Help between x264 and Nero AVC

[dvd_maniac]

I currently use Nero Digital Standard AVC to compress my DVDs onto my Media Server. From the Codec Shootout I see it as the best in terms of quality. I am done compressing all my movies and now I am starting my Episode DVDs and was wondering if someone could tell me if x264 is up to par with Nero's AVC yet?
The reason I was looking for a switch is for speed. I have a Pentium D 830 (3.0) and Nero is not multi-threaded yet. If x264 is faster and only slightly behide in quality than I would use it instaed.

Thanx for any help you might provide me...

[acidsex]

Personally, I would suggest you trust your own eyes. In my tests, Nero/Ateme AVC is heads and shoulders above the rest with x264 coming close but not quite there yet. Again, this is according to my eyes.

Test them both and decide if the quality/speed trade off is acceptable to you and decide accordingly.

[berrinam]

@acidsex: Are you talking about the beta test Ateme codec, or the Recode codec?

@all: On Sagittaire's Movie Metric Benchmark Challenge (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=90784), x264 High Profile beats Nero Main Profile (in this test, the Main Profile encoder is even more recent than Recode, so it is almost definitely better). Keep in mind, though, that
(a) metrics are not necessarily the same as visual quality
(b) high profile requires more cpu power than main profile

[dvd_maniac]

I use the Standard AVC profile at 375kbps. Would the latest x264 you are talking about be better and/or faster for what I use? (In your opinion)

I know what acid said is obviously the only way I will know for sure. However, I just need an idea of speed increase and quality gain or loss I should expect before installing more codecs and programs.

[berrinam]

Well, I think that (for metrics) x264 is certainly better quality than Standard AVC. In terms of speed increase, I am afraid that I have no idea. I just did some short tests, and I got some completely unexpected results (x264 was about 5x faster for turbo first pass (severely cut down options) and about twice as fast for second pass. Considering that x264 has always been slower than Recode for me, I think there is something seriously up. By the way, I am only on a singe core machine.). Anyway, I don't think that it could be too much hassle to just download x264 and try it yourself, but that is up to you.

[bond]

i didnt test it, but i would guess that multithread encoding with x264 would be faster than nero avc encoding at ~ the same quality

[dvd_maniac]

Well for now I am just running 2 encoding jobs at a time putting different instances of Recode into different CPU affinity...

Getting a combined 32fps between the 2 on the second pass :)