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

[PCU]

Overall what's the best H.264 encoder in 2021?
What H.264 encoders are used in BD & Netflix?

[microchip8]

Still x264

For BD, I think MainConcept is used (might be wrong)

[PCU]

Originally Posted by microchip8

Still x264

For BD, I think MainConcept is used (might be wrong)

So why does MSU say the Chinese version of these encoders is better?

[microchip8]

Originally Posted by PCU

So why does MSU say the Chinese version of these encoders is better?

Because their testing is flawed and biased

[PCU]

Originally Posted by microchip8

Because their testing is flawed and biased

So why doesn't Doom9 itself make a comparison?

[microchip8]

Originally Posted by PCU

So why doesn't Doom9 itself make a comparison?

Doom9 is not an official test entity. All tests are limited and done by users of the forum using different settings to find a balance between compression and speed. There are not many that can get all encoders like MC/Ateme/Chinese ones and do a thorough test, unbiased

[Balling]

Originally Posted by PCU

So why does MSU say the Chinese version of these encoders is better?

Where? For hevc Ticktock's hevc encoder is indeed better, just like Mainconcept.

If we are talking about 2012 tests of AVC those are wrong now.

x264 devs are still fixing in 2021 quite hillarious mistakes... https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264/-/issues/28 So no surprises there.

No surprises about this about Beamr too is bad and is still based on x264 (what changed from 2013?). https://gist.github.com/Daiz/5043109

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by Balling

x264 devs are still fixing in 2021 quite hillarious mistakes...

lol >=

Yeah well, that happens...
It shouldn't but it does...

[rwill]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

lol >=

Yeah well, that happens...
It shouldn't but it does...

In my opinion using CAVLC with High Profile is somewhat retarded. Never understood AVCI reasoning...

[kolak]

Originally Posted by Balling

Where? For hevc Ticktock's hevc encoder is indeed better, just like Mainconcept.

If we are talking about 2012 tests of AVC those are wrong now.

x264 devs are still fixing in 2021 quite hillarious mistakes... https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264/-/issues/28 So no surprises there.

No surprises about this about Beamr too is bad and is still based on x264 (what changed from 2013?). https://gist.github.com/Daiz/5043109

Same as Telestream GPU accelerated x264 in Vantage.
If you use no acceleration you get 2x slower encoding than x264 itself (one same machine).
If you use GPU acceleration (by buying crazy expensive Tesla card and burning 100s of extra watts) you get about same speed as vanilla x264 on CPU

Amazing technology...

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by kolak

Same as Telestream GPU accelerated x264 in Vantage.

Amazing technology...

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.
And if it wasn't for closed source proprietary stuff like VANC OP47 .stl subtitles mux in mxf and DolbyE encoding we would have succeeded in recreating a better open source transcoder...

[mp3dom]

Originally Posted by microchip8

Still x264

For BD, I think MainConcept is used (might be wrong)

For official BDs (I mean, pressed and made by authoring houses), MainConcept is still used by "cheap" companies and most of the times the MainConcept version is the old one that comes with old "CineVision for Bluray" encoder (something made years ago).

The encoder used for A+ blurays titles comes from SiriusPixels.
Anyway these are very specific encoders for bluray, you can't compare them with x264. x264 is a multi-purposes encoder that can be restricted to output valid BD streams. BD encoders, on the other side, are built to meet the BD specs and nothing more. Even the encoding engine is made to work better at high bitrates because nobody wants a bluray encoded at 8 mbps. If you encode a video at 4 Mbps with such BD encoders, you'll get total garbage as output.

[benwaggoner]

I've seem some pretty impressive Beamr examples showing ~20% bitrate reduction versus x264. The genius features of x264 are CRF and mbtree. And Beamr's psychovisual optimization is now a lot more advanced than CRF.

[microchip8]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

I've seem some pretty impressive Beamr examples showing ~20% bitrate reduction versus x264. The genius features of x264 are CRF and mbtree. And Beamr's psychovisual optimization is now a lot more advanced than CRF.

I disagree. Look at their example on their site where they compare a 1 Mbps source to a 0.6 Mbps encoded Beamr stream. It's pretty blurry to my eyes.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by microchip8

I disagree. Look at their example on their site where they compare a 1 Mbps source to a 0.6 Mbps encoded Beamr stream. It's pretty blurry to my eyes.

I've not looked at Beamr for reencoding purposes for a long time. I'm speaking of the Beamr 4x encoder where combines the core Vanguard encoder with Beamr perceptual optimization.

[PCU]

YouTube encoded video benchmarking results with my eyes:
x264: best quality
Google's AV1: blurry comparing to x264
VP9: On2 Technology (now Google) is the worst codec dev company I ever saw in my life!
x264 is so good, see what happens to x266 in the future.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by PCU

YouTube encoded video benchmarking results with my eyes:
x264: best quality
Google's AV1: blurry comparing to x264
VP9: On2 Technology (now Google) is the worst codec dev company I ever saw in my life!
x264 is so good, see what happens to x266 in the future.

YouTube uses some quite performance-tuned instead of quality-tuned x264 settings last I looked.

VP9 and AV1 suffer from a lot of PSNR tuning, which tends to blur quite a bit due to poor adaptive quantization. Unfortunately the VMAF metric wasn't tested with a variety of adaptive quantization modes, so doesn't score different modes as having different quality even when they perceptually do.

And AV1 and aomenc were tuned against VMAF much more than subjective quality evaluations, which yields the results you describe. Other AV1 encoders are improving that, but YouTube doesn't use them.

But in general, YouTube isn't a great reference for codec comparisons, as they are very performance-tuned, do a whole lot of segmented encoding. And YouTube gives higher bitrates and encoding time for their politically preferred AV1 and VP9 codecs.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

YouTube uses some quite performance-tuned instead of quality-tuned x264 settings last I looked.

VP9 and AV1 suffer from a lot of PSNR tuning, which tends to blur quite a bit due to poor adaptive quantization. Unfortunately the VMAF metric wasn't tested with a variety of adaptive quantization modes, so doesn't score different modes as having different quality even when they perceptually do.

And AV1 and aomenc were tuned against VMAF much more than subjective quality evaluations, which yields the results you describe. Other AV1 encoders are improving that, but YouTube doesn't use them.

But in general, YouTube isn't a great reference for codec comparisons, as they are very performance-tuned, do a whole lot of segmented encoding. And YouTube gives higher bitrates and encoding time for their politically preferred AV1 and VP9 codecs.

IDK much about AV1, But in 2004, I converted an original video of a game from Bink format to VP4, the quality of everything I did was very blurry, even all EA games using VP4 were blurry too.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by PCU

IDK much about AV1, But in 2004, I converted an original video of a game from Bink format to VP4, the quality of everything I did was very blurry, even all EA games using VP4 were blurry too.

Yep, none of the VPx series did a good job of adaptive quantization. On2 was very focused on the core encoder being highly tuned for PSNR, and then using advanced postprocessing to suppress defects.

Early Flash video used the VP6 codec, which was a pretty mediocre codec coupled with a really advanced postprocessor. It could do sharpening, smoothing, even synthesize noise. If those got turned off with a flag, the native quality wasn't good at all. And quality was unpredictable as the degree of postprocessing varied with CPU power.

VP3 was the ancient Ogg Theora codec, and VP4 was a mild update of that, without the VP6 postprocessing. VP4 and VP5 were only ever used in vertical products like games AFAIK.

I actually used the original TrueMotion and TrueMotion-S for some games in the 90's. Those were retroactively defined as VP1 and VP2.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yeah x264 and Beamr 4x are tough to beat today for typical VOD streaming use cases. Ateme does a really good job in live encoding (to my eyes). Pretty tough to beat.