I have been looking at a new video codec, x264. It was built from the ground up by a group of volunteers. Its encoding speed is nothing to brag about, but makes up for it with the crystal clear video quality and the tiny filesize. I will be comparing x264 against two different video codecs, wmv and xvid. The codec is made to have very high quality images on low bitrates.

This is a short review of the codec, with a few tests.

What YOU need, ffdshow or vlc. exe.gotfrag.com/portal/story/32401

You will need the x264 to encode videos.

Sample videos can be found here.

Should you want to open x264 in virtualdub, you need to get the vfw for it which can be done through ffdshow. Simply go to the ffdshow folder in the start menu and go to “VFW codec configuration”. Then, find h.264 and set it to libavcodec, or you can right click and set it to all supported formats. Either way you will be able to open x264 files in virtualdub.

Virtualdub does not yet support render .mp4 files and might never. Should you want a .mp4 file, then I suggest you check out the doom9 forums. They have several video encoding tools and tutorials.

How I Tested The Codecs

I captured cliper's ace against SK on de_inferno at CPL winter, with startmovie 30 and forced 8x AA and 16x AF. I then rendered the ace uncompressed with videomach. First, I did a two pass with default settings on each of the three codecs in virtualdub. Then I used tweaked settings based off guides and personal experience at a lower bitrate to see how they compare.

Why did I use Counter-Strike for the test? Almost any game stresses codecs much more than real life video. It is colorful, in a larger resolution, and fast. That is why you can get away with encoding movies at a very low bitrate.

NOTE: Conclusions based on quality are subjective. I watched all of these on Windows Media Player Classic, ffdshow with no post processing.

For the default settings, I did a standard 2 pass at 3500kpbs, this is what most people render at for Counter-Strike movies.

Surprisingly, x264 and wmv appear the same in this test. The x264 does look a little bit better. Xvid however, was obviously the lowest quality out of them. There were very noticeable distortions around names and heads up display.

Tweaked Settings Test

These are the guides I used, thanks to ncarts and doom9 forums. For xvid, I used personal experience and know how.

I encoded all 3 codecs at 2000 kbps. You may think “but that's too low, all the movies I see are double that!” That is because the people who encoded them haven't been enlightened.

All the codecs take significantly longer to encode with tweaked settings, a longer encode for higher quality. X264 takes the longest easily. I did not time the encoding process, but it easily took twice as long as wmv, which took longer than xvid.

Now since the bitrate is lower, the flaws of the codec stand out more. It is plain to see who wins. X264 looks crystal clear, and has almost none of the distortion that normally plagues movies in wmv and xvid. The wmv and xvid codecs had noticable distortions. X264 is very capable of going way, way, down in bitrate and still retain good image quality. Finally, I encoded the same video at 500kbps (yes, five hundred). Even then, it was still very watchable.

Conclusion

The tests showed that x264 looks much better than wmv and xvid at lower bitrates. So why do we still use wmv and xvid so much?

1.X264 is relativity unknown
2.CPU heavy decoding
3.Long encoding

All three of those problems will be solved by time, such as the advent cheap of dual core processors and the programs (encoding/decoding) that take advantage of them. X264's issues may be solved by sooner than later, but maybe I am being too hopeful.