[MPlayer-users] Re: best encoder ?

[Florin Andrei]

On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 01:50, Rémi Guyomarch wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 10:31:20AM +0200, Karsten Müller wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> > 
> > I have a (not so) simple question:
> > I want to convert my VDR recordings (MPEG PES streams) to divx.
> > 
> > What's the best encoder to do that ?
> 
> ff's libavcodec without any doubt.

Actually, it's doubtful it's the best in each and every case.
It seems to be the fastest when encoding, and there's a good case it's
the fastest when decoding too.
But when it comes to image quality, things are not so simple. Especially
because different people are interested in different things: best
quality when confined to a fixed size, best quality when keeping the
size as small as possible, differences between movies with a lot of
action and movies with more "quiet" scenes, etc.
And again, the definition of image quality is not very clear.

In my opinion, a while ago DivX5 provided the "best" quality (whatever
that is) for medium-to-low bitrates (confined to a 700MB CD), but it
seems like XviD has made a great progress lately.
If i were after quality for normal DivX encoding (watching movies at
home), generally i wouldn't choose libavcodec.

Almost always, this kind of statements ("software XYZ is the best,
regardless of how you test it") are doomed to fail the reality check.
(and yes, as you can see, i used the word "almost" in my own statement
:-D)

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/