XviD/mp3 encoding, just curious

[Kawatta-kun]

Unusable format of course, but I am just curious about it since I never really tried it. And for old computers or other projects it would be interesting to know how to encode. Where can i found the necessary info? Thanks.

[post-it]

finally; a question "this board is designed for"!

Obviously, there is a list on our F.A.Q. area ( which is really ( fairly ) up to date.

For an overall review of "just what the heck is it anyway" questions..
Doom9 .. left hand side, "DownLoads" -- welcome to our ~world~
Free Codecs dot com look for CPPP and other thing's
Video Help, VCD's & others .. under the "how to's" on the left ..

this is just the tip of the iceberg .. but it WILL get you pointed in the right direction.

[mirkosp]

The avtech 3.0 beta still has a section that covers xvid+mp3 encoding quite easily and well.
It's not in the 3.1 tho because, honestly, anybody should be able to playback h.264 nowadays, especially at SD resolution (I can get 720p h.264 to play on a N450 netbook without coreavc, so...) and encoding with zarxgui is easier too.

[Mister Hatt]

The old guide entry on xvid also has some bad info, for example using the official xvid encoder rather than libavcodec, which does a far better job. That said, h264 is easier to decode anyway (yes REALLY) so anyone who says they can't play it but can play xvid is doingitwrong.png

[Zarxrax]

To expand on that,
An h264 encode that DOESN'T use all of the advanced features should be easier to decode than xvid (and at higher quality).
I'm pretty sure "typical" h264 encodes though will use slightly more power than a typical xvid encode though.

[Mister Hatt]

Most of the heavy duty options (with the exception of CABAC which should be used on all encodes regardless) are actually only slow on the encoding side. The decoding slowdowns come from people actually using the loopback deblocker, and the high data throughput mostly. Capping your bitrate on a constant ratefactor encode goes miles towards smoother playback, it's how you handle crf streaming encodes correctly. CABAC certainly slows things down but shouldn't make a big difference if you're careful. The other points of slowdown are ridiculously high numbers of reference and b frames, and complex b-pyramid structures. People seem to think that these settings have huge benefits when really they are only theoretical maximums which usually don't have much of a big impact besides for slightly smaller encodes and significantly slower decoding. Another feature which really slows things down is weightp/weightb and the associated mbtree. If you go without mbtree, you can turn these off without much of a problem, although the encode will be larger so the vbv stuff needs to be handled even more carefully if your machine has low throughput.