Video,Audio and Container suggestions

[Luxman]

Hello everybody! I'm very happy to join officially this great community with my first post :D
I am a very newbie regarding audio/video issues, probably the newbiest here. I am a linux user from several years and i LOVE the FOSS world!
I've been reading some opinions about the latest video and audio codecs and I'd like to ask some questions to be able to choose and study more deeply the codecs that best suit my needs.
Concerning video codecs: 'till now I've been using xvid or theora within some linux gui-frontend to rip my DVDs and the results are fine. Recently I have read good opinions about x264 and Snow codecs. What's the best choice in terms of quality, space needed, active development and features?
Concerning audio codecs: I like Vorbis, and Musepack. Which one would you suggest?
Concerning containers: I read Matroska has the best flexibility. Is there another container with its versatility and oss licenced?

Have a nice day! :thanks:

[foxyshadis]

Concerning video codecs: 'till now I've been using xvid or theora within some linux gui-frontend to rip my DVDs and the results are fine. Recently I have read good opinions about x264 and Snow codecs. What's the best choice in terms of quality, space needed, active development and features?
Whatever works for you. Snow is neither very high quality nor fast, just to warn you, compared to xvid, let alone x264, but it is comprable to theora. Worth a try, don't expect any miracles.

There's some strong opinions (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=129258) on xvid vs x264, but it's pretty unanimous that at low and mid bitrates (most 1-2 CD backups) x264 is noticeably better. You can have the equivalent of youtube quality at dialup bitrates, if you ever wanted. :p Almost everyone has moved on to h.264 for HD, especially since it's one of the standard HD codecs, unlike divx/xvid.

The best reason to continue using xvid is that you already have an investment in it, like a standalone player or a computer that isn't strong enough to play AVC. If that isn't an issue, there's nothing stopping you from trying it; you can use the same players, same editors and all that with x264.

Concerning audio codecs: I like Vorbis, and Musepack. Which one would you suggest?
Again, if it works for you, it works, but Musepack is pretty dead and doesn't get much support these days. Vorbis is all I've used for most of a decade, sounds very good at mid bitrates (80-128), until HE-AAC made extremely low bitrates usable.

Concerning containers: I read Matroska has the best flexibility. Is there another container with its versatility and oss licenced?

Sure, but not one with even a tenth of the support. :p

Hope this helps answer a few things.

[Dark Shikari]

Whatever works for you. Snow is neither very high quality nor fast, just to warn you, compared to xvid, let alone x264, but it is comprable to theora. Worth a try, don't expect any miracles.Snow is quite a bit better than Theora and Xvid; its efficiency is within about 10-20% of x264, and its artifacts are much less noticeable.

However, its very very experimental, and requires a ridiculous amount of CPU power for decoding and encoding, making it not particularly useful for any serious use.

x264 is without a doubt the best free codec most of the time, and Matroska is a great container. If you want high audio compression, AAC is a good option; otherwise many people just use the original AC3 audio from their DVD.

[Kurtnoise]

but Musepack is pretty dead and doesn't get much support these days.
I don't think it's dead. The first SV8 beta are out now, although it's clearly more and more unused these days and still problematic with several containers.

[Luxman]

Thank you very much for all your answers!
Reading the thread that foxyshadis posted me I found many interesting opinions. It seems that AVC represents the near future in video codecs; on the other hand it requires modern hardware equipment and I don't know if my actual Athlon 2200+ XP can deal with it in a proper way...

So far I would say the folowing:
- x264 + vorbis/mp3/aac/mpc/ac3/dts + mkv is the best solution to keep a video inside the computer.

- xvid + mp3/ac3/dts + avi is the best solution to have the maximum compatibility with a standalone player.

- theora + vorbis + ogm is useful to make screencast and for video streaming.

- snow it's still too young to make it a gold standard codec for any purpose.

Would you agree with that?

:thanks:

[Dark Shikari]

- xvid + mp3/ac3/dts + avi is the best solution to have the maximum compatibility with a standalone player.Well, other than MPEG-2 of course. And with Xvid, make sure the appropriate settings are set--not GMC, Qpel, etc.
- theora + vorbis + ogm is useful to make screencast and for video streaming.OGM as a container format is basically dead. Avoid it. I don't know why you would use Theora either; its main use is when you really really really have to use something free, i.e. if you're a company and don't want to pay patent royalties.

[Luxman]

Well, other than MPEG-2 of course. And with Xvid, make sure the appropriate settings are set--not GMC, Qpel, etc.

Ok, thanks ;) I'll read carefully some posts and guides on how to get the best compatibility out of the XviD codec.

OGM as a container format is basically dead. Avoid it. I don't know why you would use Theora either; its main use is when you really really really have to use something free, i.e. if you're a company and don't want to pay patent royalties.

Didn't know that ogm was dead... I liked the idea to have a video all based on free software (in this case made by the same company). The reason is, as stated in my first post, my love for Open Source software. Plus I often see ogg/theora video screencasts in many blogs and sites so I assumed it was good for that purpose... :D

[Dark Shikari]

Didn't know that ogm was dead... I liked the idea to have a video all based on free software (in this case made by the same company). The reason is, as stated in my first post, my love for Open Source software. Plus I often see ogg/theora video screencasts in many blogs and sites so I assumed it was good for that purpose... :DMatroska has basically replaced OGM for all intents and purposes... and for good reason IMO.

[Gusar]

Didn't know that ogm was dead... I liked the idea to have a video all based on free software (in this case made by the same company). The reason is, as stated in my first post, my love for Open Source software. Plus I often see ogg/theora video screencasts in many blogs and sites so I assumed it was good for that purpose... :DThose screencasts use the OGG container, not OGM. They're two different things.
OGM was more or less a hack and yes, it's dead. OGG is the official container to store vorbis/theora/flac/speex and is still being used wherever you need a pure royalty-free solution.

[Luxman]

Those screencasts use the OGG container, not OGM. They're two different things.
OGM was more or less a hack and yes, it's dead. OGG is the official container to store vorbis/theora/flac/speex and is still being used wherever you need a pure royalty-free solution.

Thanks for the info! I thought ogg was meant to be used just for vorbis audio files whereas ogm was specific for video.
This thread has been really useful to me :D
One more thing: would it be inappropriate to run some tests on x264 video encoding on a machine equipped with 1800MHz CPU and 512 MB RAM? Should I expect to have very long encoding times?
One more time :thanks:

[foxyshadis]

Snow is quite a bit better than Theora and Xvid; its efficiency is within about 10-20% of x264, and its artifacts are much less noticeable.

I'll have to try it for archival then, but I guess I'll need to keep versions of ffdshow handy in that case.

I don't think it's dead. The first SV8 beta are out now, although it's clearly more and more unused these days and still problematic with several containers.

SV8's practically a different format, but yeah, I guess it is alive now. I'd lost interest after it went dormant for a few years and missed that announcement.

Thanks for the info! I thought ogg was meant to be used just for vorbis audio files whereas ogm was specific for video.

You could do what a friend does, call everything .vogg, .thogg, .spogg, & .flogg. You have to manually fix all the associations though. :p

1800 P4, Athlon XP, P-M, or Core2? All of them will take very different amounts of time to encode, in roughly that order. (Aside from a dual core, it'll be quite slow, though. Expect half to 2/3 of xvid's speed for HQ-Slow.)

[Dark Shikari]

I'll have to try it for archival then, but I guess I'll need to keep versions of ffdshow handy in that case.Note to get the best quality out of it you have to use the option (forget what its called) that optimizes all 4 MVs for a block simultaneously, which is very slow. Using the correct wavelet for ME is also pretty important... and those are slow too.

Basically its incredibly slow encoding to get good results, likely due to the fact that algorithmically it hasn't been very heavily optimized.

[Luxman]

You could do what a friend does, call everything .vogg, .thogg, .spogg, & .flogg. You have to manually fix all the associations though. :p

Not a bad idea :D

1800 P4, Athlon XP, P-M, or Core2? All of them will take very different amounts of time to encode, in roughly that order. (Aside from a dual core, it'll be quite slow, though. Expect half to 2/3 of xvid's speed for HQ-Slow.)

I got an Athlon 2200+ XP (1800MHz) so I guess I will try to get the best I can out of XviD for now ;) But for sure my curiosity won't let me avoid to try x264 with some videoclips ;)