[MPlayer-users] lanczos or bicubic spline or..?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 12:06:59PM -0800, * wrote:
> --- * <afe0108 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Hello, I scoured the list but couldn't find any opinion about
> > which -sws option is generally considered the best.  Taking into
> > account the quality of the implementation in mencoder if that's
> > an issue.
> > 
> > From what I've read -sws 9 (lanczos) might be the best for sharp
> > details?  Here's a page comparing them:
> > 
> > http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec042901.html
> > 
> > But I can't personally tell any difference between -sws 2 or 9
> > or 10.  Can anyone else?  Thanks.
> > 
> 
> Hello, no one has an opinion which is better?  If I want to test it
> myself could I assume that (everything else being equal) higher PSNR
> values mean it's better?  Thanks.

No. The PSNR the encoder reports is relative to the input image it
gets, so higher PSNR values just mean the scaler produced data that
compresses better. In general I would recommend -sws 1 or 6 for
encoding. Gauss (7) could also be useful if you're trying to make very
low-res/quality encodes and avoid artefacts, while Lanczos (9) could
be useful if you're using constant-quantizer encoding and want maximum
quality. But IMO, at a fixed bitrate, the scaler that blurs the most
will look best.

Rich