Re: Fixing mpeg2enc

Hi Andrew, Steven & gang,

first off, good to hear from you again! I already read Steven's email
messages on the ffmpeg-users mailinglist. Steven, sorry if I don't
respond much on the lists, but there's a big community of people that
can help with this so I try to focus my limited attention on
development instead, in addition to the PhD work which takes most of
my time (Gernot-style, basically :-) ). If you need specific help,
don't hesitate to email me privately. I do read all my incoming email.

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 8:01 AM, Andrew Stevens <[email protected]> wrote:
> However is really any role for mpeg2enc these days?  I thought ffmpeg
> did a pretty decent job these days.  Leastways it seems fine when I've
> transcoded MPEG-2 via MythTV - which I've always assumed uses ffmpeg (I
> have NO analog video sources anymore..)
>
> Ronald: what do you think? You still seem pretty active in the wider
> open-source multimedia world (a big 'well-done' with those WebM
> efforts...!!).   Duplicated effort with multipleprojects none of which
> is really quite production quality is the bane of open-source...

MythTV can use both, I think. But hm... That's a difficult question to
ask. :-). A major problem here is that both mpeg2enc as well as
FFmpeg's MPEG*-encoder are no longer all-that-actively developed at
this point. FFmpeg's active encoding development focuses more on newer
formats (e.g. AAC+H264) nowadays. DVD might be the biggest market in
practice, but developers consider it obsolete already. (Doesn't it
make you sad how quickly these new technologies become obsolete?)

Let's go by popular opinion:
Also see http://www.transcoding.org/transcode?FFmpeg_Vs._Mpeg2enc
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/221423-ffmpeg-vs-mpeg2enc
https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/cinelerra/2004-September/002222.html

Quick summary if you don't want to click the links:
- When giving it the right parameters, both give you DVD-compliant
output (and sorry Steven, I really don't know why some of your
commands don't work, my best recommendation is to take the ones that
do work and adapt them gradually to lead to your desired output, even
if this means specifying a slightly higher bitrate to the 2nd pass b/c
the rate control screws up, and having to do video+audio all in the
same command...)
- FFmpeg is faster, might generally provide a little better perceived
quality output in the same encoding time compared to mpeg2enc
- Mpeg2enc better handles hardware standards (and the "quirks") and if
you give it all the time in the world, it will actually surpass FFmpeg
in perceived quality also
And Steven will have read on the ffmpeg-users mailinglist already that
in the end, for the enthusiasts who can spare the time, this means
that many people do actually use mpeg2enc. The fragmentation might not
be ideal, but that's just the way it is... So: I definitely think it's
worth fixing the bugs, mpeg2enc is used a lot, although most
GUI-software that's actually out there will nowadays support encoding
using either one at the choice of the user.

I could try to convince you to work on FFmpeg but I'll leave that for
some other time and place. ;-). VP8 is amazing, I might study+learn
the art of video encoding using this new "toy" format. After all,
libvpx is somewhat slow. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Oh,
fragmentation...

Cheers,
Ronald

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