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Options Analysis of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Codec x264

Project head: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
Testing, charts, analysis: Alexander Parshin, Vladimir Popov, Kira Ragulina

x264 Codec

We have analyzed x264 (version r938) - one of the best codecs of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video coding standard. This codec demonstrates great results of both quality and speed of encoding according to our previous MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec comparisons. Number of codec options were analysed to find their best values and codec’s optimal presets.

The following options were considered:

Macroblocks partitions selection (--partitions)
Number of B-frames (--bframes)
Number of reference frames (--ref)
Motion Estimation method (--me)
Algorithm of subpixel compensation usage (--subme)
Mixing of predictions from different frames (--mixed-refs)
Weighted predictions in B-frames (--weightb)

Report Contents

The report contain the following sections:

List of optimal presets for different encoding speed
Codec options analysis using colored point clouds
Codec options analysis using speed/quality tradeoff
Codec options analysis using convex-hull elumination

Presets quality and speed. Each point is tested preset.
X axis is encoding speed, Y axis is average bitrate for the same quality.

Main Results

Main results of this work are the following:

List of optimal presets. Those presets can be used for better encoding of your video.
Recommendations for presets usage for different encoding speed.
Conclusions about methods implementations efficiency related to other implemented methods.

We offer commercial evaluations of codec’s parameters set similar to this one. Write us an e-mail for more details.