Question about Realtime vs Non-Relatime.

[Junu]

i have Tandberg real-time encoder 5930 and 5990 for broadcasting service.
but i need to prepare another vod service.
my question is
does non real-time encoder (like mainconcept, ateme, etc) obviously improves the picture quality than real-time encoder for VOD?
i know non real-time encoder has the function of two-pass encoder for good quality, but i wonder does it really effect.

[Sergey A. Sablin]

i have Tandberg real-time encoder 5930 and 5990 for broadcasting service.
but i need to prepare another vod service.
my question is
does non real-time encoder (like mainconcept, ateme, etc) obviously improves the picture quality than real-time encoder for VOD?
i know non real-time encoder has the function of two-pass encoder for good quality, but i wonder does it really effect.

I think almost no one here has tandberg encoder do make comparison. The may be the case that single pass for non-real time encoder will be enough to beat tandberg. The other case is tandberg is so great that no one non-real time encoder can produce even near quality as it.

so it sounds like - "I have a black box without any information about input and output, could you tell me whether it is good enough or should I change it to white one?"

[Blue_MiSfit]

:)

Conventional wisdom would assume that given the lack of broadcast time constraints, one could achieve superior quality with a high quality 2 pass encode.

Just my 2 cents :)

[bond]

Conventional wisdom would assume that given the lack of broadcast time constraints, one could achieve superior quality with a high quality 2 pass encode.my opinion too

but maybe we can abuse you to make some test comparisons between tandberg and x264 with the same source for us, quality and speedwise

[Manao]

A few things to consider though :
if a comparison is made, it must be done at the highest fps/resolution at which the hardware encoder still manage realtime ( else, it would be underused, since it can't go faster than the video ) you can do two passes in realtime. Just put two encoders one ahead of the other by a few frames, and make them communicate together. For CBR, you don't need the whole movie to properly use a two passes algorithm ( or, rather, the smallness of the CPB prevent you from trying to distribute bitrate over more than a few frames ). CBR mode in x264 isn't imho ready to be compared with professionnal encoders. x264 does a very good job for two passes & CRF encodings ( in comparison to professionnal encoders ), but CBR isn't usually an interesting subject for the open source community, and hence suffers from the lack of attention.