x264's Progress Over Time

[UltraTV]

I'm putting together some blog posts and entries basically arguing that x264 is the greatest things since sliced turkey and cranberry sauce.

Would anybody like to toss in some comments/links that show x264's progress from the early releases to today's ultra-optimized beast of an encoder? It would be amazing to find some comparison's against the original h264 reference encoders, the things x264 does to expand the capabilities of the h264 codec (psy enhancements etc.) basically anything that can paint a historical perspective of the development of the software.

Looking forward to your comments!

[qyot27]

Well, if you want the reference software to compare to it's readily available here:
http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/

Mind-blisteringly slow, however. It took something like 10 minutes for me to encode a total of 366 frames @ 848x480 on a Core i5, and that was after splitting the source video into 4 pieces and running the jobs in parallel (configuration settings notwithstanding; most of them were near-placebo if I understood it right, except that I had the motion estimation set on Hex). I only tried it so I could have a point of reference for 12-bit and 14-bit decoding support with libavcodec, though.


You can just re-run comparisons against selected builds throughout the project history. They should be as valid today as they were then. Make builds in increments of 200 or 300 and test them against each other. That'd be one way of showing how things have progressed over the years. Provided that revisions from way back then can be built with current versions of GCC and not get miscompiled, anyway.

[tph]

MSU's codec comparisons has a "x264 Comparison Over Time" section.

http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/