MPEG-2 Not Dead Yet
Posted by Mark Nelson on 28th December 2005 | Permanent Link
The folks at Digigami want you to know that there’s plenty of life left in the venerable MPEG-2 video codec. In fact, they’re claiming that their VBR MPEG-2 code is every bit as good as H.264, thank you very much.
It’s a little bit audacious, but these guys are actually saying that their highly tuned encoder does a better job at encoding HD streams than an H.264 codec:
“In our tests here at Digigami, we find that our MPEG-2 encoder is actually outperforming H.264 by a wide margin on 720p/1080p film content. Typically, our HD MPEG-2 encoder can produce VBR files two thirds to one half the bitrate produced by current H.264 encoders. On our website we have compressed material which supports this assertion. A recent example is a 400MB H.264 720p video blog that we recompressed to 172MB MPEG-1 VBR. In our testing, only highly saturated, brightly colored material (atypical of most content) is improved by H.264 - owing primarily to the use of 4:2:2 color. It amuses us that our MPEG-1 VBR encoder can also match and outperform H.264 on many progressive encoding tasks at HD frame sizes. MPEG-1 is 6 years older than MPEG-2 and even more widely adopted, reliable, proven and trustworthy.”
Of course, done properly, I can imagine a lot of ways that a test like this could perform the technology inversion Digigami is claiming. But it is true that there has been a lot of time and energy put into the souping up of MPEG-2, while H.264 is a little more of a newbie.
Of course, they don’t go into too many details on what they’re using to do this testing, but if you have a kilo-US-buck you can buy their encoder and give it a shot yourself.