[MPlayer-users] xvid vs lavc

[Rémi Guyomarch]

Following the ve_xvid activity, I wanted to do a quick benchmark to
see the relative strength of xvid compared to the latest lavc mpeg4
codec.

xvid: latest stable code from CVS.
lavc: latest CVS
hardware: athlon xp 1800+
size: As reported by mencoder, ie just the codec output, doesn't
include the container overhead. Rounded to the nearest kB.
time: User time as reported by the 'time' command.
quality: xvid quality settings are the same as those in the vfw
codec/plugin/module/whatever in the xvid CVS tree.

First test, 1m30s of a 720x576 MPEG2 stream (PAL DVD) at quantizer 2 :

size    time      options
=====  =======   ===================================================
35592  0:56.38   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=2
35441  0:59.09   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=2:v4mv
35375  1:22.28   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=2:vhq
34910  1:30.20   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=2:v4mv:vhq

47567  0:54.05   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=0:fixed_quant=2
48006  0:51.86   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=1:fixed_quant=2
48006  0:51.80   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=2:fixed_quant=2
48006  1:00.94   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=3:fixed_quant=2
36505  1:15.21   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=4:fixed_quant=2
36494  1:15.02   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=5:fixed_quant=2
36395  1:22.17   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=6:fixed_quant=2


Second test, 5 minutes of a 576x240 MPEG2 stream (same DVD, cropped &
scaled) at quantizer 3 :

size    time      options
=====  =======   ===================================================
76150  1:56.39   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=0:fixed_quant=3
56076  2:36.40   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=4:fixed_quant=3
55631  2:57.25   -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quality=6:fixed_quant=3

50303  1:58.87   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=3
49912  2:05.05   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=3:v4mv
50046  2:23.78   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=3:vhq
48723  2:43.79   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=3:v4mv:vhq


Conclusion : libavcodec is still the King :)

Notes :
- I assume that a given video stream has the same quality (PSNR) when
compressed with the same quantizer by xvid and lavc, am I right ?
- I didn't tested the quality of the curve-fitting algorithm of the
two codecs (xvid_vbr.c & lavc internal 2-pass module).
- No, I didn't tested divx5 since there's no divx5 for FreeBSD and I
doubt there will ever be.

-- 
Rémi