[MPlayer-users] PSNR Questions
D Richard Felker III
dalias at aerifal.cx
Sun Feb 16 09:04:24 CET 2003
On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 09:42:21PM +0100, Struan Bartlett wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Ian wrote:
>
> >D Richard Felker III wrote:
> >
> >>How are you measuring the PSNR of the original?? Like I said, you have
> >>to use the same reference to compare PSNR.
> >
> >I've been experimenting with a 3 or 4 pass TV recording method whereby
> >I capture at maximum bps for a high-quality "original" mpeg4 or mjpeg,
> >then do a 2- or 3-stage reduction to 1Mb/s mpeg4. I left the PSNR
> >option on for both stages and just observed that the figures were
> >higher for the low-bw output than the max-bw "original".
> >
> >Incidentally, the quality of this procedure was not significantly
> >(visibly) better than an original grab at the low-bw rate, hence my
> >interest in an objective measurement.
>
> Objective measurement of encoding quality is really my question.
>
> A week ago a URL (rguyom.ath.cx) was posted of a doc that compared
> various encoding options by comparing the PSNRs reported by mencoder.
>
> I was experimenting myself to compare the quality of a cropped movie
> encoded at bitrate Xbps: first unscaled, but with (mplayer-only) encoded
> aspect ratio; second, scaled according to encoding-tips.txt's procedure
> using calcbpp.pl.
>
> I wanted to use the reported PSNRs to objectively determine the relative
> performance of each method, but unfortunately it appears this is not a
> measure that works well.
>
> 1. What's your experience of the quality of encoded cropped video at a
> given bitrate in my two scenarios above?
>
> 2. Does this invalidate the use of PSNR as an objective measure and
> therefore the results of the rguyom.ath.cx paper?
>
> 3. If so, how are we to objectively measure the performance of encoding
> parameters?
>
> What's your take?
Actually, I just remembered one other good way to 'objectively'
measure quality: average quantizer. Lower is of course better. What's
nice about measuring quality by average quantizer is that the number
should be in some sense proportional to the severity of ringing/block
artifacts.
Using avgq to compare quality between different scaling, however,
probably is not a good idea. At lower resolutions, artifacts become
much more noticable, so a much lower quantizer is needed to make the
video look good. For example, IMO, anything above constant q=2 looks
bad at 320x240, whereas 4-5 is pretty good and even 6-7 is ok (talking
more about peak than average) at 640x???.
But anyway, if you want to evaluate the benefits of deblocking,
deringing, blur, denoise, etc. before encoding, avgq could be a very
useful metric!
Rich
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