[MPlayer-users] Produce 422 format pixels with mencoder for mpeg4-encoding

[Marco Munderloh]

> The quality of the MPEG-4 AVC video would be highly dependent
> on the quality of the encoder that produced it.  Same is true for MPEG-4
> ASP.  I'm asking about the quality of the video produced by libx264 (with
> 422 pixels) vs the quality of the video produced by libav (with 420 pixels).
> Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not one is better than the other?

To make it short: x264 is one of the best AVC encoder available.

> Which encoder is  less advanced and less effective?  x264?  or libav?

What do you mean by "effective"? In case of efficiency bitrate vs. quality,
x264 is clearly the winner. In case of processing power needed to decode,
ASP is in front. The processing power needed to encode can broadly by
controlled by the provided presets in x264; however this effects coding
efficiency. If processing power does not matter but quality, have a look at
x265 which implements the HEVC coding standard.

> My intermediate files are lossless-compressed with ffvhuff.  The final output
> file is MPEG4.  I know nothing of ASP or AVC or whatever the difference
> is between them (but maybe I should learn).

Maybe a good idea. But to make it easy for you: use x264 and you are fine and you
will have the least problems.

By the way, x264 does also supports lossless compression, if you specify a qp of 0.
Moreover, it has a fixed quality coding mode (crf) which tries to produce a constant
image quality instead of reaching a specific bitrate. crf of 20 should be okay.

Best, Marco