2 newbie questions: x264 still being improved? handbrake alternatives?

[treeninja]

I tried searching but I could not find an answer. Is x264 something that is constantly being worked on and refined, or is it done for good? If I wait a few years, will x264 be more capable of producing better looking conversions of my DVDs with smaller file sizes too?

Also, I am currently using handbrake (for mac), and I was wondering if someone could suggest some similar programs to handbrake (either windows or mac) that might be as good or better for converting my DVD collection to mp4, mkv, and avi files.

I do like handbrake, but I was wondering if a different tool might make my x264 file sizes smaller with the same picture quality, and also here (http://handbrake.m0k.org/trac/wiki/SupportFAQ#enterthecolrmatrix) and here (http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1112&highlight=gamma+quicktime) are reasons I am thining about using another encoder besides handbrake.

Also, does anyone know if apple ever plans have avi or mkv support built into quicktime? I like the idea of not reconverting the audio over again to another lossy format just for it to fit in the mp4 container. avi and mkv let me do ac3 passthrough of the audio track (no extra conversion of the audio)-- which is nice. It would be very cool if I could use apple's front row to watch movies in avi or mkv some day. It's a shame apple has not already had support for these containers built into quicktime.

[Dark Shikari]

I tried searching but I could not find an answer. Is x264 something that is constantly being worked on and refined, or is it done for good? If I wait a few years, will x264 be more capable of producing better looking conversions of my DVDs with smaller file sizes too?Yes, its still being improved. No, its not going to be particularly dramatic. The really big improvements that are "in the pipeline" are:

1) One-pass lookahead (for twopass-like quality in onepass encoding, especially for real-time encoding). This could theoretically be used to help quality in two-pass also.

2) Graphics card acceleration of x264 on 8800+ cards (using CUDA). Would result in the ability to use very high-end motion estimation options with minimal speed loss.

3) Better adaptive quantization. Deal with blocking in flat areas better.

Other less major improvements I know about:

1) Intra RD refine optimization, makes intra refinement 3-4 times faster. For you, it means a slight speed increase for --subme 7.
2) Inter refinement changes, such as my prototype fast-ref-search/etc. For you, this means somewhat faster encoding with large numbers of reference frames.
3) More Altivec assembly code, resulting in faster performance on PowerPC processors.

If you want better quality with x264, use a higher bitrate or stronger settings. If you're really nuts and don't care at all about speed, get one of the patched builds and use --fpel-cmp satd with --me esa or similar.

In terms of raw quality, x264 is pretty close to its theoretical peak; the only major improvements for raw efficiency likely lie in better ratecontrol/quantization choices, and better frametype decision. Most small improvements will likely be speed/optimization improvements--cutting corners for minimal quality loss, rather than improving quality. Of course, if you're speed-restricted--i.e. you say "I don't want this to go slower than 2 FPS when encoding", and x264 gets 20% faster, then you can use better quality options at the same speed.