Best video codecs

Dominus Atheos · Post by **Dominus Atheos** » 2006-08-19 02:34am

I want to record stuff off my tv tuner, and I was wondering what the best format is.

My options are:

My tuner is a piece of unholy shit, and it will never get good quality, so I'm mostly concerned about size.

I have a Semperon 2800+ processor that runs at 2.0Ghz, and it'll be live encoding.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-08-19 08:24am

You might want to live-recored using HuffYUV and then at a later date compress it.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2006-08-19 03:14pm

If you're mainly concerned about size, and I'd recommend xVid. It's incredibly popular among most fansubbing groups, largely because it's a fairly universal format and can be compressed fairly well without sacrificing much in the way of quality. (Your typical half hour episode can fit into about 170mb of space, depending on the encoding methods, for example).

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-08-20 02:57am

For size usually DivX, XviD, or H.264 are very good formats. You've got all of those.

However, I don't know how much CPU power it'll take to encode those in real time, hopefully it won't cause any choppiness.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-08-20 03:47am

I've had very good results size/quality wise with H.264, but like Praxis I've got no idea if it works on live recording.

Actually, given the 'multiple pass' method most codec transcoding use, doesn't it make sense to record it initially with the best quality codec you can regardless of size, and compress it later? Using Xvid on a realtime stream means it can't be optimised, and it gets processed a frame at a time.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-08-20 04:50am

Yeah, I'd assume DV would be the absolute best quality, with minimum CPU usage, but ballooning filesize. Then encode it in H.264 or DivX or XviD later if you can.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-08-20 10:29am

Praxis wrote:Yeah, I'd assume DV would be the absolute best quality, with minimum CPU usage, but ballooning filesize. Then encode it in H.264 or DivX or XviD later if you can.

HuffYUV would be better as a capture format. DV playback is fast but encoding takes quite a bit of work.

Stark wrote:Actually, given the 'multiple pass' method most codec transcoding use, doesn't it make sense to record it initially with the best quality codec you can regardless of size, and compress it later? Using Xvid on a realtime stream means it can't be optimised, and it gets processed a frame at a time.

You are correct. Most MPEG-4 codecs work best in multipass mode.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-08-20 10:31am

On the other hand, Huff takes up huge amounts of disk space, and he might not have that much disk space to spare. It's also more sensitive to the speed of the hard disk.