2009 MPEG-2 Encoder Test!

[simps]

Encoders tested:
HCEnc v0.23
QuEnc v0.72
TMPGEnc v2.525
CCE SP v2.7
Canopus Procoder v3.0
Main Concept Reference v1.61


Results:
Best: CCE
Very good: HCEnc (very close to CCE)
Good: Procoder / QuEnc (too bad QuEnc is so slow)
Not so good: TMPGEnc / Mainconcept


Link:
http://forum.videohelp.com/topic367668.html


[]'s
Simps

[CruNcher]

Not only that but look @ most of the screens there are heavy chroma upsampling issues though i guess it comes from the decoder not the encoder very heavy visible in 12-Frame 3545:

[scharfis_brain]

ProCoder never changes Brigthness and Contrast, if you feed it properly with YUY2 Video.
If you feed it with YV12 video then it will rely on a system-decoder that may break things up.
so redo the test for procoder with YUY2 input and you'll see that it will behave much better.

[simps]

ProCoder never changes Brigthness and Contrast, if you feed it properly with YUY2 Video.
If you feed it with YV12 video then it will rely on a system-decoder that may break things up.
so redo the test for procoder with YUY2 input and you'll see that it will behave much better.


Thanks. I re-did procoder with converttoYUY2() and updated the comparison with the new frames from procoder. I used all the max quality settings in procoder, like mastering quality, etc.
Let me know what you think about it now.

[]'s
Simps

[halsboss]

Confirms to me why HCEnc was always my favourite "by a country mile".

[scharfis_brain]

HcEnc has lots of trouble with dark areas, Which ProCoder hasn't.

Also Procoder IMO outperforms all other MPEG2-Encoders regarding MotionEstimation.
It is able to even grab low contrasted textures through heavy grain.

[halsboss]

Thanks for that, interesting knowledge. The $500 cost (US I think) for ProCoder scared me well off. $500 is enormous bikkies to us and way beyond our budget in the current and foreseeable future. For the price differential, in the eye of this beholder :), HCEnc compares favourably in value-for-money terms.

[scharfis_brain]

Give ProCoder Express a try.
It is like 50 to 70 Euros and has the same quality like Procoder.
It only lacks batch support and grid-encoding. Which both are neglectable.

[halsboss]

Thanks! eu$70 is about aus$125 which i'm afraid is still nothing to sneeze at just now. Googled and Canopus diverts to http://desktop.grassvalley.com/products/ProCoderSW/index.php and it seems like they don't list Express any more. Searching their website doesn't seem to find it either.

[benwaggoner]

Thanks for that, interesting knowledge. The $500 cost (US I think) for ProCoder scared me well off. $500 is enormous bikkies to us and way beyond our budget in the current and foreseeable future. For the price differential, in the eye of this beholder :), HCEnc compares favourably in value-for-money terms.
If you think that's high, don't even look at Rhozet Carbon :). It's basically ProCoder for pro video. For MPEG-2, it's got support for all the more esoteric formas like Blu-ray, ATSC, CableLabs, MXF, HDV, all the Video Server variants, etcetera.

Well worth the price for professional content creation, but no different than ProCoder for DVD stuff.

[Lyris]

I'm not surprised to see Cinema Craft win (a shame they didn't test SP2, though). I use SP2 and can't even begin to fathom the genius programming that allows MPEG-2 to look like that. Every time, I wonder what DVD-Video could be if every studio and authoring house was using it.

[Dark Shikari]

If you think that's high, don't even look at Rhozet Carbon :). It's basically ProCoder for pro video. For MPEG-2, it's got support for all the more esoteric formas like Blu-ray, ATSC, CableLabs, MXF, HDV, all the Video Server variants, etcetera.

Well worth the price for professional content creation, but no different than ProCoder for DVD stuff.Too bad the interface is awful and the quality terrible though, from what little testing I did. It supports everything--badly. And most of the support comes from libavcodec anyways.

[IgorC]

It could be interesting to see perfomance of Libavcodec MPEG-2.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=128498

[scharfis_brain]

@Dark Shikari: MPEG2 quality should be superior.

I don't know about its MPEG4 encoding qualities..

[benwaggoner]

Too bad the interface is awful and the quality terrible though, from what little testing I did. It supports everything--badly. And most of the support comes from libavcodec anyways.
The interface is definitely aging. It was a refreshing blast of non-modality when ProCoder 1.0 came out, but that was 6-7 years ago now. Still, it does a nice job of Profile constraining; ugly but productive. Its implicit preprocessing is a big time-saver as well.

What do you see it using libavcodec for? The MPEG-2 encoder itself is Canopus's (Rhozet was spun off from them before Grass Valley purchased Canopus; Rhozet is now owned by Harmonic).

[Dark Shikari]

The interface is definitely aging. It was a refreshing blast of non-modality when ProCoder 1.0 came out, but that was 6-7 years ago now. Still, it does a nice job of Profile constraining; ugly but productive. Its implicit preprocessing is a big time-saver as well.

What do you see it using libavcodec for? The MPEG-2 encoder itself is Canopus's (Rhozet was spun off from them before Grass Valley purchased Canopus; Rhozet is now owned by Harmonic).Well, I suspect they use libavcodec for a lot of the decoding of obscure formats given that they include it in the libraries folder.

[kolak]

HcEnc has lots of trouble with dark areas, Which ProCoder hasn't.

Also Procoder IMO outperforms all other MPEG2-Encoders regarding MotionEstimation.
It is able to even grab low contrasted textures through heavy grain.


100% agreed:)

CCE-SP gives up on noisy interlaced sources. Custom Technology saved advanced motion estimation (and also adaptive GOP structure) for the Xtream version.

[gizzin]

CCE, and HC are the most advanced mpeg2 encoders. HC having same inherent flaws (problems with dark areas, fades) but its free so you can't complain. CCE is bad with interlaced sources and tends to be a little more noisy. Procoder is crap, it just uses filters to make its encodes look better than what they really are.

[Lyris]

CCE is bad with interlaced sources and tends to be a little more noisy
It is? CCE lets you fine-tune the Quantization Characteristics per scene, so if you're having trouble and care enough, you can choose to balance more in favour of seeing mosquito noise, or more in favour of seeing rough quantization (this is my understanding of the setting, anyway). You can also turn the Dithered Quantization off, so it shouldn't adding any noise unless you tell it to (I'm talking about 'noise' in the analogue sense, you may be describing digital 'noise'?)

[*.mp4 guy]

Procoder is crap, it just uses filters to make its encodes look better than what they really are.

looking at the screenshots, it just looks like procoder is using more aggressive quantization (deadzones, probably) then the other encoders, accept perhaps ffmpeg (Quenc). This might also explain why it does better on noisy content

[scharfis_brain]

Procoder is crap, it just uses filters to make its encodes look better than what they really are.
Since an encoder itself is a filter, there is absolutely no problem if a encoder uses some prefiltering to do a better job.

On almost all material I encoded so far ProCoder did a better job than all other encoders especially with grainy sources.
That is because Procoder has a very good motion search that it isn't fooled by noise.
And it *maybe* has a motion compensated noise reducer, which itself is no problem either.
Also I prefer a smooth, non-pumping image.

Blockyness and GOP-pumping easily are revealed by the sharpening filters of the currenty flat screens in customers homes.
The latter ones also are a big issue with TMPGenc, which with its default settings produces much more blockyness and incredible GOP-pumping.