decoders...

[GmorG McRoth]

You will write some application to manually apply demages simalar to those that happen at scratched cds and bad satelite signal? I was searching for something like that for quite some time.

[DmitriyV2]

Looks like an interesting idea. Which decoders are you aiming to test? I would guess ffdshow, vlc and possibly mplayer (although I'm not sure if it would be any different from ffdshow) plus other commercial decoders...
Fo commercial there will be 2 different ways:
1) "Official" - with official "Call for codecs" (+3 month longer at least, but with more seriously inspected results)
2) "Non official" - with codecs, that we found "somewhere".
We are thinking about them now.

For free decoders - is mplayer and ffdshow support H.264 directly? :) (AFAIR they use libavcodec both)
vlc use "x264" decoder and can be tested. libavcodec can be tested also and of course it's possible to test reference JM decoder.

[DmitriyV2]

You will write some application to manually apply demages simalar to those that happen at scratched cds and bad satelite signal? I was searching for something like that for quite some time.
Yes, but nothing is wonder in it: stream header is preserved anyway and bit inverting is used for transport stream (http://www.chiariglione.org/MPEG/technologies/mp02-ts/index.htm).

[bond]

vlc use "x264" decoder and can be tested. libavcodec can be tested also and of course it's possible to test reference JM decoder.vlc also uses libavcodec
its a myth that x264 is a direct part of vlc

[DmitriyV2]

vlc also uses libavcodec
its a myth that x264 is a direct part of vlc
Ok! Thanks! Open source decoders number reduced to one decoder (+ maybe JM reference). So question is only in names of commercial decoders.

BTW: In our MPEG-2 decoders testing (http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/pdf/msu_mpeg_2_decoder_comparison_2006_eng.pdf) libavcodec win first place in comparison with 7 commercial decoders, so this is not first time when it compete with commercial decoders.

[bond]

well its normal that opensource tools perform best, its in the nature of opensource ;)