Overall what's the best H.264 encoder in 2021?

[kolak]

I can offer it today to EVERYONE.
Send me files and I will provide you infinitely compressed version, so nothing
Just 1$/minute of content

[VoodooFX]

Yeap, that's what they were selling: bitrate reduction on any video without loss of quality. So if you chain Beamr>Beamr>Beamr..., you are compressing to a singularity, maybe even to a negative bitrate.

EDIT:
Most of those wonder technology companies scams out few thousands of $ and disappear, I see this one succeeded in raising the few millions, now they have money to augment their wonders with new fata morganas and try to legitimize in some way, but for how long, time will tell (btw, not comparable, but DivX thing is still ongoing).

Anyone member Theranos?

[Blue_MiSfit]

Beamr is absolutely not nothing

I've tested their stuff and it's quite good. Of course you can't just chain it in a loop, that's not how it works. They actually started doing what you're talking about - essentially automated compressed domain transcoding - which wasn't super interesting to me. Then they integrated that IP in-loop with their own encoders (which they acquired from Vanguard). This is actually pretty awesome.

Their Beamr 4x and Beamr 5x encoders are H.264 and H.265 respectively with special rate control methods ("CABR") based on their optimization metrics.

I didn't have the time to do a thorough evaluation but the results are definitely impressive, especially in the OTT use case where you need to build an ABR encoding ladder and the effort involved to do anything more complex than a static ladder recipe is substantial. Being able to just use CABR and say "Spend up to this many bits per second but please use fewer where it makes sense" (kind of a better capped CRF) is pretty great.

Their people are generally really great too. Their technology is not cheap, but if you're in the market for a paid H.264 (or H.265) encoder their stuff is _absolutely_ worth looking at (as is Ateme at least and probably others).

[TomV]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

Beamr is absolutely not nothing

I've tested their stuff and it's quite good. Of course you can't just chain it in a loop, that's not how it works. They actually started doing what you're talking about - essentially automated compressed domain transcoding - which wasn't super interesting to me. Then they integrated that IP in-loop with their own encoders (which they acquired from Vanguard). This is actually pretty awesome.

Their Beamr 4x and Beamr 5x encoders are H.264 and H.265 respectively with special rate control methods ("CABR") based on their optimization metrics.

I didn't have the time to do a thorough evaluation but the results are definitely impressive, especially in the OTT use case where you need to build an ABR encoding ladder and the effort involved to do anything more complex than a static ladder recipe is substantial. Being able to just use CABR and say "Spend up to this many bits per second but please use fewer where it makes sense" (kind of a better capped CRF) is pretty great.

Their people are generally really great too. Their technology is not cheap, but if you're in the market for a paid H.264 (or H.265) encoder their stuff is _absolutely_ worth looking at (as is Ateme at least and probably others).

It's funny to read opinions from people who have never actually tested the encoder they're commenting about. Derek (Blue_MiSfit), on the other hand, knows what he's talking about.

Beamr has encoder implementations (Beamr 4 for AVC, Beamr 5 for HEVC), and they have a patented compression technology that they have applied to still image compression as well as AVC, HEVC and other codecs (CABR). Their base encoders are very, very good. Their CABR technology works as advertised. If you haven't evaluated their encoders, I don't know why you would think you are qualified to comment on how they compare.

[excellentswordfight]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Lightspeed or whatever they're called in Vantage are crap.
Seeing how bad and expensive Vantage was is the whole reason why I decided to contribute to FFAStrans in the first place.

The most annoying part of GPU-encoding on Vantage is that they afaik only support it on their lightspeed hardware, dated hw with an huge markup price.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

The most annoying part of GPU-encoding on Vantage is that they afaik only support it on their lightspeed hardware, dated hw with an huge markup price.

Yep. Lightspeed hardware only...

[kolak]

It's overpriced, but this is enterprise area where everything has huge markup. I'm more shocked by support fees and the way how slowly problems are fixed. This is a joke, real joke.

At least in terms of reliability it sort of works. In the same time any custom made cluster system running ffmpeg (x264/5) on few machines can easily be as reliable.
If you can do a bit of any scripting (Python etc.) then Vantage is a waste of money.

Btw... anyone has Manzanita muxer license to sell?

[benwaggoner]

Yeah, Beamr is definitely a lot of something! Some people may be thinking of their original business model and technology where they'd take an input file and retroactively apply an advanced flavor of CRF to reduce bitrate where it can be without reducing psychovisual quality significantly.

But then Beamr bought Vanguard a traditional (and very good) encoder company, and integrated their psychovisual tech in with the Vanguard encoders. So no second pass reduction involved, just a more psychovisually tuned encoder.

[Balling]

Interesting, then I suppose Beamr should be tested.