TMPGEnc to License x264 Encoder for TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress

[poisondeathray]

Pegasys Inc. announced today that it has formally signed an agreement with x264 LLC for the use of the x264 H.264/AVC encoder under a commercial license. The x264 encoder will be integrated into the next generation of Pegasys’ popular video conversion software, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, and will be the first commercial software granted a commercial license for this technology in Japan.

Source:
http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/press/10_1125.html

[hech54]

I don't get it. I use X264 quite often.....for free.

[jagabo]

Yes, it's free for personal use. Not for commercial use.

[poisondeathray]

Perhaps some people want a easier-to-use GUI or other features (like color correction , filters etc..)

(although there are easy to use, free GUI's for x264 already)

The press release doesn't say if they are dumping Mainconcept AVC encoder (which they, and virtually every other video software company have licensed for years) . I suspect the licensing fees for using Mainconcept are much higher than x264

[SatStorm]

I was ready to post this!

Pegasys' solutions are far from "simply encoders". I bet this is the first step to impliment x264 to TMPGenc Authoring Works.
And yeah, of course we can do those things for free, using other alternatives today. But that's not the point.

[RabidDog]

The bad thing is that their software is very firmly Intel/Nvidia biased. Dont know how much cash has been splashed but its a shame. Also their stuff tends to be very sloooowww. SO will this be any better? Be good to see some Benchmarks on various configs.

[SatStorm]

Actually, I use their programs over a decade (the legendary TMPGenc, once the best free encoder for CVD/SVCD), mostly with AMD CPUs and I never had a problem. They do say that their products are optimized for Intel / nvidia, but probably this is just (a paid by Intel / Nvidia) marketing.

This announcement also posted on the x264 homepage, so for some reason they also think that it is important.

[deadrats]

Pegasys Inc. announced today that it has formally signed an agreement with x264 LLC for the use of the x264 H.264/AVC encoder under a commercial license. The x264 encoder will be integrated into the next generation of Pegasys’ popular video conversion software, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, and will be the first commercial software granted a commercial license for this technology in Japan.

Source:
http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/press/10_1125.html

an number of things come to mind:

1) that's dark shikari?!? just looking at his geeky face explains why he is such a douche in all online interactions.

2) i guess this means that tmpg will cease to use main concept's encoder, which is too bad, i had really hoped that pegasys would license mc's gpu powered avc encoder and integrate that into their product.

on a general note, i think this will mark the death knell for pegasys' products as real players in the desktop market. there was a time pegasys took the lead in embracing and including the latest technologies in their products: they were one of the first to support sse2 with the original tmpg encoder, they were the first to embrace sse3, ssse3 and sse4 (<--which made a significant difference in many cases), hell to this day their software is one of the few to support sse4; they were the first to have gpu accelerated filters (which helped out quite a bit) and they were the first to have gpu powered decoding, though it's only limited to mpeg-2.

after that, they just rested and offered no real improvements to their software, maybe adding support for some additional formats, but it seemed that they were more interested in trying to market their various sdk's.

i honestly don't see anyone spending $100 bucks on tmpg express if it's major feature is that x264 is "seamlessly integrated", x264 is open source and legally free to use, there are a ton of open source projects that can be used with it and even the current tmpg express can output to x264 using the vfw framework.

honestly, considering how often x264 is updated and how many times they have to fix a bug that crept in, pegasys is looking at a situation where their precious baby is going to be outdated within a month of it being released.

if they didn't want to, or couldn't afford to, license mc's gpu powered avc encoder they should just have worked on offering a purevideo/uvd decoder for both amd and nvidia video cards that supported avc, mpeg-2 and vc-1 decoding, that alone would have catapulted them to the head of the class.

very disappointing news, pegasys should have spent more time worrying about improving their product and less time about trying to implement more effective anti-piracy measures (which were easily bypassed, btw.)

edit: one additional thought comes to mind: i'm not 100% sure that this is completely legal on the part of the current x264 developers, the software was originally created and GPL'd by Laurent Aimar;
Jason and Loren, the current lead developers are now taking the GPL'd product and creating a second "commercially friendly" license for the software that they can sell.

this doesn't smell kosher to me and i think that they are going to have problems somewhere down the line.

[SatStorm]

Personally, I don't like mainconcept's H264 encoder. I prefer x264 on all terms (quality, speed, flexibility).
And x264 might not be CUDA/whatever today, but it might be in the future, who knows. I know that it is 10bit today and it is multicore.
If the next year the 6 core and 8 core CPUs became standard, CUDA / GPU won't do so much difference for encoding. Those extras might be helpful for decoding (so to feed the encoder) or the filters.

About who buys commercial products while there are free / open source solutions out there, the answer is: the majority. Same way they buy Windows and Macs, while there is Linux for free.

[deadrats]

Personally, I don't like mainconcept's H264 encoder. I prefer x264 on all terms (quality, speed, flexibility).

the biggest thing x264 has going for it is that it is the only legally free h264 encoder currently available (not counting the avc encoder that's part of the ffmpeg project).

if sony's blu-code or cce's HD encoder were also legally free or very inexpensive (or easily pirated) x264 would quickly disappear from common usage.

as far as quality is concerned, x264's advantage ceases to exist as soon as one uses a sane amount of bit rate for a particular encode, people that swear by x264 seem to have a rather bizarre fascination with bit rate starving their encodes, they seem to get off in being able to say that they only used 4 mb/s to encode a 720p video.

it's never made any sense to me

And x264 might not be CUDA/whatever today, but it might be in the future, who knows.

it's never going to be ported to CUDA, Open CL or DX Compute, the lead developer has been quite clear on this. the reason he has given range from the absurd to the idiotic but the reality is that the design decisions the two lead developers have made have for all practical purposes made porting x264 to run on a gpu all but impossible without a major rewrite.

the Jason has also adamantly come out against using the new avx instruction set though it does seem he is willing to work towards seeing if parts (or all) of x264 will run on sandy bridge's new video transcoding engine.

I know that it is 10bit today and it is multicore.

do you even know what it means that it features a "10 bit" encoding option? how much benefit do you think it's actually going to give you when your sources are most likely 8 bit?

yeah, if i were playing around with uncompressed 10 bit sources and x264 suddenly allowed me to created 10 bit avc videos i might get excited, until i remembered that most, if not all, avc decoders don't support 10 bit avc decoding just yet (someone correct me if i'm wrong on this).

If the next year the 6 core and 8 core CPUs became standard, CUDA / GPU won't do so much difference for encoding. Those extras might be helpful for decoding (so to feed the encoder) or the filters.

they're not going to become standard, the road maps have been available for quite some time, the shift is towards integrated gpu's (with integrated uvd's), improved threading (via SMT), wider alu's and fpu's and more beefier SIMD capabilities.

eventually, at least according to amd's road maps, all floating point calculations will be handled by integrated gpu's, so i wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we find ourselves right back to dual core cpu's with large L2's, 256 bit alu's, no fp/simd units and a homogeneous gpu.

About who buys commercial products while there are free / open source solutions out there, the answer is: the majority. Same way they buy Windows and Macs, while there is Linux for free.

actually i would venture to say that most people don't buy their copy of windows or OS X, it either came installed on the pc they bought or they pirated it.

i remember microsoft releasing it's findings concerning piracy rates of XP and how they arrived at their conclusions: basically they looked at how many licenses they sold world wide and compared it to the number of unique IP addresses that accessed windows update servers, the rate was 100 to 1, for every 1 license they sold 100 separate computers downloaded an update.

same thing goes for Mac OS, i would say that the number of people that actually buy each update apple tries to stuff down it's customers throat is significantly less than the number of people that find a boot leg copy somewhere on the net or go down to their equivalent of china town and get a copy for $5.

[lordsmurf]

Personally, I don't like mainconcept's H264 encoder. I prefer x264 on all terms (quality, speed, flexibility). .

Not sure what you mean here.

Quality of MC generally surpasses x264, sometimes pegged as the same in certain tests (but those are usually pro-x264, so not really unbiased).

Speed of MC is quite good, especially with GPU accelerators. Even on a dual-core system, I can pull down very quick encodes.

Flexible? Pretty much anything is tweakable in Reference.

It's the de facto preference of professionals for a reason.

I suspect the licensing fees for using Mainconcept are much higher

They've been on a non-stop increase for years now. I remember when MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder was about $200 -- now it's $500+

[SatStorm]

It is the defacto pro solution, but on the low bitrates that I use mostly, x264 seems to me better.
I don't know if there is a difference between the (older) demo 1.x version I used for tests back when I had time for this, and the full version 2.1 of today. And I don't know if that has to do with the source I use.
Most people focus on HD those days, from BluRay. But here in Europe we have the new DVB Terrestrial transmission with the mpeg 4 format so we have to deal with SD framesizes and low bitrates. Also, the new "fashion" is the various TV providers to convert their mpeg 2 satellite channels to mpeg 4, keeping the non valid framesizes for any kind of authoring. Those broadcasts need re-encoding. When I tried a couple of things last year, I liked the results of x264 more than Mainconcept. I sticked with it since then.

x264 is opensource. It might support things through a fork project or whatever in the future. Personally, I don't know if theres gonna be a need for it, because I believe 6 core and 8 cores CPUs gonna turn mainstream in the next couple of years. Encoding is an issue but filtering is another. If CUDA/whatever deals with the filters and CPU with the encoder, it's OK with me. This is how I do things anyway (filtering + encoding).

Using low bitrates are not a fascination, it is a habit and in many cases a need. It is like those 128kb mp3s: They are not good enough but they are OK for most uses.
Personally, I have an archos 605 with 30GB and the mp4 plug in. When I'm our for work, I need to have with me lots of material, for various reasons. And I don't mean movies necessary. You can easily say "it is outdated, buy a new one, it is so cheap now". The problem is that we, the P.I.G. countries of Europe, a couple of years ago use to have enough money to buy stuff on every new need. We were consumers and good ones. Greece use to be gadget's paradise. Now, we barelly have to pay for food. But what we do have, are many gadgets unused. So, the new thing here, is to start using them since we already have them! So, the interest about extreme H264 encoding, is huge: 2 year old Phones, older mediaplayer, older notebooks... you get the point.


Regarding 10bit, I have to say that for anime is better. Better data allocation, smoother picture. In theory. My tests some half year ago didn't show me any difference. But it is to early to talk about it. I mention it is 10bit just to point out that it has future, it has new things to play with. Personally I won't use it since day one, because I care for the most possible compression with acceptable visual results.

I don't follow the inner situations / deals of programmers / developers myself (anymore at least). But deadrats, you have a point there!

[lordsmurf]

Prior to v1.6, it was just an MPEG-2 encoder. v1.6 is quite good, and v2.1 is even better.
I operate in the streaming media and broadcast domain, too -- not Blu-ray right now, as there's little demand.
Blu-ray is largely jailed to commercial releases for wide distribution.

The economy sucks everywhere.

[SatStorm]

I don't remember exactly the version I done those mainconcept tests, but it was when they first supported H264. It was branded Mainconcept H264 encoder if I remember correct.

SD with H264/ACC is what most switch here in Europe those days. High Definition remains a subcription thing for the few. Very few HD channels broadcast for free on our Satellites (mostly Germans). And Blu Ray don't sell that much. What it does sell, are those older ~42" LCDs / Plasmas, under 800 euros. Those ones barelly can show the benefits of High Definition.

Economy sucks everywhere, I know. It is a matter of time otherd in Europe follow our "example". We woke one day with the big ones telling us that "we are doomed", cut our salaries in half, cut the 1/3 of the jobs, rise 35% the taxes and take us away all the rights we have as workers (8hours, 5 days, the salary of xmass, etc). Meanwhile we do have a huge problem with migrations from East, now jobeless so the crime rise.
I don't know where all this gonna lead anymore. Not for us here in Greece, for Europe in all.

[RabidDog]

Dont fret satstorm .. PIG countries are just working off the Fat they accumulated during the Boom years, similar to America. Economy in ASia is doing quite nicely . Economy in Africa is a growing thing. South AMerica is also growing as is China and India. they will be gadget buyers of the future. In two years time you will look back on your post and laugh! HA-hahahaha.. HAHAHAHA . Damn, if only they'd release the arms on this jacket.
Seems silly NOT to use the transcoding instructions in sandy bridge tho, that sort of chip level stuff can give very healthy decreases in runtimes. Blu-rays are selling well and are on track to oust DVD's..

[SatStorm]

Well, I had my x-mas present: I'm official jobless since yesterday (after 12 years in the raw). So, I don't know what I'm gonna do in 2 years from now, but I know what I gonna do this year for sure: First, I gonna cut all the expenses, including telephone and internet connection! No money, no party! (thank God I have my own house, so I don't have any rent to pay).
So if you don't see me around the next months, you know what is happening! I hope I do a fast comeback, but I don't bet on it!

[Anonymous344]

Perhaps some people want a easier-to-use GUI or other features (like color correction , filters etc..)

I certainly do because I find MeGUI and AutoMKV and the like hard to figure out. Something that looks like HCEnc's GUI with clear options would be ideal. I can't seem to find different matrices to use for x264.

EDIT: Sorrry to hear of your troubles, SatStorm. I hope your situation improves.

[led]

From german shops I've placed an order for a Philips DVD 5180 Blu-ray "both Blue-Ray & 3D BLUE RAY PLAYER and they've turned down my order on Christmas.

As I am aware IF there are ISO standards on it and one would look over http://x264vfw.sourceforge.net/ for the free codec, the ISO standards as I recall ISO13813, are free domain in my country. If the standard are of Pioneer or LG's REGiSTERED PROPERTY than it is not an ISO (international standardisation organisation act) but a "factory standard". I agree companies to register x264 as H264 .