ErMaC's Guide to All Things Video - Part 4

MPEG1 - The Golden Oldie

Origins: Back in the very late 80's, the Motion Picture Experts Group was trying to come up with an open, efficient video compression standard which was officially brought into the International Standards Organization as ISO/IEC-11172, or more commonly known as MPEG1. The MPEG1 standard was designed originally for 1.5MBit/second datarates (i.e. 1X CD-ROM speed, the 1.5 figure includes audio however) and 352x240 resolution.

How it Works: MPEG relies heavily on Inter-frame compression. There are 3 different types of frames in the MPEG standard - Intraframes (I-frames), Predicate frames (P-frames), and Bidirectially-interpolated frames (B-frames). I-frames are essentially the MPEG equivalent of Keyframes - these frames have all the data necessary to recreate themselves, i.e. you don't need to reference another frame to render an I-frame. P-frames reference the previous I or P frame and store the changes in picture. B-frames are meant to be very low-bitrate frames, so they reference both past and future frames. The standard MPEG stream structure used in VCDs, SVCDs, and DVDs is IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBB, although the official MPEG standard doesn't place any restrictions on the distance between I or P frames. A group of frames that starts with an I frame and ends at the frame before the next I frame is called a Group of Pictures, or GOP. It's perfectly legal to stop a GOP short, insert a new keyframe and begin a new GOP at any time. This is akin to Variable Keyframe Interval in other codecs.

Benefits: MPEG1 was the codec which made distributable digital video happen. MPEG could be streamed, stored on CDs - you could do all sorts of stuff with it. Even today it is still a very viable compression algorithm. You can play MPEG movies on almost anything, from settop players, to PCs, to handhelds running PocketPC! That's pretty darn impressive!

Disadvantages: MPEG1 is old, lets make no bones about it. It's still damn good, and it beats out everything else in terms of compatibility, but in terms of technical quality there are better things out there. In order to get a good picture, it does require more bits/second than other codecs.

Recommendations: I use MPEG1 for my high-quality video distributions. The codec and MPEG file structure is very versatile, but I distribute high-quality 352x240 versions of my video at 2MBit/sec variable bitrate, and they look damn good. That way I know that almost anyone, anywhere, on any computer can view my videos.

MPEG2 - The Behemoth

Origins: After the MPEG1 standard was finalized, and people started trying to apply it to higher-resolution video pictures, there were many flaws in the standard that became apparent. The biggest of these was that MPEG1 could only compress progressive-scan images, which meant real TV pictures (which were interlaced) were very difficult to compress. MPEG2 was born out of the desire to achieve compression of broadcast-quality video, and to this end it has succeeded. MPEG2 is used for DVDs, ATSC (High Definition Television) broadcasts, Personal Video Recorders (such as TiVo), and many other applications. MPEG2 is so versatile that while originally it was planned to have an MPEG3 standard for High-Definition TV broadcasts, it turned out that MPEG2 scaled in terms of bitrate so that only 1 standard was necessary for both Standard and High Definition video.

How it Works: MPEG2 is very similar to MPEG1 when you look at the surface, although several of the underlying pieces have been completely changed. But for our purposes, it's good enough to say that MPEG2 is a souped-up version of MPEG1 with support for Interlaced video and High-res pictures.

Benefits: MPEG2 gives better picture quality than MPEG1 at full CCIR 601 resolution (720x480) and at comparable bitrate. Basically, MPEG2 scales, while MPEG1 doesn't.

Disadvantages: MPEG2 takes more CPU horsepower to decompress, and basically has no advantage over MPEG1 at lower resolutions. If you're distributing for the web, you're not going to want to be compressing stuff in MPEG2 instead of MPEG1 because the benefits of MPEG2 aren't realized until you get into full TV resolution, which means big filesizes.

Recommendation: If you're creating your own high-quality archival backups of your videos, I would encode them at DVD-quality MPEG2, but I would never use MPEG2 for online distribution.

ASF - Advanced Streaming Format, with the emphasis on STREAMING

Origins: Microsoft, seeing the success people like Apple and RealNetworks were having in the streaming video arena, they decided to barge in, ignore the previous standards and create their own, as Microsoft usually does. Thus ASF was born, a watered down version of AVI paired with an extra information stream. ASF is both a format and a codec. It's basically AVI that can only use Microsoft's MPEG4 implementation, but without the indexing issues of AVI (you must have all of an AVI to play it as index blocks and such are referenced at the end of the file).
A newer, standalone/streaming version of ASF called WMV was introduced not too long ago, but it's essentially the same thing, including the drawbacks of data overhead and such.

How it Works: Essentially, ASF is Microsoft's own partial implementation of the MPEG4 standard. I say partial because if you read the MPEG4 standard, you will notice that there's a hell of a lot more to the standard than what Microsoft provides. Basically they just took the video encoding portion, strpiped out things like B-frames which weren't compatible with the AVI format, and wrote an encoder/decoder for it and called it Windows Media.

Benefits: If you want to stream your video over the web, ASF may be very attractive to you. It's a format which was meant for streaming, so most of its architecture is centered around that fact. However, I doubt most of you have the bandwidth to stream your videos live over the web.

Disadvantages: Just as it's an advantage for streaming, the structure of ASF is also very prohibitive when you're trying to simply store video in single files, to be downloaded and viewed later. ASF keeps track of all sorts of other things in its stream, meaning there's significant bitrate overhead for non-video and non-audio data (example, using the old VirtualDub 1.3c and the 4.0 beta of Windows Media Tools, where the MP43 codec still worked in AVIs, an average ASF file takes up 25% more space than a direct stream copy of the video stream to an AVI file). ASF is limited to 352x288 resolution. ASF is also prone to errors, as when you compress to ASF the encoder does things like dropping frames to maintain bitrate, and it also does some other nasty things which when streaming ins't an issue, but definately is when you're just trying to encode standalone video files.
As if that all weren't bad enough, Microsoft is also very protective of its format. They've patented the ASF file structure so that no program can interface with it without breaking patent law, and their license agreements (or at least they used to) actually forbid transcoding to other formats after encoding to ASF.

Recommendation: Don't use it unless you're planning on streaming your files.

DivX ;-) - ASF without the drawbacks!

Origins: OK, now a lot misinformation has gone around about how DivX actually started. Here's the lowdown: a guy who went by the handle "Gej" used a hex editor and some other tools to modify the binary dll file of Microsoft's MS-MPEG4v3 ASF codec so that it would work under AVIs, so that you could use it to encode high-res movies (since ASF was restricted to 352x288 resolution). He then released it onto the net. There was no source code theft, no illicit activities, it was just some guy messing around with a binary file which was freely and legally downloadable from anywhere on the net.

How it Works: Essentially it's the same codec as what's used in ASF (if you don't believe me, use the ASF VirtualDub to extract an ASF video stream to an AVI file, then change the AVI's FourCC code to DIV3 and notice it still works) except that it uses the AVI file format, meaning no resolution restriction, no filesize overhead, and easy manipulation and playback in any program supporting AVI.

Benefits: DivX, like ASF, is a decent MPEG4 implementation (although incomplete). It can compress images better than MPEG1 in less bits, but it does lose more color data than MPEG1 (at least in Microsoft's implementation it does).

Disadvantages: DivX isn't quite as compatible as MPEG1 - it plays on PCs, BeOS, and Linux easily enough, and it will play on the Mac with some work, but on other platforms you're out of luck. It also takes more horsepower to playback than MPEG1 (not as much as MPEG2 though), but there are settings in the advanced area of the Codec for playback on slower machines at slightly lower video quality. DivX also has some issues with solid black not being black.

Recommendation: For my smaller filesize version fo my videos, I use DivX all the way. It's a wonderful codec, and using programs like Nandub, available at Doom9's page, it can produce pictures that are almost always better looking than MPEG1 at half the bitrate, most of the time.

Sorenson - Quicktime's Best Codec

I'm really not qualified enough to say much about this codec as the only research I've done into it has come up empty (also their site is down). But I can tell you that it's basically an inter-frame codec which is used for high quality web streaming. If you feel the need to distribute in Quicktime (which I highly discourage - if you want cross-platform use MPEG1) then this is the codec to use.