mencgen / lavcgenetic anyone tried this?

[ReinerSchweinlin]

Just found this by accident:

http://www.caps-entreprise.com/private/dolbeau/lavcGenetic/lavcGenetic.html

It seems to brute force test different settings in H264 and ASP-Codecs build into mencoder in order to find the best settings (assuming PSNR is a viable factor for this).

- Is PSNR reliable in predicting "good picture quality" (I read some threads a while ago here that it´s NOT)
- Has anyone enough time/horse Power to run a test?

I´d guess XVID settings are well known enough so this might be a waste of time. But as I recall, the ffmpeg-ASP Codec hase far more options which are not well explored. Maybe tweaking x264 is worth looking at it, too?

What do you think?

[buzzqw]

interesting... but never been able to test
never found a build

BHH

[foxyshadis]

RDO (aka VHQ) and trellis are also PSNR-optimizing local decision modes. By simply maxing out the available options, including silliness like --me esa, you should maximize PSNR.

It would make more sense to optimize for SSIM. That's still imperfect, but less imperfect than PSNR: PSNR particularly fails badly when you want to keep noise, grain, or fine detail; complete removal of fine grain results in negligible PSNR loss, so the optimizer will always pick that route unless forced otherwise.

Avsp, the avisynth GUI, includes a similar encoder optimizer (that can additionally work with script filter settings, you have to extend it yourself if you want it to change encoder parameters on the fly, iirc), which can work with PSNR, SSIM, or any other metric you can find an avisynth plugin for. You can test that way.