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.
December 29th, 2005 at 11:00 am
What’s not obvious from the press release is that, while it is possible, it requires human interaction and multiple passes to achieve it. Digigami’s flagship product contains some (admittedly cool) tools to compare side-by-side before and after shots, view bitrate graphs, etc. so you can interactively tweak the compression. It is not a fully-automatic process.
Another thing not obvious is that their current flagship products are only available for Mac and won’t be ported to Windows any time soon.