Today I decided to do some tests of editing codecs to see which ones are out on top these days. I've always been quite partial to Lagarith, but I've been having some troubles with it lately, so I decided to see how everything else stacks up.
The results of these tests are non-scientific.
My system utilizes a 2.4ghz Intel Q6600 processor (4 cores).
The video that I encoded was an unprocessed 15 minute clip from Spirited Away (NTSC DVD).
I tested the following codecs, all using yv12 mode, intra-frames only:
- Lagarith (multithreading enabled)
- FFdshow Huffyuv (median mode, adaptive huffman tables)
- FFdshow FFV1
- x264 VFW
For x264, I made 4 tests. One with the default settings. One with cabac disabled. One with cabac disabled and the QP set to 1. And one with cabac disabled and the QP set to 10.
For each codec I measured three things:
- Time to encode
- Output size
- Average CPU usage while encoding
And here are the results:
Lagarith
Time: 3:09
Size: 3.27gb
CPU usage: 65%
FFdshow huffyuv
Time: 1:50
Size: 3.49gb
CPU usage: 50%
FFdshow FFV1
Time: 8:39
Size: 2.89gb
CPU usage: 30%
x264 VFW
Time: 5:19
Size: 3.01gb
CPU usage: 95%
x264 VFW no cabac
Time: 3:29
Size: 3.39gb
x264 VFW no cabac, QP1 (not lossless)
Size: 3.67gb
x264 VFW no cabac, QP10 (not lossless)
Size: 2.33gb
Here is how each codec performed relative to one another.
Speed:
472% - 8.39 - FFV1
290% - 5:19 - X264
190% - 3:29 - X264-nocabac
172% - 3:09 - Lags
100% - 1:50 - Huff
Size:
100% - 2.33 - X264-nocabac-qp10
124% - 2.89 - FFV1
129% - 3.01 - X264
140% - 3.27 - Lags
145% - 3.39 - X264-nocabac
150% - 3.49 - Huff
156% - 3.67 - X264-nocabac-qp1
Conclusion:
FFV1 was the best compressing lossless codec in the test, but performed very slow.
X264 appears to be a great contender as an editing codec. It was almost as good as FFV1, but also much faster. If the cabac setting is disabled it almost approaches Lagarith in both speed and compression efficiency, but doesn't quite catch it.
If you are willing to forgo lossless encoding for filesize savings, using QP10 in x264 can get you a filesize savings of 30-45% over lossless x264. The big surprise here was that setting QP1 actually resulted in LARGER sizes than the lossless version.
If you want pure speed, it seems that nothing beats ffdshow's implementation of huffyuv. It's way faster than everything else, and it's compression efficiency isn't that much worse than lagarith's.




