anyone use any "alternative" codecs?

[deadrats]

and if so, what do you think of them?

i have been playing around with vp8 and theora with the settings maxed out and a gop of 250 using xmedia recode and i have to say i am very surprised by the high quality encodes. it's true that they tend to be very slow but then again x264 at the highest settings is also slow as shit.

just wondering if anyone has used any of these or maybe one of the wavelet codecs like snow and what you thought of it.

hopefully dirac, vp9 and h265 will be here soon, i can't wait to see what they can do.

[Selur]

VP9: still to slow atm. too be useful (same as current H.265 codecs)
VP8: most of the time not as good as x264 with its psychovisual enhancements and 10bit encoding, but better than MPEG-4 ASP
theora: worse than MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid, Divx ASP,...)
dirac: not really useful atm. below MPEG-4 ASP and in rare cases above

quality per speed vise x264 beats them all atm., from my experience.

[deadrats]

any chance of adding x265 support in Hybrid anytime soon?

[Selur]

any chance of adding x265 support in Hybrid anytime soon?

short answer:

No



longer answer:

No, because x265 is far from usable:

Do you know of a source for a working H.265 encoder which isn't as slow as the reference encoder and supports input video pipe/std::in ?

From what I know, there are atm. a few encoder out there:

• x265 (https://code.google.com/p/x265/): seems to be based on an old H.265 reference encoder and hasn't been updated for over a year.
  -> not useable at all, especially since the old reference encoder wasn't spec compliant
• TAppEncoder (http://x264.fushizen.eu/builds/hevc-hm/): which is a small rudimentary command line interface for the reference encoder. Sadly the reference encoder is slow as hell. Like 7-9 hours for this 200 frames of an 1080p sample, since the reference encoder is single threaded without any optimization. Additionally the encoder only supports raw file input, so huge intermediate files are needed. -> it's simply not usable for normal encoding
• MnHEVC (http://mnhevc.com/request/): a project which attempts to optimize the reference encoder, sure it's around 7 times faster than the reference encoder, but sadly it's still based on a rather old version of the reference encoder and 7 times faster (1 hour per 200 frames) is still not a usable speed.

(see: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=166586)
-> all the currently available H.265 encoders are only for testing purposes and not for real world encoding

It's simply not worth the time to spend a few hours of time to add any sort of H.265 encoding support atm. like I wrote before:
a. the encoders only accept raw (= uncompressed YV12) files so huge intermediate files would be needed
b. the encoders are simply too slow to be useful (and since they are also only single threaded, even using some fast pc wouldn't help)

-> as soon, as there is a usable&free H.265 out there I will look into adding support for it in Hybrid
To be frank I would be surprised if we would see a usable encoder out there in the next 1-2 years.
Remember it took x264 more than 10 years to be where it is atm. so even if a lot more people help to develop a free&usable H.265 encoder it will probably still take another one to two years, if we are lucky.

Cu Selur

Ps.: I also would be surprised if the x265 project like it is atm., with one relatively unknown developer (did some x264 patches iirc.), would be one of the projects which made it into a usable state.