Why are h.264 files so big?

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Gunboat Diplomat

You can make an XviD movie at a much higher quality than an h.264 version simply by making the file size that much bigger,

No, you can't. Certain problems with the ASP codecs NEVER go away no matter how much bitrate you throw at them.

Originally Posted by Gunboat Diplomat

so... why would h.264 carry a stigma of being strictly of higher quality rather than having better quality per bitrate?

Because it IS better, duh.

The logic for creating a h.264 version with higher bitrate (and the same resolution) as the XviD version goes something like this: "The XviD version will suck anyway, so let's create a small, crap-quality version for the people who don't care or don't want to download a lot, and one high-quality version for the people who DO care about video quality."

Originally Posted by Shounen

150-179mb vs 233mb? +50 wont get you at that awsome bitrate/quality but the quality itself at all, will improve(say better color).

For the 16457567th time:
THE AMOUNT OF BITRATE A GIVEN EPISODE REQUIRES TO LOOK GOOD HAS NO RELATION WHATSOEVER TO THE USUAL FIXED SIZES.

<shameless boasting> Take a look at A-Keep&gg's later Night Head Genesis encodes, for example. 85 MB per ep, and still looks good. (Yes, really. Try comparing it to the previous 140 MB encodes and see if you spot any significant differences. Bonus points to any non-encoder who does.)

Point: certain shows can be compressed into oblivion and back and still look good, others can't. I should also remind the honored forum populace of the old truth "crap in, crap out". A good encoder can rescue a crappy raw to some degree, but there are limits (and I assume this is what bayoab is getting at with his "filesize is not related to quality" comment).

[Shounen]

Originally Posted by kodachrome

If it's was LuPerry's sub of it, then it was h264. Unless he put wrong labels on the file names...

I dont watch anything that has to do with fansubs, unless i wanna check how there doing with the quality...However i did watch fansubs back in 2002

Originally Posted by TheFluff

For the 16457567th time:
THE AMOUNT OF BITRATE A GIVEN EPISODE REQUIRES TO LOOK GOOD HAS NO RELATION WHATSOEVER TO THE USUAL FIXED SIZES.

Again, I know this already and most rips have ended pretty neat at that size.


My RAW had h.264, size about 550mb
Lu perry or whatever his name was, had also h.264 in his HD release
more of an LQ.HD I'd say.

[ffdshow]

Originally Posted by Karnot

Absolute bull, UNLESS you have a hardware h.264 decoding graphics card.

I think video resolution has bigger impact on CPU usage than filesize. And don't take the CPU clock rate seriously. An old sempron 2.4G may use 70% of CPU for playback, while a AMD64 3G may use <20% CPU for the same file. Another thing is the output method, I use renderless mode or OpenGL so it is slower.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by bayoab

I'd love to see someone attempt the following experiment:
Grab a random scene from some random show or grab a raw from one of those 5 minute shows, but nothing where either codec clearly has an advantage over the other. Encode both scenes with the same target size relative to a 175mb encode with no special features*. Then release them with the XVID one labeled H.264 and vice versa. Let's see how many people still claim the true H.264 one is better quality.

Sample 1
Sample 2 (both 20 MB)
5000 frames from Maria-sama ga Miteru. Source is R2 DVD, exact same lossless was used. I used my usual high-quality settings for both XviD and x264. Same bitrate (850, a realistic value for a 175 MB ep with ~140-160kbps audio or so) was used for both. To me, at least, it's blatantly obvious which one is which, but try comparing them yourself. Don't cheat by looking at ffdshow's codec info window!
Also note that this show compressess pretty well - XviD is slightly starved for bitrate in these samples, but not THAT much.

[Shounen]

booooo
keep it 640x480, 2nd... 704x400 (4:3 wtf?...dont do that). 3rd AVC is not the type of "x264" that i'd prefer or h.264 as the real name for the codec is

Most encoders leave a trace on what you've used, I still and always will hate that one!

update:
Again XviD leaves just like jpg's do, artefacts...unless were talking about non-animation were the eye will be completly mistaken

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

Sample 1
Sample 2 (both 20 MB)
5000 frames from Maria-sama ga Miteru. Source is R2 DVD, exact same lossless was used. I used my usual high-quality settings for both XviD and x264. Same bitrate (850, a realistic value for a 175 MB ep with ~140-160kbps audio or so) was used for both. To me, at least, it's blatantly obvious which one is which, but try comparing them yourself. Don't cheat by looking at ffdshow's codec info window!
Also note that this show compressess pretty well - XviD is slightly starved for bitrate in these samples, but not THAT much.

Yes it is completely obvious to my eye too... But show that to a normal leecher, and I wonder....

Spoiler for what to look for:

The most glaring differences are in the dark parts of the hair... The colors are blotchy and there is some jpeginess in the xvid. Keep in mind too, that the highest quant used in the xvid was 5... whereas the highest in the h.264 was 22 (equivalent to about quant 3 for xvid)... So it's no wonder the h.264 is obviously higher quality.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Yes it is completely obvious to my eye too... But show that to a normal leecher, and I wonder....

Spoiler for what to look for:

The most glaring differences are in the dark parts of the hair... The colors are blotchy and there is some jpeginess in the xvid. Keep in mind too, that the highest quant used in the xvid was 5... whereas the highest in the h.264 was 22 (equivalent to about quant 3 for xvid)... So it's no wonder the h.264 is obviously higher quality.

Spoiler for response:

Well, he asked for the same bitrate and got it.

Originally Posted by Shounen

keep it 640x480, 2nd... 704x400 (4:3 wtf?...dont do that).

1. Look up what the word "anamorphic" means
2. mod16 > "perfect 16:9"

Originally Posted by Shounen

3rd AVC is not the type of "x264" that i'd prefer or h.264 as the real name for the codec is

...
H.264 is not a codec. Neither is AVC, which is the MPEG name of the same standard. x264 IS a codec (or rather, it's an encoder only).
Now, what the heck made you bring this up at all?

[checkers]

Originally Posted by Shounen

booooo
keep it 640x480, 2nd... 704x400 (4:3 wtf?...dont do that). 3rd AVC is not the type of "x264" that i'd prefer or h.264 as the real name for the codec [B]is

edit: beaten! :<
Please, if you are going to write stream of conciousness, at least use real sentences . Onto your points:

• 'keep' it 640x480? The DVD resolution is 720x480, and I assume the video was encoded with a black matte at 4:3, hence the vertical cropping. (Unless this was so quickly thrown together TheFluff just went for 1:1 AR)
• The codec is x264. The standard is h264 (note lack of dot!), aka [MPEG-4] AVC

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Mentar

Dang, all those codec developments and optimizations to save bits and bitrate in the past years have all been in vain ... bayoab, please leave the technical talk to people who actually have any knowledge about this issue. This ignorant statement disqualifies you from any meaningful discussion on this subject.

I'll quote TheFluff here since you clearly missed the point but he got part of what I was getting at.

Originally Posted by TheFluff

For the 16457567th time:
THE AMOUNT OF BITRATE A GIVEN EPISODE REQUIRES TO LOOK GOOD HAS NO RELATION WHATSOEVER TO THE USUAL FIXED SIZES.

Point: certain shows can be compressed into oblivion and back and still look good, others can't. I should also remind the honored forum populace of the old truth "crap in, crap out". A good encoder can rescue a crappy raw to some degree, but there are limits (and I assume this is what bayoab is getting at with his "filesize is not related to quality" comment).

The other part of my point (beside compressability due to colors) is that an incompetent encoder can bloat a file (easily). (This is assuming they do not use the size control option and instead use the quant/qual/bitrate options on XviD. I have no idea what options .264 stuff has.). This is of course much harder considering how encoding is now, but is still possible. Kanon prelude would probably be a good example of the variation possible in file size. (I would bet from seeing at least 3 of them that the order of the sizes is not the order of the quality.)

[Harukalover]

Originally Posted by checkers

[*]The codec is x264. The standard is h264 (note lack of dot!), aka [MPEG-4] AVC[/LIST]

I always thought x264 is just the name of the encoder not the codec itself... While H264/AVC are the name of the standard... (Guess I need to study more. :/ )

Originally Posted by TheFluff

The logic for creating a h.264 version with higher bitrate (and the same resolution) as the XviD version goes something like this: "The XviD version will suck anyway, so let's create a small, crap-quality version for the people who don't care or don't want to download a lot, and one high-quality version for the people who DO care about video quality."

Exactly the point I was trying to illustrate... I guess my choice of wording sucks though. :P

But yeah that's how I usually operate. I only do XviD for those who fear change or can't play H264 files (Old computer or no knowledge of codecs to play it back). I had the same problem with my old Celeron 950Mhz PC, but back then I had no clue what I was doing. Maybe CoreAVC could pull a miracle off.

Will check those samples out when I get back from school...

[checkers]

well.. codec is short for encoder/decoder, so really x264 is only an encoder and not a codec

[DryFire]

Originally Posted by checkers

well.. codec is short for encoder/decoder, so really x264 is only an encoder and not a codec

Well if you want to get technical it did have a (non-working) decoder for a long time:

Changeset 588

Timestamp:
    10/10/06 07:05:55 (1 week ago)
Author:
    pengvado
Message:

    no more decoder. it never worked anyway, and the presence of defunct code was confusing people.

[Shounen]

Again XviD...less quality more crap. H.264/AVC better quality, less crap. Of course that XviD fails for it's both old and crappy encoding technique, but still... XviD is both faster and easier to encode. Even for a complete newbie, that uses Movie maker or something similar. But 95% of all, dont give a damn about oooh~ I can see some crap there and look there color is so.... Anyways XviD will stay here for about 5 more (or more!) years, you'll see. If we compare to how many people that are out there, that have faster than say 4mbit d/l. Then the majority is below that, so there.

I live Sweden, and we got about 9mil people. About 3mil got more 10mbit or faster. And yes comparing to say US, you guys got how many millions? But still, so many still have dsl or some have still have modems *cough*. So we download high quality stuff mhm.. yes.

Remember DivX.3 was used before, after that came XviD, tho WMV3 was also used in some cases, /me points at KAA'

A friend of mine got a 2.6G 32bit, tho he has like what 56k or something. He dosent know a s*** about codecs. he even uses VLC. I think since he had problems with both the MKV/Mp4 container, which is why he dosent download fansubs with that container (or with the h.264 codec) at all. 99% of all people still like's AVI and XviD.. user friendly and all that.

update:
I once gave my friends some dvdrips of love hina back in 2003, simple XviD in an Avi, embeeded subs (SSA) they liked it. (this was never released in public ) Next time I brought them Love Hina Again. Tho this time it was h.264 (or x264 you name it) in mkv's, OGG Vorbis as sound. That's when the problems came up. I cant play them, no sound what to do~. That's when it came...dont give "funny" things to people that you know. Explaining on what to do would take to long so.

So this is why leechers want the easy found, easy get version. Keep it XviD (easiest decoder to find on the web) MP3 who wouldent be able to play theys? And finally AVI (created back in 1992 i presume?) No chance that they wouldent be able to play theys, unless they some other OS.

[DryFire]

Originally Posted by Shounen

XviD is both faster and easier to encode.

And you pay a price for that speed. Link

[[darkfire]]

Well for Megami-Animes zegapain we did both h264 and xvid. Here are the file size specs

Xvid: 226mb
h264: 230mb

Now that right there makes it look like the h264 was bigger, but in reality the xvid was bigger.

The h264 release had a higher resolution (480) and a higher bitrate audio. Xvid was had the standard size (704x396).

Xvid:
Video: ~204mb
Audio: ~22mb 128kbs MP#

h264
Video: ~197mb
Audio: ~33mb 192kbs AAC

Now is the h264 video really bigger then the xvid one. At a glance id did look that way. But what was bigger was actully the audio. This may not be normal of fansubs but not all h264 doesnt always mean bigger files. You have to look at all the aspects about what could make the file bigger.

[NoSanninWa]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Yes it is completely obvious to my eye too... But show that to a normal leecher, and I wonder....

While I am not exactly a "normal leecher," neither do I have any experience or training as an encoder. For the purposes of encoding I am probably the closest thing to a "normal leecher" in this thread. Since I merely have an experienced eye, I'll tell you my assessment in the hopes it has some validity.

Well I started out by viewing sample 1. I skipped around a bit since MariMite without sound is rather Meh, but I thought that the video quality was quite nice. Then I put on sample 2 and immediately said, "Yuck!" There you have it, the response of a "normal leecher" is yuck. Okay, I wouldn't have minded the video quality as much if I hadn't just been watching sample 1, but the response is still valid.

Spoiler for what to look for:

The most glaring differences are in the dark parts of the hair... The colors are blotchy and there is some jpeginess in the xvid.

Now that you point that out, it is clearly true. That's probably the reason I responded, "Yuck."

Keep in mind too, that the highest quant used in the xvid was 5... whereas the highest in the h.264 was 22 (equivalent to about quant 3 for xvid)... So it's no wonder the h.264 is obviously higher quality.

While the poster did specify that the same bitrate should be used in the examples, this is probably not the way that TheFluff would normally choose to make a pair of 20MB samples if he was trying to maximize the quality of both of them. A fairer test might be to see what happens if TheFluff tried to maximize the quality of both while maintaining the same filesize. But I think he's pleased enough with the results of this.

[Medalist]

Well there seems to be many answers to this and yet "some" of us are getting on to comparing h264 and why the files using that codec are so big...[darkfire]'s post being meaningful but what was the point? It didn't answer anything or ask or discuss the sole topic. And technically there really "ISN't" an answer to this question because:
----: 1. Different encoders may have different styles and choices
----: 2. Why not they be big?
----: 3. A satisfying file size varies upon different people (and i mean everyone outside of encoders)
----: 4. If the job is done correctly at that so point, say 233mb, then why ask if it's good.
----: 5. I suppose that since high-filesize does job why take chances on multiple encodes by trying to go lower ( way lower )
----: 6. H.264 as explained I believe in this thread has some reason to be placed at high file sizes:
----: 7. More widespread? Because the filesize does "somewhat" decide quality (but i won't go further into that)
----: 8. I assume h264 files at that size are pleasing to you, no? So then why ask?
----: 9. Did I mention why not?
----: 10. Average Analysis: h264 on avg has about a third greater bitrate at 170mb then XVID...so why not push the limits further?

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Shounen

I live Sweden, and we got about 9mil people. About 3mil got more 10mbit or faster.

Completely off topic, but... please stop grabbing numbers out of thin air. According to this report, less than two million people in Sweden have ANY kind of broadband connection at ALL, and that's with a rather generous definition of "broadband".

Originally Posted by NoSanninWa

A fairer test might be to see what happens if TheFluff tried to maximize the quality of both while maintaining the same filesize.

Well, that's more or less what I did. If both are to be the same filesize, they HAVE to have the same bitrate. I guess I could have used a higher bitrate for both, though, to point out that Xvid does have problems h.264 lacks, even at very high bitrates. But that wouldn't have been as obvious, of course. The samples, as they are, favor h.264 slightly because Xvid inherently needs more bitrate to accomplish more or less the same thing, but that was kind of the point. I guess I could have encoded at constant quant 18/quant 2 and rambled about the differences, but I was lazy...

[Lambda]

I've been mostly watching 233Mb h264 encodes of Simoun, but in a couple of cases the Xvid versions have been significantly smaller than the h264s, so I've got them instead. Now, when I watched one of them, I remember at the start, being used it being in a larger file and done with a better codec, noting that it wasn't nearly such good quality. But a minute later I'd completely forgotten about this and I was just enjoying the show in the usual way. It made absolutely no difference to my viewing experience.

I think it's difficult to figure out how good an encode actually is, simply because the very process of wondering how good it is changes the way you look at it. The only way you can really tell that something is a meaningful imperfection is if you notice it even when you're not looking for it.

Personally, I've never found a 170Mb Xvid encode with meaningful imperfections, by which I mean anything which detracts from my enjoyment when actually watching the episode. I'd like to see more <150Mb h264 encodes, myself.

[Medalist]

Yes point, but some people like to take quality seriously and nothing is wrong with the XVID it's just H.264 known for high quality is downloaded and watched though I don't see why since well...(that's whole other story)

I would love to see smaller filesized h264 but someone has to set a trend that the quality is worth it.