Does XviD or x264 has less artifacting at low bitrates and resolutions?

[mahsah]

Which in general has less artifacting at a bitrate of around 500 kbps and a resolution of 480x272?

Thanks,
Sam

[Sirber]

AVC is better in low bitrate than ASP for sure, whatever the codec name.

[unskinnyboy]

@mahsah, There are also other variables here like length of the movie, type of source, settings used etc. But x264 generally performs better than XviD at lower bitrates (especially with its in-loop filtering).

[mahsah]

Cool, thanks. I heard AVC was better, but I wanted to make sure first.

[Manao]

x264 will almost always be more 'artifact-free' than xvid, whatever the bitrate. That's especially true at low-medium bitrates ( which seems to be your case ( medium ) - though it depends on the content ). At high bitrate, xvid may retain more 'grain', but that definitely can't be counted as an artifact for x264 ( especially since that grain mostly comes from the fact that the source is mpeg2 encoded ).

Also, in your case, I'd slightly raise the resolution. 480x272 is quite small, and even though 500 kbps can seem rather low, i'd push up a bit the resolution ( 512x288 or 544x304 ) - if, of course, the original resolution is larger than 480...

[ilovejedd]

Hmm, might the resolution of 480x272 be for a PSP encode? Just a guess... :p

Anyhow, yep, at low bitrates (at least for the videos that I've tried), H.264 seems to be better than XviD. XviD encodes tend to be blockier than their H.264 counterpart. Of course, this is just personal preference. I'd rather lose sharpness and detail than have my video all pixelated.

A low-motion video I encoded at 384kbps with H.264 has the same quality as a 512kbps XviD encode, at least, to my untrained eye. Both were encoded using ffmpeg at 320x240 resolution and playback was done on a PSP. :)