Best Encoder when encoding with low bitrates

[MI6]

From your experiance, what encoder is best comparing to quality when encoding video with low bitrates (4000-4500 Kbs)

[Baldrick]

Encode to what? mpeg2, h264,etc?

[deadrats]

From your experiance, what encoder is best comparing to quality when encoding video with low bitrates (4000-4500 Kbs)

that really depends on a number of things:

1) what resolution are you talking about?

2) how high a quality source are you talking about?

the reality is, despite what any x264 worshiper will tell you, if you are starting with an extremely high quality source, perhaps if you had an unprocessed film transfer or footage you personally shot with a high end hi def camcorder that shoots to an uncompressed format and were going from that to dvd resolution, then any encoder/codec would give you excellent quality and you would have a hard time telling one encode from another.

also, filtering plays a very big part of the encoding equation, if you are encoding using encoder x sans filtering and comparing it to encoder y with a high quality denoise filter, then more often than not encoder y will win.

basically h264 in general holds an advantage at really low bit rates for any particular resolution and x264 in particular is a favorite among those that absolutely insist on bit rate starving their encodes (like those clowns that take a commercial 1080p blu-ray and transcode it down to 720p using under 4 mb/s) but once you let the bit rate fly and start using a decent amount of bit rate, then the encoder/codec becomes less relevant, from a quality standpoint.

[MI6]

Encoding to MPEG 2 (720x576).

[deadrats]

Encoding to MPEG 2 (720x576).

well, you have a number of good, solid choices, the best free one has to be hc encoder, tmpg plus is also very good, you can get a 15 day fully functional trial from the developer.

[jagabo]

I find Hc to be better than TMPGEnc Plus. Use HcGUI if you aren't comfortable with CLI encoders.

[guns1inger]

HCEnc does very well at lower bitrates