4 ms·

Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for

Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD". x264 - core 57 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2005 - http://www.videolan.or g/x264.html - options: cabac=0 ref=3 deblock=1:1:1 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subm e=5 brdo=0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone =21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=12 nr=0 decimate=0 mbaff=0 bframes=2 b_pyramid =0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 bime=0 keyint=60 keyint_min=25 scenecut= 40(pre) rc=abr bitrate=2000 ratetol=1.0 rceq='blurCplx^(1-qComp)' qcomp=0.60 qpm in=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30 Even Youtube does a better job keeping modern than this; there's no excuse for startups to be using outdated technology.

alain94040 17y ago
I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard. See: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid. The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
  - wensing 17y ago
    "As the lead developer..." Great example of why I love HN (and IRC).
chrysb 17y ago
Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers. Thanks!
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary . If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode. I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it. Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)
  - danielrhodes 17y ago
    That's interesting. We do have some very recent versions of x264 installed (Core 67 - 68, depending on environment), but it looks like Mencoder might be using a different library. I'll have to check. Thanks!
    - DarkShikari 17y ago
      Yup, that's a classic issue; you can end up accidentally using ancient libraries without even realizing it. Also, 67-68 isn't particularly recent; the latest "stable" would probably be r1318 aka fe83a906ee aka Core 78. You can try trunk as well, but we're having some miscompilation issues with the latest improvements, so I wouldn't trust it for production use yet. Another note is to check your settings; a lot of people have all sorts of weird encoding commandlines (you included, given the contents of the string I pasted above) from the days when x264's setting system was baroque and confusing. Now the defaults are good and there's some nice automatic presets that let you easily pick a tradeoff of time vs. quality (see x264 --help), so you don't have to mess with weird options.

alain94040 17y ago

I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).

DarkShikari 17y ago
As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard. See: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid. The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
- wensing 17y ago
  "As the lead developer..." Great example of why I love HN (and IRC).

chrysb 17y ago

Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers. Thanks!

DarkShikari 17y ago
Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary . If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode. I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it. Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)
- danielrhodes 17y ago
  That's interesting. We do have some very recent versions of x264 installed (Core 67 - 68, depending on environment), but it looks like Mencoder might be using a different library. I'll have to check. Thanks!
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    Yup, that's a classic issue; you can end up accidentally using ancient libraries without even realizing it. Also, 67-68 isn't particularly recent; the latest "stable" would probably be r1318 aka fe83a906ee aka Core 78. You can try trunk as well, but we're having some miscompilation issues with the latest improvements, so I wouldn't trust it for production use yet. Another note is to check your settings; a lot of people have all sorts of weird encoding commandlines (you included, given the contents of the string I pasted above) from the days when x264's setting system was baroque and confusing. Now the defaults are good and there's some nice automatic presets that let you easily pick a tradeoff of time vs. quality (see x264 --help), so you don't have to mess with weird options.