[MPlayer-users] lavc vs. xvid (and improving lavc quality)

[Jason Tackaberry]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 16:20 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> so when the source material is noisy the motion estimation / macroblock 
> decision will favor noisy blocks, the trick here is that its much cheaper 
> bitrate wise to find some noisy block instead of a using a lower quantizer 
> and actually storing the exact noise

I've tried out nsse on a number of problem areas, and the results have
been very encouraging.  Now, the PSNR is lower by about 1 dB, but if I
understand what you've explained properly, nsse will favor a noisy
macroblock, but that noise may not correspond to the noise in the
source, and so while the PSNR will be lower, visually it's
imperceptible.  (?)

NSSE is some 4-5 times slower than cmp=0, and about 3 times slower than
cmp=1.  Is there room for optimization there, or is the algorithm
fundamentally slower than the others?

Cheers,
Jason.