Video Compression > MPEG-2

Looking for comparison FFmpeg, MPEG2Enc, HCEnc

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Redsandro:
Since FFmpeg and Mencoder use the same codebase for MPEG2, I left it out.

I was trying to find out which has the best quality. I made some comparisons and overlayed them in Photoshop, but apart from visible differences I couldn't say one is better than the other. This probably means I compared wrong footage.

On general, I hear that FFmpeg is faster but Mencoder MPEG2enc is better, and HCencoder is best. That last is what I hear and what is claimed on Doom9, but I've not seen it in any comparison at all. Also, HCenc is a one man closed source tool.

FFmpeg being faster is also subjective because you don't have to use the default options.

Doing more comparisons on other footage is so time consuming and I am pretty sure someone else already did it.

So there's two questions: Which do you prefer, and do you have a link to a little comparison out there?

Dark Shikari:
ffmpeg and mencoder are just frontends for the same MPEG-2 encoder.

Redsandro:
That's sort of what I meant by using the same codebase and why I left Mencoder out.
Feel free to add other encoders, but my main interest lies with these three and the claims people make about them without me being able to find a comparison on the internet.

The only thing I've noticed is that Mpeg2enc and FFmpeg seem the same to me, while HCenc looks a bit artificially softened. And HCenc spams the stream with itself as the writing application where FFmpeg doesn't. Something about making it obvious that you didn't pay MPEG licensing fee's where a clean stream might as well has come from your legal copy of Encore for which an MPEG fee was payed.rated with

-edit-
After I wrote this, I noticed that the second time I mentioned Mencoder I actually meant MPEG2enc, I fixed this in the initial post.

qyot27:
I'd compared ffmpeg to HCenc about a year and a half ago, but it wasn't some highly-stratified scientific test or anything.  And in a year and a half's time, much of this could have been fixed, if work was/is still going into the MPEG-2 encoder, anyway.

Most of my reason to encode in MPEG-2 is for DVD authoring, and at that point, ffmpeg had a couple disadvantages compared to HCenc - lack of 3:2 pulldown support (I dunno if that's there now, but when I did the test it was necessary to follow up with DGPulldown; either that, or the build I was using was broken or outdated, but I don't think that was the case), and there was a strange issue with the start frame where it would look as if it was compressed with a much higher quantizer than the P and B frames that followed it, and therefore looked awful, even if the bitrate was set at 6000kbps.  Using settings intended for DVD compliancy, there was no way to fix it that I can remember.

HCenc, on the other hand, can produce streams with 3:2 pulldown without an added step (meaning I only need DGPulldown for 25->29.97 [25000/1000->30000/1001] or 24->29.97 [24000/1000->30000/1001] streams), and the frame quality was consistent - and HCenc is pretty specifically vetted for DVD compliancy in the first place.  There's also something of a chance I'd use it for doing MPEG-2 for Blu-ray, although if I was encoding for Blu-ray I'd probably be using H.264 99% of the time.

Redsandro:
Thanks, that's the kind of experiences I am looking for!

My main use is also for DVD. I pretty much use AVC for anything else. A dvd-player is almost as common as a faucet these days so it's a good way to distribute presentations for the livingroom.

But it's clear that your experience is much worse than mine. I don't know for the pulldown because I do processing like that in AviSynth anyway, but the compression itself looks different but similar (as in no obvious blockiness and other artifacts).

I hope HCenc goes open source some time so anything good can be merged with libavcodec, but I don't think so.

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