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MillimeterEncoding Best Practices, Part 2
Jun 23, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
In the previous installment, you read about which streaming codecs major broadcasters and corporate producers were using. Now you’ll see the results of some quality comparisons that I presented at Streaming Media East in New York last month. I compared the quality of H.264, Microsoft’s VC-1, and On2’s VP6 codec using both SD and HD test clips, which I describe further below.
As you may know, H.264 is a standard, and many companies have produced their own standards-compliant H.264 codecs. For this reason, H.264 quality varies depending upon who created the codec and the even the encoding tool. As part of my presentation, I compared the output of three H.264 codecs—MainConcept, Apple, and Dicas—and found that MainConcept as rendered by Rhozet’s Carbon Coder produced the best quality, so I used this output to compare against VC-1 and VP6.
Regarding VC-1, note that it’s the same codec as in Microsoft’s more familiar Windows Media Video 9 codec. It's just a rebranding to reflect SMPTE’s designating VC-1 a standard—primarily for HD playback devices such as the Samsung Blu-ray BD-P1000 that sits in my living room. For the record, I produced all VC-1 comparisons using Microsoft’s Expression Encoder 2.
VP6 is On2’s most famous of all Flash codecs, which I produce using On2’s flagship encoding tool, Flix Pro. There are now two versions of the VP6: VP6-S is recommended for high-definition production, and VP6-E is best for SD production.
Just before Streaming Media East, On2 announced a VP6 update that supposedly would deliver 40-percent better quality than the existing codec. Because On2 hadn’t yet integrated the new codec into Flix Pro, I asked if the company would supply sample encodes to my parameters using its existing inhouse tools. It did, and I’m showing those results in the comparisons you’ll see below. However, I'm not scoring the results because I didn’t have the final codec in hand.
