H.264 / MPEG-4 FFMpeg on Blu-ray rips

[ACiB708]

Hi all, just wanted to kno, I'm ripping my blu-ray collection, and well MPEG-4 is WAY faster than H.264, these are my settings:
1280*720 res
7000 kbps bitrate
MKV container
Audio passthrough to keep it the same as the source

The output size will be almost identical, but my question is will there be a noticeable difference in video quality? I mean, I know H.264 has better quality at lower bitrates but is it worth the extra time? (looots of extra time) or is it a quality difference only noticeable by experts?

Thanks all!

[hunterk]

The difference is *huge*, assuming you actually utilize the advanced x264 options. I recommend you try transcoding a short video using the 2 options and see for yourself.

[kosobai]

For any given bitrate, x264 will produce better quality video, expecially where the advanced options are used. BUT these options would make even a brand-new top-spec Mac Pro crawl. Unless you have some Power 6+ iron kicking around, I wouldn't bother. Ffmpeg is good enough if not starved of bitrate.

[JohnAStebbins]

Ffmpeg is good enough if not starved of bitrate.

I just can't agree with that. One of the most visible problems you will see is due to ffmpeg's lack of good adaptive quantization. The visible effect of this is scenes that have a moderate amount of complexity and large background areas with low complexity are going to exhibit haloing in those background areas (not enough gradients to smooth what should be a smooth background). The halos move as the scene changes. It's very distracting. There are numerous other advantages to x264, that with practice you'll learn to spot.

[kosobai]

Indeed, I had noticed this 'banding' effect, which resembles playing a 16 bit video game. With QP 4 or 3, this effect vanished, at least using the material I was encoding (Shakespeare in Love). x264 has more stops than a pipe organ; I just don't have 6 months of my life to spend learning which ones to pull out!

If you recommend a good movie, I'll buy a copy and we can compare results.

[JohnAStebbins]

I see the banding even at QP 2 in selected scenes of pretty much any movie I encode with ffmpeg. I was just experimenting the other day with ffmpeg settings in handbrake to see if I could diminish the problem. I was using Ultraviolet as my sample. There are a few ffmpeg settings I would expect to have some effect, but only one of them had any effect at all. And it came at the cost of about 45% reduction in encoding speed. Setting mbd=0, cmp=10 and subcmp=10 eliminates much of the banding (though still not all). I would have expected that nssew would have been useful in tuning the amount of banding, but it had no effect. Also, ffmpegs adaptive quantization controls had no perceptible effect (naq + scplx_mask).